QUEER IS THE NEW CAPITALISM: NEOLIBERAL TECHNOLOGIES AND A

BLUEPRINT FOR THE LEFT BEYOND IDENTITY POLITICS

BY

ZOOEY SOPHIA POOK

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Major Subject: Rhetoric and Professional Communication

NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY

LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO

May 2018
“Queer is the New Capitalism: Neoliberal Technologies and a Blueprint for the Left
Beyond Identity Politics,” a dissertation prepared by Zooey Sophia Pook in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, has been
approved and accepted by the following:

Loui Reyes
Dean of the Graduate School

Barry Thatcher
Chair of the Examining Committee

4/10/2018
Date

Committee in charge:

Dr. Barry Thatcher, Chair

Dr. Elizabeth Schirmer

Dr. Melody Katherine Jonet

Dr. Christina Medina

ii
 VITA

January 15, 1986 Born in Detroit, MI

2009 Graduated from Antioch College with a Bachelor of Arts in

Philosophy
Yellow Springs, Ohio

2011 Graduated from University of Toledo with a Master of Arts in

Philosophy
Toledo, Ohio

2012-2016 Philosophy Instructor at Schoolcraft College

Livonia, Michigan

2013 Graduated from Oakland University with a Master of Arts in

Communication
Rochester Hills, Michigan

2015-present Director of LGBT+ Programs at New Mexico State University

Las Cruces, New Mexico

FIELD OF STUDY

Major Field: Rhetoric and Professional Communication

iii
 ABSTRACT

QUEER IS THE NEW CAPITALISM: NEOLIBERAL TECHNOLOGIES AND A

BLUEPRINT FOR THE LEFT BEYOND IDENTITY POLITICS

BY

ZOOEY SOPHIA POOK

NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY

LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO

MAY 2018

This work is a declaration of non-compliance with cultural studies; it is a motion of

no confidence. Specifically addressing queer theory as a case study, this work will
challenge the continued influence of postmodernism in cultural studies for the
purpose of addressing power in the present and the rise of neoliberal capitalism via
information technologies. The aim of this dissertation is to intervene in cultural
studies and to engage in a set of critical inquiries into neoliberal governance with the
hope that what emerges is a lens that can adequately assess information technologies
and challenge the production of postfordist subjectivity. It is not through institutional
discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to
exist through and for neoliberal networks via our participation with internet
technologies. Neoliberal multiculturalism includes all bodies and experiences via
their reduction to data and network flow. Difference no longer presents itself as a
potential site for disruption but emerges as a site of appropriation for information
technologies constantly involved in the repackaging of data possibilities. Thus,
neoliberalism presents a unique challenge to theorists of identity and power that must
be met with changing techniques that speak to and challenge the ways that differences
are reduced to postfordist being.

iv
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: A Brief Statement of Non-Compliance ............................................ 1

A Meditation in Three Parts ............................................................................................... 8

What’s the Matter with Cultural Studies? ........................................................................ 13
A Queer Death: Is it Better to Burn Out than it is to Rust? ............................................... 21
Programming Identity ..................................................................................................... 33
A New Ontology: A New Lens in Queer Theory ................................................................ 41

I. An Assessment of Queer Theory ....................................................................... 46

Transgressive Annihilation............................................................................................... 46
Is Queer Theory Historicist, or is Historicism Queer? ....................................................... 50
Queer Theory and Identity Politics................................................................................... 55
Performativity and Identity Politics.................................................................................. 59
Queer Compulsion........................................................................................................... 70
The Personal is Not Political…Even if it’s Queer ............................................................... 72
The Queer Subaltern Cannot Stop Speaking..................................................................... 75

II. A Meditation on Neoliberalism ........................................................................ 77

The Neoliberal Horizon and the End of the Subject .......................................................... 77

Queer Theory and Academic Contagion........................................................................... 79
Neoliberal Embodiment .................................................................................................. 84
Precarity and the Death Throngs of Yesterday ................................................................. 88
Identity Politics and Subjectivized Agency ....................................................................... 91
Whatever Violence and Neoliberal Empire .................................................................... 100
The Shape of Post-Neoliberal Things to Come ............................................................... 103

v
III. A Meditation on Technology......................................................................... 106

A Cybernetic Reimagining .............................................................................................. 106

The Algorithmic Religion................................................................................................ 109
Totally Postfordist ......................................................................................................... 113
The Digital Order of Things ............................................................................................ 116
Algorithmic Literacy ...................................................................................................... 121
“Whatever” Hacktivism ................................................................................................. 125

IV. A Meditation on Ontology............................................................................. 134

If We Are Compelled to Suffer… .................................................................................... 134

What About the Anti-Social Thesis? ............................................................................... 135
Pessimism as the Last Human Hope............................................................................... 139
Freud and the Death Drive ............................................................................................ 143
Digital Mediation and Death Transcendence ................................................................. 148
Posthuman vs Unhuman ............................................................................................... 153
The Algorithm as Undead Horror ................................................................................... 159
Killing the Machines ...................................................................................................... 164
Conclusion: Nihilism as Anti-Compulsion ....................................................................... 175

Conclusion: Is This the End? .............................................................................. 177

Pessimistic Possibilities.................................................................................................. 177

Whatever, What About Violence? ................................................................................. 181
A New Lens ................................................................................................................... 188
A New Politics ............................................................................................................... 191

References ............................................................................................................ 196

vi
 Introduction: A Brief Statement of Non-Compliance

Jack Halberstam (2005) writes in In a Queer Time and Place, “A ‘queer’

adjustment in the way in which we think about time, in fact, requires and produces

new conceptions of space. Furthermore, ‘queer’ refers to non-normative logics and

organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and

time.” For Halberstam, queer ways of being challenge the temporalities of capitalism

and identity by reimagining time, longevity, inheritance, health, the family, binary

systems of power, how we perform work, and more generally how we use our bodies.

But isn’t this essentially what neoliberal technologies have already done? Wasn’t it

the internet and the scope of digital networks and information technologies that

shattered the binaries of work/leisure, public/private, and consumer/producer, making

investment possible all over the world in a matter of seconds while also transforming

mundane leisure tasks into a commodity by monetizing information? Perhaps it is

capitalism itself that is temporally and spacially queer. Capitalism has already

become postmodern; the world is already neoliberal.

This work is a declaration of non-compliance with cultural studies; it is a

motion of no confidence. Specifically addressing queer theory as a case study, this

work will challenge the continued influence of postmodernism in cultural studies.

Utilizing a postmodern perspective, and holding to the tenants of Michel Foucault’s

disciplinary set of lenses, disciplines such as queer theory remains stuck in a

romanticized world of identity politics where one’s differing personal expression

1
offers the possibility of cultural and political resistance and emancipation. Today, in

the postfordist age of neoliberal multiculturalism, nothing could be further from the

truth. Nearly all participation in western culture is plugged into global networks of

information capital where all bodies (and non-human bodies) are equally exploited in

their production of data. Sweatshops still exist and so does war, but the force and

necessity of each are dramatically waning. Power is evolving, as Deleuze notes,

beyond the centralized foci of institutional sites of power to those of networks

(Deleuze, 2000, p. 90). Through this mutation, neoliberalism emerges to manage a

state of permanent training and education ruled not by force but by access and credit

and debt. Here individual expression is only the effect of an algorithm. It is the result

of an experience with an interface that mines data, returns it, and reimagines the user

within its coordinates. Identity itself must thus be reimagined, as human and non-

humans emerge through mediation within technological and political networks.

Neoliberalism is the singularity of governed and governor, voice and identity,

emerging as data through the flows of internet network.

The personal is not political; it is capital. Algorithms don’t care about your

sexuality or politics; a link will equally appear for Amazon to Jack Halberstam’s

queer musings or Bill O’Reilly’s latest pseudo historical work of conservative

revisionism, depending on your browser history. Similarly, research on third world

performances of gender and sexuality in queer theory do not amount to much besides

further accumulation of data and academic profits. As Steven Shaviro (2013) notes,

“Far from being subversive or oppositional, transgression is the actual motor of

2
capitalist expansion today...” (p. 5) Contradictions are not oppositional to capitalist

growth; contradictions are generative, as difference is appropriated, quietly flattened,

and then doubly victimized under a neo-colonial banner of multiculturalism.

Everything is repurposed as data: it is singular governance through the digital

reduction of the hostilities of difference. The network, as a political topography, is

what queer theory cannot comprehend.

The aim of this dissertation is to intervene in cultural studies and to engage in

a set of critical inquiries into neoliberal governance with the hope that what emerges

is a lens that can adequately assess neoliberal technology and power, and challenge

the production of postfordist subjectivity. This will amount to a shifting away from

the use of the disciplinary lenses which have long served in cultural studies in

disciplines like queer theory, that inadequately privilege institutional matters of

identity, losing sight of the changing ways that information technologies impact the

way that forces of capital converge and manifest, no longer aiming to discipline the

subject but to orient, mediate, and cipher data from it, to sustain an order that is no

longer dependent on labor but information. This work will attempt to diagnose and

intervene in the gaps between analyses of identity in cultural studies and outdated

models/understandings of power and technology. I will refer to this neoliberal process

of technological mediation and desubjectivation, simultaneously, as annihilation and

as appropriation, as multiculturalism is reduced to the singularity of postfordism via

participation with information technologies. Annihilation is a term adapted from

Tiqqun’s work to make sense of the flattening of ways of being in the world towards

3
postfordism through neoliberalism (2010). The neoliberal processes of annihilation

and appropriation are what distinguish it from past modes of capitalism and what I

will attempt to provide are cultural studies tools that provide meaningful ways to

resist neoliberal governance. It is my contention that the creation of this work can

also provide a new blueprint for leftist action and change beyond the identity politics

that have dominated the social sphere, and which have been influenced by and which

have influenced canonical works in cultural studies and queer theory. My specific

focus lies with the simultaneous movement of theory and politics arising in the

1990’s with works such as those of Judith Butler, birthing several disciplines of

identity studies in the academy, which place a heavy focus on the personal and the

symbolic ways expressions of identity could challenge state power, but have failed to

meaningfully challenge or even account for the ways that power and economics have

shifted during the same period through neoliberal governance. I will argue

throughout this work that such methods of resistance are a far cry from earlier

incantations of identity politics, arguing instead for a variety of revolutionary politics

beyond both the performative and the disciplinary where identity politics have

currently and historically placed their focus. This work is not a call for academic

interpellation so much as it is a demand for academia to challenge its own processes,

which remain complacent within the production of postfordist subjectivity, and an

attempt to reach anyone on the Left whose mind and efforts have not yet been

completely given over to neoliberal reform or to the current fashion of identity

politics.

4
 I am not writing as a queer theorist but as someone resisting both the

oppressive forces of neoliberalism and the stifling deconstructive/destructive forms of

academic research in the humanities, which mimic the methods of neoliberal

technologies, ceaselessly producing more and more data without offering much

material benefit to the humans whom it makes its subjects. I write this project from

the space of political theory, attempting to speak to cultural studies specifically

utilizing queer theory as a case study, but my position as a transgender scholar cannot

be completely escaped either. I do not have any illusions that this work will sway

anyone; both sides of the fence between critical scholars with identity concerns and

political theorists with more macro concerns, which mark the field of cultural

critique, are, for the most part, unabashedly stuck in their commitments and will most

likely choose to applaud or reject this work by academic traditions as hollow as a

mere skim to see if a certain name appears in the bibliography or not and, if so, in

what context. My commitments are to resistance and to sincerity, both of which are

at odds with academic interpellation that mirror other neoliberal multicultural

practices, which work to appropriate and flatten difference into a singular postfordist

voice, such as through participation with internet technologies. I am much more

interested in channeling the kind of Nietzschean Dionysus so often found in the

radical Leftist groups of today than in appealing to an academic model that relies so

heavily on and contributes towards the appropriation and interpellation of human

inventiveness, creativity, and resistance. This won’t be a contribution to queer theory;

it will be a critique of power for which no discipline is exempt from. Revolutionary

5
anger should not be assuaged by the academic politics of form; my use of style is

meant to challenge neoliberal singularity and the academic voice that also speaks

through and for it with its own endless production of data. Deconstructionist methods

have led to the estrangement of certainty in the humanities; I will make an argument

for its necessity in revolutionary struggle and in cultural theory, which will I continue

throughout this work. The postmodern voice speaks at the same tone, speed, and

volume of postfordism; it rejects revolution as a totalizing force parallel to the state

that it must reject, ignoring the ways that empire and capital have already totalized

postmodernism as a singular form of governance and being through information

technologies. I will thus speak with certainty, and argue that this is a necessary

argument for the Left and for critical theorists who wish to challenge power rather

than muse about its effects. This will be a work for those interested in thinking about

and developing strategies to challenge neoliberal technologies, and, as such, one will

certainly read this in part or whole and take what is useful to them for whatever

reason.

The work of Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam have not led to the

destabilization of institutional power. Instead, neoliberal power already rests and

exists upon similar principles of destabilization which arise and are maintained

through the work of algorithmic technologies. Current multimedia scholarship and

political critique can help us to make sense of neoliberal technologies, locating

identity in the flows and fluxes of algorithmic networks of affective capital, rather

than within any institutional locus of discipline or within our relation to the

6
performative. Queer theory and much of cultural studies are without any literacy in

technology; they are trapped in the past and thus consistently reproduce critiques of

power that do not speak to human experience in a present system of technological

governance that mediates both the human and non-human alike. This scholarship can

contribute to a critical framework of appropriation that fills the lacuna between

ideological critique and concern for autonomy and personhood in the present,

accounting for human life within global networks of power and technology.

Why choose queer theory and not some other area of cultural studies? LGBT+

identity calls us forth as activists in the present; there is an impetus for resistance.

LGBT+ bodies have been at the center of neoliberal multicultural strategies of

st
interpellation and appropriation in the 21 century. This has included, but is not

limited to, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the legalization of gay marriage, the

inclusion of transgender bodies under Title IX, and an influx of representation in

mainstream media and on the internet. But these great changes have not necessarily

spoken to matters of autonomy, instead they often drive LGBT+ identities further into

processes of neoliberal appropriation and have moved us, through inclusive strategies

and policies, towards capitalist ways of being. Therefore there is a strong need, and a

relevance, in developing theory and an academic site to challenge the ways that queer

bodies are emerging as postfordist subjects. LGBT+ bodies are at the center of

neoliberal multicultural strategies of inclusion in the present. To be forthright, I have

a personal interest in entering this project as a transgender woman and as an

administrator at a major university where I deal directly with multicultural policies in

7
my position representing and advocating for the needs of LGBT+ students, faculty,

and staff. It is my personal hope that queer theory can rise to this task in the same

way that it has met previous needs of resistance in more disciplinary times. And there

is no reason that queer cannot also mean revolutionary anti-capitalism in the struggle

against the eclipsing totality of empire. As such, I will use queer theory as more of a

blanket term to describe critical theory that focuses on queer identity, emanating in

feminist, queer, and race theories, rather than adhering to strict disciplinary

perimeters that can be sticky and don’t ultimately serve a work that is about

revolutionary practice much more than it is about disciplinary concerns.

A Meditation in Three Parts

This dissertation will read like a manifesto for a new Left. I am not concerned

with academia, which so conveniently mimics and sustains information capital- ever

fracturing into more disparate parts and creating more creative opportunities for

neoliberal appropriation-but with social change. Academia as an institution manifests

itself in its current form as a site of destabilization and contributes toward the

production of postfordist subjectivity. My choice of language and style speaks to the

desire and the need to directly challenge and disturb broader academic practices of

deconstruction and commodification, which I will take up throughout this

dissertation. This dissertation will be a work of theory building. Taking place in three

parts, political, technological, and ontological, I will offer evidence to why current

approaches in cultural studies have fallen short, while presenting more effective

8
theoretical tactics. I will be specifically engaging queer theory as a case study for the

sake of scale, and because so much opportunity arises through the current political

struggle of LBGT+ individuals. Cultural and theoretical sites of analysis will be

presented throughout to offer pertinent examples.

This work will consist, after an introductory analysis of the problem, of three

meditations on what I consider to be the flawed problematic of Queer Theory and

identity politics. The purpose of these meditations is to rethink the nature of what

grounds critical theory and what will be necessary to create and to imagine a new lens

that will not only lead to fruitful cultural analysis, but that will provide the impetus

for actual material challenge to capital. This introduction will mock the presentation

of the larger body of this dissertation, offering a series of small inquiries into the

problems that the larger work will seek to explore and develop solutions for.

This dissertation will develop itself as a work of theory building. Each

meditation will contribute to a larger vision of cultural critique and a new political

vision. The three meditations will be focused in political theory, media theory, and

ontology, because it is precisely ideology, technology, and the body which could

stand reassessment. It is the nature of being that capital now operates on in ever more

efficient ways through affective technologies that demands us to rethink the ways that

politics operate and maintain dominion. I have chosen these three sites of entry

because they speak to the totalizing condition that neoliberalism imagines citizens as

postfordist subjects. This dissertation will work to create a space of doubt in that

9
totality.

The following chapter will be introductory. It will work to examine Queer

Theory and LGBT+ politics in the present, exploring how performativity informs

tactics of resistance and how we think about queer politics. By exploring the

influence of performativity in queer academic projects, I draw useful parallels to

works of LGBT+ activism to explore the ways that neoliberal appropriation functions

to produce postfordist subjectivity. This chapter serves as an outline to the importance

and relevance of LGBT+ identity as a useful site of intervention to explore the flawed

direction of Cultural Studies and to explore the needs of a new Left. In this first

chapter, I begin an inquiry into the ways human beings are mediated by neoliberal

technologies that will be carried out through the rest of this work. I will begin to

build a case that neoliberal participation amounts to a kind of annihilation in which

multiculturalism amounts to inclusion by reduction, reimagining diversity as

opportunities for information capital, and flattening identity to capitalist being.

The second chapter, and the first of three meditations, will explore political

theory to attempt to come to terms with neoliberalism and postfordist subjectivity.

This meditation will examine the parallels between the rise of neoliberal technologies

and empire with post 68 strategies of identity politics on the Left. I will argue the

ways in which cultural studies participate in and promote the non-violent tactics of

identity politics, which are ultimately ineffective in challenging the current state of

empire in which capital maintains itself. I will ultimately work to move to bring

10
Deleuzean and Lacanian strategies of political and economic analysis together to

develop tactics of direct resistance and to imagine a future that challenges capital

rather than is appropriated by its technologies. In this chapter I develop a notion

called “Whatever Violence,” developed from Žižek’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s

“divine violence,” and from Georgio Agamben’s notion of “the whatever” as a tool

for the Left to shake postfordist subjectivity and to challenge neoliberal annihilation.

The second meditation will focus on neoliberal technologies- their function

and their impact in producing postfordist subjectivity. This chapter will explore

current works in multimedia theory to make sense of and to develop strategies to

challenge the ways in which power, information, and capital are circulated within

neoliberalism through internet technologies and how power and direction emerge in a

deregulated, decentralized state. I will also examine what resistance looks like and

how it could be meaningful in the digital age, presenting a significant challenge to

neoliberalism through the disruption of the channels and flows of information and

capital. In this chapter, I focus on how neoliberal technologies shape postfordist

participation and how direct action can create opportunities for the Left to produce

spaces of resistance, through the misuse of neoliberal technologies, within the

totalizing experience of neoliberal annihilation. I argue that the actions of groups like

Anonymous and Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) produce insight into the

mechanics of neoliberal technology and politics and offer strategies for the Left on

how to challenge empire.

11
 In the third and final meditation, I will explore the question of ontology as it

pertains to postfordist subjectivity. In this chapter, I take up directly the question of

humanity in the face of mediation with neoliberal technologies and offer

psychoanalytic theory as a lens to explore our attachment to internet technologies.

Using modern works of nihilist and antinatal theory, I challenge queer theory and

intervene in current debates on the Left regarding the question of human agency in

our current technological moment. It is my contention that neoliberal technology

does not refashion human beings, but draws upon and harnesses a compulsive nature

that psychoanalytic works have already worked, in depth, to make us aware of.

Exposing and developing this ontological state of compulsion works to challenge any

politics that seek to promote a futurity on neutral (historicist) or creative

(posthumanist) grounds, moving beyond the anti-social thesis to consider the

changing condition of human lives under neoliberal governance. Revealing our

compulsive nature illuminates the mechanisms upon which neoliberal technologies

function, exploiting, appropriating, and generating possibilities from transgression

and the manic fracturing, splintering, and repackaging of data. Finally, I use nihilist

theory, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s notion of “the radical act”, to examine the ways that

suicide presents itself as a tool to expose and challenge the human compulsion which

upholds information technologies and neoliberalism.

Finally, in the conclusion of this work, I draw together my three meditations

and argue for their coherence as a comprehensive and viable lens for Queer Theory in

our present, neoliberal moment. I also draw together a vision of resistance for the

12
Left, which I build throughout the chapter of this work. Through my defense of both

of these goals, I too, move to challenge any ethical or tactical objections I could

imagine being raised. This work will certainly be of moral and pragmatic question to

many, and I have not proceeded without ethical and tactical questions at the forefront

of this important project. In this conclusion, I move to leave the reader, as I do with

the work in its entirety, empowered with critical tools to assess the ways that empire

and neoliberal technologies function and with a blueprint to build and a landscape of

resistance.

Through a series of vignettes, the rest of this chapter will pose brief

introductions and places of entry into larger questions in this work. This style of

brief, severe, and assured writing will also appear throughout the rest of this work to

sit in sharp contrast to traditional academic writing; this work is not meant to pose

questions, contribute to academic debate, to fetishize identity, or to commodify

revolution through the production of data capital, but to disturb postfordist

subjectivity and to disrupt neoliberal flows of information, which academia is

certainly not exempt from participating in. I offer the corresponding chapters, upon

which each idea might be drawn out in more length. I hope I have your attention.

What’s the Matter with Cultural Studies?

In Bruno Latour’s (2004) “Has Critique Run Out of Steam...” the author

ponders if we are not, as cultural theorists, training the next generation of scholars

with outdated tools intended for outdated wars (p. 225-6). For LaTour, ideological

13
critique has been boiled down to a mechanized process, in which cultural scholars

dispassionately tear apart a cultural artifact, stripping the viewer of any agency, and

simply replacing it with whatever hidden mechanism the theorist finds themselves

party to (the subconscious, economics, panopticism, etc.) (p. 239-9). This mechanized

critique naturally ignores the greater concerns and relationships through which these

artifacts, individuals, and attachments arise, and ultimately provide us with very little

(p. 248). Rosi Braidotti goes further than LaTour, asserting in The Posthuman (2012)

that the Humanities are in serious danger and may disappear altogether from the

st
university in the 21 century (p. 10). It is Braidotti’s claim that modes of critique

such as those of Jaques Lacan and others, whom considerable ideological modes of

analysis have been drawn from, were once useful, but quoting Deleuze and Guattari

are now about as useful as a Polaroid camera (p. 189). Finally Robert Samuels, in a

(2002) piece specific to Rhetoric and Composition, although drawing mostly on

larger generalized arguments and critiques of academia, posits that the work of Slavoj

Žižek and other cultural theorists, which he labels without qualification as

postmodern, have destabilized the academy and set the stage for the permanent

student- who with no opportunities and no worthwhile training for work, takes

needless courses in emerging and opportunistic disciplines like gender studies that

exist simply to keep the student engaged in an endless monetary cycle (p. 327-54).

While some of these works mentioned do not explicitly position themselves as

projects of ideological critique, they are speaking to processes of critique which stem

directly from and speak to the state of ideological stasis today. Ideological critique

14
and postmodernism have become synonymous; deconstruction is a ubiquitous tool.

Cultural studies today engage in an indulgent fetishism of identity politics: a

necromancing of an age of discipline that no longer matters. Is this not why LaTour

states that ideological critique today is just going through the motions? Every identity

category has been deconstructed, shattered, appropriated, and reappropriated; only

skeletons exist. Our methods of analysis represent a previous age and a previous

power and have begun to lose their weight. The infrastructure and mechanisms of

information capital too, function through deconstruction, engaging in similar actions

to identity politics and cultural critique, breaking down information, monetizing it,

and repackaging it in ever new ways. Our lenses don’t work anymore. Any critical

lens must be reformed with these political concerns in mind and thus I position an

analysis of politics firstly among the three meditations of this project.

Cultural Studies is in crisis. The various schools of ideological critique have

always been in contention, but its very legitimacy and potency as a technique seems

to be falling into a kind of ambiguity produced by postmodern technique and the

politics of identity. For this reason, it is useful to turn back to ideological analysis as a

lens of critical theory to think about what it is and what it can do. Peter Dews (2012)

shares that the common places of ideological analysis are “the illusory autonomy of

the bourgeoisie subject...the oppressive functioning of scientific and technological

reason...the radicalizing potential of modernist aesthetic experience; and...the manner

in which what are apparently the most marginal and fortuitous features of cultural

artefacts reveal their most profound, and often unacknowledged, truths” (p. 55).

15
Dews’ work is primarily concerned with the relationship between The Frankfurt

School and the post- structuralists, drawing a number of parallels between Adorno

and Derrida, which have been overlooked due to obvious differences, including a

shared concern with “the historicity of language, a repudiation of foundationalism in

philosophy, an awareness of the subterranean links between the metaphysics of

identity and structures of domination,” and perhaps most importantly, a love-hate

relationship with the work of Hegel (p. 155-6). It is after all Marx who sets the stage

for ideological critique with his reading of Hegel and the restoration of subject and

object, and the revelation of partial consciousness to the whole. I utilize Dews work

to evidence here that there is a commonality within ideological critique, even between

its two biggest and most historically contentious benefactors, which Dews attributes

to different interpretations of Nietzsche (p. 64). But this might be too neat a reading,

as Slavoj Žižek (2012) suggests, “‘ideology’ can designate anything from a

contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its dependence on social reality to an

action-orientated set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals

live out their social relations to a social structure to false ideas which legitimate a

dominant political power” (p. 7).

In a recent landmark text on ideology by Terry Eagleton (2012), which spans

a range of critique from Lukacs to Habermas with Gramsci and Althusser in between,

the author notes a number of places within these works where ideology is reduced to

false consciousness, proletarian epistemology, or even to thought itself (p. 195-246).

This is not surprising, as we probably imagine the purpose of ideological critique as

16
to awaken some kind of political oppositions towards power. But it is here where

ideological critique threatens to fall in on itself: representing thought so broadly, it

becomes nothing. Perhaps this is where the aforementioned Robert Samuels finds

himself, with his overarching condemnation of cultural critique in academia, as

ideology finds itself to be everywhere and yet nowhere at all, failing to intervene in

very real material concerns in the university, such as downsizing and the growth of

administration and adjunct faculty (p. 327-54). This is also where Latour’s

understanding of critique stems from, highlighting the tireless deconstructive

mechanisms of cultural critique, where everything is torn apart to reveal its social

constructionism, but for what purpose or end? Here it is interesting to note Michael

Weiler’s (1993) attempt to locate ideology as a rhetorical object. Weiler’s formulation

is that ideology is a form of persuasive argumentation aimed at achieving a political

legitimation, which must be both coherent and logical, and is primarily rooted in

political philosophy (p. 15-26). While Weiler’s conception of ideology is concise, and

he does note that ideology need not be something that citizens are aware they are

participating in, it seems to rely heavily on a liberal humanist model, avoiding the

unconscious effects of language that Lacan and later, Althusser, demonstrate via the

ways that subjects are interpellated and thus positioned in society. Similarly, we

might also think about the ways that institutions discipline our behaviors, thus

mediating our cultural experience and understanding of social relations that theorists

like Gramsci and Foucault were apt to remind us of. While it is not my intent to

extract or draw forth a neat model of what ideology is, it seems to suffice to have

17
illustrated the connections, as well as the problems which have arisen within

ideological critique, and to draw attention to how these historical problems find

themselves exacerbated in the present with the emergence of identity politics and

neoliberal technologies. Such an appeal to history might offer us a renewed sense of

purpose on the Left in an attempt to determine what cultural theory should serve to do

for us in our present postfordist moment.

This current crisis and attempt to fill this void in ideological analysis has been

fueled by the influence of Spinoza and Deleuze, and has theorists reimagining human

agency in relation to the ever-growing global bodies and networks of technology and

economics that configure human bodies and non-living matter in a myriad of

emerging formations. Empire (2000) by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as

the posthuman works of Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad take as their

foundation Deleuze’s claim in “Postscript of the Societies of Control” that we are in

the infancy of a new epoch in human history, defined by the mutation of capital,

evident in the emergence of affective technologies that quickly replace the centralized

forms of power in Foucault’s disciplinary society. Hardt and Negri describe this

current state of things with their widely utilized concept of “empire”: “Empire posits

a regime that encompasses...spacial totality” and “presents its rule not as a transitory

moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and

in this sense is outside of history or at the end of history” (p. xiv-xv). If, for Hardt and

Negri, our concern is the ahistorical and totalizing power for which empire presents

itself, we might note that this is not an entirely new thought about power, as Gramsci

18
notes that ideology is historically variable but is ahistorical in structure (Eagleton,

2012, p. 239). Thus we have to go further to address the question of capital’s

mutation to evaluate the changing condition of human politics, and to ultimately

assess if these new methods of ideological inquiry offer the potential to critically

assess and fill the current void in cultural studies.

Turning to the work of posthumanists, Karen Bared (2003) explains,

“discursive practices are not human-based activities but rather specific material

(re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries,

properties, and meanings are differentially enacted” (p. 828). Furthermore “matter is

not a fixed essence; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a

thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” (p. 828). It has thus been the project of

posthuman scholars to develop critical tools to evaluate and interrogate the complex

emerging networks of activity that both human and non-human things find

themselves emerging in through the regimes of affective capital. Specifically for Jane

Bennett (2010) and Rosi Braidotti (2012), this involves a turn to Spinoza to ground

the relationship of thing and non-thing under appeals of matter and zoe- or the life

force that connects the earth. For these writers, zoe offers the opportunity to unite life

against the necro powers of neoliberalism. However, one might question how a shift

to the vitality of matter, as a foundational force, helps advance questions of agency

and of the relationship of subject and object, which marks the postmodern crisis of

ideological analysis, and how it might offer political solutions in the face of

information capital.

19
 As Slavoj Žižek notes, this kind of revival of vitality points to a “premodern

naivety” in which things just emerge through a kind of unpredictable and agential

magic, as agency is extended to all material things, and thus nothing, falling back to

the dilemma of postmodernism (Žižek, 2015, p. 19,14). If Robert Samuels is not

alone when he speaks to the ineptitude of Cultural Studies to offer real material

solutions to present questions of inequality in America, it does not seem likely that

the work of posthuman solutions will be likely to effectively fill the void in

ideological analysis, offering useful tools or modes of resistance towards information

capital. Forsaking the subject/object distinction of Hegel and trading causation for

emergence seems to forfeit meaningful analysis of the ways in which neoliberal

networks of information and technology function through internet technologies, and

thus, also how they might be challenged. Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the matrix that

dominates ideology, today, might serve us well here. Žižek writes:

This Matrix can be easily discerned in the dialectics of ‘old’ and ‘new’, when an
event that announces a wholly new dimension or epoch is (mis)perceived as the
continuation of or return to the past, or- the opposite case- when an even that is
entirely inscribed in the logic of the existing order is (mis)perceived as a radical
rupture (Žižek, 2012, p. 5)

In short, does a turn to new materialist vitality warrant or help us move beyond

postmodernism and the dilemma of subject/object? Does it revive the corpse of

agency and offer meaningful tools in the present to challenge neoliberalism? I don’t

find compelling evidence in either case. While I think it is extremely valuable to think

about the complex relationships between human and non-human beings via machinic

formations and networks as writers such as Alexander Galloway (2012) and Maurizio

20
Lazzaratto (2014) phrase them, I think it is of critical value not to give up the notion

of causation, which can offer us much as we trace the mechanisms and functions of

neoliberal technologies to assess what agency might persist for the purposes of

resistance. It is of extreme value for ideological analysis today to put specific focus

on the ways that information technologies function, the ways that neoliberal networks

house and transmit power and resources, and the ways that literacy in internet

technologies can produce methods of resistance.

A Queer Death: Is it Better to Burn Out than it is to Rust?

Queer theory has lost sight of the ways political power and identity come to be

and hold meaning in the present. Once a powerful advocate for queer concerns, queer

theory today finds itself in an unfamiliar terrain with archaic tools in a rapidly

evolving technological era. Concerns of the disciplinary age do not hold the weight

they once did; Gay marriage has been legalized, LGBT+ characters have emerged on

television, and information technologies absorb queer identity and experience along

with everyone else’s. Deconstructing oppression does not hold much weight when

LBGT+ bodies are being appropriated at rapid speeds by information technologies

and neoliberal policies. For queer theory, the threat of extinction via irrelevance now

looms. It is my intention to reimagine critique of identity and power through a

reassessment of goals, tactics, and ontology, by way of a sober assessment of

neoliberal politics and technology.

21
 Queer studies began to emerge in the 1980’s with works such as those of

Adrienne Rich, Catherine Mackinnon, and Eve Kosofksy Sedwick which questioned

and interrogated an inherent heteronormativity that permeates Western ways of

knowing and being. It was the argument of these scholars that without recognizing the

internalized heterosexual structure within our thinking and culture, that critical

scholars could not adequately grasp or make strides in the plight of gender and sexual

inequality. Queer theorists are concerned with the ways that language and other

symbolic modes of human comprehension are mediated through a heterosexual lens,

such as those which dominate law, medicine, and the media, normalizing and

disciplining bodies to heteronormative practices and knowledges, while violently

excluding those who do not perform gender and sexuality in ways that adhere to

heterosexual norms and logics (Wittig, 1992, p. 21-22). Thus, the task of queer theory

is to locate, deconstruct, and reimagine these closed discourses through a plurality of

techniques that open up possibilities for non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative

expressions of bodies and minds. Queer theorists borrow from feminist theorists the

notion of partiality, and place a necessary ethical and epistemological focus on the

social location of the researcher and the possibilities that emerge from one’s distinct

and unique social vantage point. Acknowledging partiality is in part a relation to a

skepticism of the mastery of any discourse that works to promote discovery and ways

of knowing that speak to a wider representation of bodies and ways of being in the

world (Hall, 2005, p. 6).

22
 The goals of queer studies historically speak to the disciplinary age and utilize

identity politics as their tool of choice. Deconstruction of othering binaries, the

dismantlement of heteronormative master discourses, and the dethroning of a

patriarchal logocentrism are inherently the rhetorical tasks that mark the goals of

queer theory. To locate critique, and open these discourses creates the possibility to

set the “terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an

incoherence of definition” within them, and this amounts to a “discursive power”

through “rhetorical leverage” (Sedgwick, 2008, p. 11). This kind of critical and

generative discursive work can be evidenced by landmark queer texts such as John

Sloop’s Disciplining Gender and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which by way of

evidencing and illuminating the construction of discursive heteronormative regimes

that discipline and regulate the use of minds and bodies to heterosexual knowledges

and practices, also move to create the possibility of agency through their

transgression. Works such as Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and

Rhetorics of Materiality, Roderick Fergusons (2004), Disidentifications: queers of

color and the performance of politics, Jose Munoz (1999), and Jack Halberstam’s In

a Queer Time and Place, are among the numerous works that continue this trend,

interrogating the ways in which non-normative performances of bodies and identities

work to open closed discourses of sexuality and gender, generating new conceptions

of temporality and ways of being and knowing in the world.

It is my argument, and I think one that the aforementioned LaTour article

sums up nicely, that identity critique has become stale and formulaic. In The Straight
23
Mind, Monique Wittig argues that our task is to challenge and bring down the

heteronormative discourses that order and limit our realities, and not simply to create

new categories of being, as those new identities would simply be rendered and

mediated through the same terms of heterosexuality if this unconscious and

overarching system is not challenged first (Wittig, 1992, p. 21- 32). Despite the fact

that this essay is a landmark and foundation text in queer theory, its tenets seem to

have been forgotten or watered down through the materialization of a formula in the

field. A common reading that has emerged in queer theory is one of equivalence, in

which theorists conflate queer ways of being with heteronormative resistance. The

examples are plentiful, as the aforementioned text by Jack Halberstam sits as a prime

example, alongside the work of Judith Butler, and the work of queer rhetorical

scholars such as Karma Chavez (2010), Gayle Salamon (2010), and Emily Dianne

Cram (2012), which all take up performativity as a liberatory, ontological tool. It will

late be my argument that Judith Butler’s widely popular notion of performativity in

the early 90’s is what solidified this trend.

Academically, these works all utilize or attempt to theorize arguments that

generally speak to the social phenomenon of identity politics, and the possibilities

that arise with struggle based on racial or sexual difference. In short, identity politics

attempt to bring a kind of subjectivity to notions of being and social organization,

examining the ways that individuals are shaped and informed by their cultural

experience, with an interest in how these social formations might challenge or speak

to power. In queer theory, this has amounted to the ways in which queer ways of

24
being might challenge or intervene in heterosexual discourses, thus locating self-

determination as the ability to shape the ways in which notions of gender and

sexuality are dictated. To draw a parallel, Malcom X famously wrote about the

binaries and definitions of black and white, and Stokely Carmichael (2015) advocated

for the recognition of Black experience to inform a new kind of politics in America,

both referencing the need to disrupt and ultimately gain a voice in the master

discourse, illustrating the function of a politics organized around a shared political

and social experience (p. 150- 174). Thus, identity politics rest on the ultimate belief

that the experiences, knowledge, and practices of those who exist outside dominant

conceptions of power and privilege contain the epistemological tools to liberate both

the oppressed and the oppressor, from the dominant paradigms that determine their

relations, by revealing the inherent oppression in their lived relationships.

But what does a dominant discourse do or mean in 2018, when today, each

click of the mouse turns information into capital, and data is packaged, repackaged,

and sold all over the world in seconds, as economic wars are waged with virtual funds

through algorithms? In his 1993 essay, “Feminism, Ideology and Deconstruction: A

Pragmatist view,” Richard Rorty asks a controversial and important question: Even if

all the logocentrisms, binaries, and technical discourses, which mediate

heteronormative ideologies, were done away with, wouldn’t patriarchal power still

persist? (p. 232). Rorty was speaking of the problematic force behind discourse,

referencing systems of power and inequalities themselves, but today things are only

more complicated as individual thought and expression are appropriated through our

25
daily use of internet technologies. In short, today it is not only power itself which

poses a reasonable concern to those doing discourse analysis, but the appropriation of

discourse and power into the singular flow of information and resources in the

networks of neoliberal power. It will be my argument that queer theory will need a

theoretical overhaul to form a viable system of critique to make sense of and

challenge the ways which we emerge as postfordist subjects through our mediation

via information technologies. It is not through institutional discipline that power

permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to exist through and for

neoliberal networks via our participation on the internet. Today, dominant discourses

are algorithms and all voices are equally commodifiable. Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri speak of this totalization in their notion of Empire: “Empire manages hybrid

identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of

command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have

merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow” (p. xii-xiii). Again, how can

queer identity challenge power when neoliberal power is already queer, decentralized,

without temporal boundaries, and completely immersive?

But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. Completely unaware of

financial capitalism in 1968- although he does surprisingly begin to poke at its

underpinnings with his concerns for the increasing automation of the economy-

Herbert Marcuse begins to address his concerns with what will eventually emerge as

neoliberal capitalism in his essay, “Liberation from the Affluent Society”. Marcuse

takes on precisely the dilemma of why we should seek liberation from a society that

26
possesses a technological economy that continues to materially improve the lives of

ever increasing numbers of people (Marcuse, 2015, p. 139). For Marcuse, the answer

is that capitalism reduces man to its logics and rationalities, stripping him of his

freedom and critical/creative abilities, and thus engaging him, solely, as a conduit in

the reproduction of state wealth and violence (p. 143). Again, with the rise of

neoliberal technologies that can transform our daily internet practices into global

capital, these concerns have only become exacerbated. Today we are not reduced to

conduits in the labor market, but appropriated through our internet clicks as digital

code, lost in a stream of information and capital in the vast flow of neoliberal

networks. This is noted as desubjectivation by Lazzarato, in opposition to

subjectivation or discipline, as bodies are subtracted from their raw potential,

becoming parts in what Deleuze refers to as machinic formations (Lazzarato, 2014).

Marcuse’s concern is taken up further, in the age of financial capital in two

meaningful ways by Alexander Galloway and Tiqqun. First, Alexander Galloway’s

(2013b) work notes the ways in which dominant theories of ontology mirror

structures of the software of financial capitalism (p. 347-48). For Galloway, this is

important to note because it evidences an ideological problem with objectivity, but

more importantly, to flip the equation, it affords us the opportunity to interrogate the

emerging political nature of mathematics, and the ways in which software not only

mediates our economy, but the ways in which economy itself becomes software

through its extraction of mathematical value (p. 358-60). Secondly Tiqqun, in An

Introduction to Civil War, speaks to the ways in which neoliberal technologies work

27
to flatten identity, eradicate hostilities (differences), and replace ways of being in the

world with postfordism (participation in neoliberal capital). This is also what Hardt

and Negri are referring to when they discuss empire’s project of creating a peace

outside of history (Hardt, M. & Negri, A., 2000, p. xv) and it is what the neoliberal

project of multiculturalism produces as an emerging rainbow capitalism: the

appropriation and reduction of cultural difference to potential data capital.

Essentially, then, we can differentiate the evolution of financial capitalism

from previous ages of capitalism, by way of its remarkable technological efficiency in

its totalizing of a singular worldly experience, which far from displacing non-

normative peoples, works increasingly well to absorb them. These technologies are,

not coincidentally, enhanced by increasing policies of inclusion and protection,

stemming from global economic bodies, nations, and multi-national corporations (gay

marriage, transgender inclusion, protection against racial bias, etc.). Thus, our present

moment provides us with ontological concerns and questions of agency that

complicate and render previous forms of protest and notions of identity, ineffective or

unemployable, regardless of being born of the same inherent oppression. This is why

a move to an appropriative lens, rather than a disciplinary one, is necessary to address

and challenge threats to autonomy in the present.

If identity has become a useless, and worse, counteractive tool, via its

appropriation by the technologies of neoliberalism, alternative methods are necessary

to challenge and intervene in the flows of information and financial capital. For this

28
purpose, Alexander Galloway provides a reading of Georgio Agamben’s “the

whatever”. Galloway writes, “The trick of the whatever is...to abstain from the

assignment of traits, to abstain from biopolitical predication, to abstain from the

bagging and tagging of bodies” (Galloway, 2013a, p. 140). Galloway continues that

this does not, however, mean that bodies are blank; they are full- but full of a generic

fullness of whatever they are (p. 141). This is not a return to essentialism: Galloway

notes that the whatever, in its singularity, rejects the Rawlsian model of man and its

inherent patriarchal, racist violence, just as it rejects the anti-essentialist symbolic

violence of Facebook and information capital (p. 140-142). The whatever is a move

towards collectivity and a restoration of relations that have been uprooted by

neoliberal capitalism and technologies (p. 142). While I do think Galloway has got us

to the what, in a work that is ultimately concerned with material change and not just

theory, it is necessary to discuss the question of how, or tactics, and this ultimately

means a discussion of violence. Slavoj Žižek (2008b) writes that subjective violence,

both in terms of symbolic and material violence, dominate our social attention, while

systemic, or state violence, is legitimized, appearing as the zero sum point against

which all other acts arise (p. 1-2). For Žižek, this is the great sin of identity politics,

we have a politicized culture, where every racist Facebook comment is policed, and

every insensitive news anchor is fired, but we don’t have the reverse: a culture that is

politically aware and active in challenging state and systematic injustices (p. 140).

The challenge becomes how to challenge the neutrality of state violence, and the

focus on subjectivity, which tactics like identity politics and multiculturalism

29
promote, ironically legitimizing non-violence, and indirect action, which as Peter

Gelderloos notes is inherently patriarchal and racist, as it legitimizes means that

structurally disadvantage people without the wealth and social privilege to participate

in them (Gelderloos, 2012, p. 19). I think it is reasonable to say that this trend is only

exacerbated in the academy as cultural scholars have the means and access to think

about and write about subjective issues of identity that don’t really touch them.

However, Galloway also rightly notes that much critical work that moves to uncouple

politics from ontology does so only to eradicate traces of phenomenology and social

constructivist theories, before ultimately placing one’s own political position back in

(Galloway, 2013b, p. 357). Thus, it is not my position that the concerns of queer

identity politics don’t matter, but that they have been taken up in ineffective ways and

packaged in methodologies that depreciate their necessity. For that reason I will move

to couple Galloway’s reading of “the whatever” with Žižek’s reading of Walter

Benjamin and “divine violence”. Divine violence, unlike multicultural or identity

politics based subjectivism, is without tactic, purpose, order, and, thus, anyone can

participate. It is what The Invisible Committee refers to as the rage of youth and the

collective voice of justice. It is anger and a response to loss, it is unreasonable, and it

is without a name. Like “the whatever,” then, it is faceless, and beyond

appropriation: it merely is. I will suggest in the second chapter that a kind of

“whatever violence” is in order- a Leftist, anonymous, politics beyond appropriation

that may challenge the objective, neutral violence of neoliberal governance.

Furthermore, I will offer examples, coupled with my belief in a necessity for

30
algorithmic literacy in the fourth chapter, offering how we might directly challenge

the flows and mechanisms of neoliberal networks and technologies. It will be my

argument that an algorithmic literacy speaks to a necessary understanding of how

power and governance function in the present.

In short, my concern with queer theory, and with the notion of queer

performances of gender and sexuality as liberatory and affective tools to challenge

heteronormative regimes is a question of effectiveness in the present. While the

material realities and discourses of law, medicine, and media are still problematic, in

terms of the representation and policies which speak to non- heterosexual peoples,

they are, for the most part, no longer overtly discriminatory or hostile. We live in a

changing economic, technological, and ideological moment, in which a global

multiculturalism is emerging under the cloud of a neoliberal ethics and materiality,

which are shifting and absorbing human hostilities and ways of being in the world.

Thus, the basic conditions for which queer theory emerged have, at the very least,

changed in form: sodomy is no longer a crime, being transgender is not explicitly a

mental illness, and gay marriage is now legal across all fifty states.

However, this is by no means is an indication that all material methods of

discipline have ceased, e.g. one can still be fired for being LGBT in many states, and

processes of transition are often remarkably difficult, and it certainly doesn’t mean

that the underlying discourses which continue to mediate our daily realities are not

determined by the same internalized heterosexual notions of being that queer theory

31
originally emerged to critique. However, it should mean that regulation and

discipline, as the dominant lenses and focuses of queer theory need to be replaced

with new tools and frameworks that speak to the epistemological and ontological

concerns of queer identity in the present. Notions like performativity just do not hold

the same weight in a culture that is now dominated by representations of LGBT life

from Caitlyn Jenner to the mainstream emergence of drag and homosexual lingo,

where the queer other, in his/her/xir newfound multicultural inclusion just doesn’t

seem very compelling. If the master discourses of heteronormativity do live on and

continue to regulate and mediate our lives, it is certainly in a different form, and

rhetorical investigations of autonomy and agency need to evolve for queer theorists.

This necessitates a shift in focus to economy and politics, and the emerging ways in

which bodies find themselves inextricably mediated through complex networks of

neoliberal technologies. The works of political and media theorists like Alexander

Galloway and Jodi Dean speak to ways in which identities are now easily

commodified and sold through the click of a mouse, making use of your unique social

positionality to customize, market, and trap one’s desires and labor within the

affective networks of financial capitalism. Here, homosexuality/heterosexuality,

cisgender/transgender, normative/queer all remain distinct, but equally colonized

through their market appropriation. No distinction is drawn, however, to regulate or

discipline an appropriate desire. Similarly, declarations and commitments of

multinational corporations to LGBT workers speak to the expansive multicultural

policies of tolerance that work to appropriate bodies of all colors, sexualities, and

32
genders in the global market. For queer theory to remain relevant, I argue that it not

only needs to recognize and make sense of the changing human experience in the

world, but to reassess its goals and purposes in regards to the ways identity is

currently mediated. Just as power has shifted and remerged in our culture, so must

queer theory shift focus from the ways that bodies are disciplined to the complex

social, economic, and technological ways in which identity and labor are both

simultaneously appropriated through emerging neoliberal policies and technologies.

If queer theory is to persist, and I think the new challenges of personhood that I

addressed offer us reason to hope it will, theorists must address the meaning, need,

and possibility of queer being and queer agency in our present multicultural and

technological moment. Addressing the technological topography of neoliberal power

and building a lens that speaks to and addresses human subjectivity and postfordist

identity in the present will be pertinent to the relevance and usefulness of this

discipline. It is my intent to build a critical lens that addresses the concerns of a

changing political and technological situation to reimagine queer theory with an

ontological and theoretical base that can meaningfully produce tools of critique that

can address, challenge, and intervene in processes of neoliberal appropriation.

Programming Identity

It is necessary to address the effects of neoliberal technologies and the

manifestation of capitalist topographies in the present. To do this, I will turn my

attention to the way multimedia scholars take up conceptions of human identity,

33
power, and agency in the age of networks and argue for the need for algorithmic

literacy in cultural studies and on the Left. It is the contention of multimedia theorists

that algorithmic tehcnologies offer a fundamental shift in how human beings

communicate, in terms of the ways that computers and internet usage orient, mediate,

and habituate human lives and experiences. Because of the capacity for neoliberal

technologies to store, process, and repackage information, human beings are now part

of a larger process of mediation that extends beyond their own agency; algorithms

hear our concerns, respond back, and engage us in endless feedback loops. It is my

argument that culturaly theory and disciplines dealing with identity such as queer

theory need to take a fundamental shift in how we conceive the relationship between

identity and power with media and communication.

What the computer, through the algorithm, produces, is an interaction between

human and media that is inconceivable and incompatible with prior modes of media

and theorizations: in short, the algorithm speaks directly back to the user. As

Friedrich Kittler notes, the computer, by way of 1’s and 0’s renders all media the

same, recreating sound, visuals, and text on the very same plane (Kittler, 2006, p. 1-

2). Thus theorizations of the computer offer a rupture to the notions of media dictated

in Marshall McCluhan’s landmark text, Understanding Media, challenging two of the

most celebrated claims in Media Theory- that media is an extension of man and that

all media derives from previous media. As Jean Baudrillard argues in The Gulf War

Did Not Take Place, what the computer has driven is a shift from representation to

simulation. No longer is the human simply a user or consumer of media, now

34
he/she/xe is a participant in a process of mediation with effects that extend and shape

both human and technology, altering the relationship between the two, and creating

the necessity for theorizing/reading the computer in new ways with new critical

frameworks. Alexander Galloway (2012) nicely encapsulates this relationship

between human and computer with his notion of the “Interface Effect” (p. viii) .

Accentuating the move away from the notion of media as an extension of man,

Galloway argues that we should move our attention away from objects of media and

towards the effects of the coevolving relationship between human and computer,

moving analysis of media to processes, rather than objects (p. vii). I will argue that

this is critical in assessing both power and the formation of identity in the postfordist

presence. Galloway notes that unlike previous medias, the computer does not make

note of an ontological condition but instead remediates the very conditions of being

(p. 21). That is to say that being is, itself, the object of the computer. Galoway states,

“The computer is not an object, or a creator of objects, it is a process mediating

between two states” (p. 23). This is where multimedia theorists begin to disagree, as

Galloway finds displeasure with works such as Lev Manovich’s (2002) The

Language of New Media, which aims to create a coherent language, offering a

structural analysis of the computer in terms of function or execution (p. 24). Such an

analyses, for Galloway, ignores the historical and social processes of mediation that

offer the computer as essentially political in terms of our human habits, behavior, and

production (p. 24-25). This speaks to the emerging necessity in which the computer

and human communication must be imagined and taken up by critical scholars in

35
ways that speak to the changing relationship between humans and technology that

should open numerous questions about power, ontology, politics, and identity.

Gilles Deleuze (2000) writes in the “Postscript on the Societies of Control”,

“The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information

or reject it” (p. 91). It was precisely through the computer, and made possible by the

internet and algorithms technologies, that the realization of financial capital and the

emergence of the neoliberal society occurred, allowing up to the second investment

all over the world and the emergence of a new kind of order marked by access to

information, dominated by its capitalization through a system of credit and debt (p.

92). Deleuze describes this not as a shift in power but as a mutation of it, departing

from an epoch of environments of centralized control (the school, factory, hospital) or

what Michel Foucault referred to as the disciplinary society to what Deluze labels as

societies of control (p. 90). It is at first this historical process that Galloway is also

leading us towards, but more specifically to our role within it that binds the social and

economic, blurring lines of public/private and leisure/work that renegotiate how we

think, communicate, and produce. In short, governance is no longer productive,

instead power/order is constituted through the use of algorithmic/affective

technologies of the computer through which human beings communicate and emerge

as social actors. It is my argument that this shift in technology and power is one still

not fully appreciated by theorists engaging in projects of identity, and one that puts

the usefulness of their critique in question.

36
 Deleuze states, “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are

modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one

moment to the other...” (p. 90). Algorithms modulate our being through our use of the

internet and, in turn, we produce the raw material for information capital: data.

Galloway notes this production occurs even in the most mundane uses of the internet,

as our leisure is effectively turned into work through a process of data mining, as

websites we visit utilize algorithms to engage us, collecting data with each further

decision and click of the mouse, commodifying, repackaging, and selling back to us

our desires through a customized experience, which occasionally rewards us with

incentives for our continued participation, by way of discounts or other promotions

(p. 136). Jodi Dean, specifically looking at the use of social media, explains this

process through Jaques Lacan’s notion of drives, arguing that we become engaged

and trapped in the closed circuits of our own desire, finding enjoyment in our

repeated failure to gain meaning or fulfilment from participation in the use of

websites that constantly defer our fulfilment and produce/require only further

investment in the medium (Dean, 2011, p. 59). Wendy Chun notes that we both use

and are used by the internet, but its protocols- the code which compels websites and

algorithms that networks and connects computers, offering information to be

monetized, are “simultaneously amplified and hidden” (Chun, 2008, p. 5). The ways

in which human beings connect with one another, communicate, and seek out

knowledge are all ensnared, modulated, and habituated through these hidden

processes. This has led theorists like Mark Andrejvic to question the democratic

37
tenets that were once heralded in the internet, pointing out that flows of information,

and the technology which produces, records, and monetizes these networks of data

and surveillance are heavily monopolized and understood only by experts in the field

(Andrejvic, 2000, p. 89-94). I will argue this point demands an algorithmic literacy

from cultural theorists to challenge the ways neoliberal governance functions.

The use of computers clearly complicates what it means to be human in ways

that previous medias (film, music, newspapers), which only represented reality, could

not perform, as algorithms create an interaction and simulation of reality, in which

human and machine emerge simultaneously in a remediation of reality: the seamless

blending of human and non/human actors into new economic relationships. Sure,

Socrates feared what writing would do to human memory and intellect, but nothing

we ever wrote spoke back to us- it never produced an interaction or a set of choices

that indebted us to further participation, engaging us in its methods, rather than the

reverse. While all technologies alter human interaction with the world, I will argue

that the internet and algorithmic technologies produce a relation of another kind that

challenges our conceptions of power, technology, and what it means to be human. I

will take up questions of technology in the fourth chapter, and the convergence of the

three throughout the rest of the work.

Important works by multimedia theorists have begun this work, critically

examining our connection and use of internet technologies. Jodi Dean’s (2010) Blog

Theory examine this reordering of humanity down to the most mundane experiences

38
of our reality- surfing the web. Dean argues that blogs and social media have led to

the disintegration of a master signifier, or in Lacanian terms- the decline of symbolic

efficiency, trapping users in pursuits of knowledge that simply lead to more mouse

clicks, as each inquiry is equally valid and yet, at the same time, demands increased

participation (p. 7). Joshua Reeves’ (2013) work echoes entrapment in the circuits of

drive, although iterated as the digital enclosure- a term Mark Andrejvic (2010) also

uses, arguing that the internet is far from decentralized, as websites are purposefully

constructed by algorithms to create flows of consumption by collecting data,

processing it, and offering personalized links to keep the user clicking (p. 325). It is

through interactivity, as Andrejvic postulates, that the computer now hyper produces

the kind of surveillance that the tv offered, a la Jhally and Livant’s reading of Dallas

Smythe, maximizing the commodification of our leisure, and dramatically altering the

ways we think, act, and engage with the world (p. 813). The domains of political

power and conversely political agency have thus shifted to the internet.

As Rita Raley (2009) has put it, echoing the famous declaration of the Critical

Art Ensemble: “The streets are dead capital,” as political struggles have emerged

online through battles concerned with contesting flows of data and information (p. 1).

For scholars like Raley and Mckenzie Wark (2004), there is optimism in the

subversive potential of computer technologies. The aforementioned likes of Deleuze

and Kittler are certainly more pessimistic about the totalizing effects of the internet,

networks, and flows of information, but Raley and Dean criticize them both for

attributing to the computer more power and control then technology currently allows

39
them (Dean, 2011; Raley 2009). Dean takes a more pragmatic stance, echoing

Andrejvic and Galloway, emphasizing the vulnerability that the internet allows and

the democratic potential that follows, but only while stressing the ways that flows of

communication and information are monetized, reifying very uneven distributions of

information and power (Dean, 2011, p. 114). It is within emerging works from

multimedia theorists that we see that the very power that is wielded in the internet,

through its monopolization of communication and data, might be contested through

exploiting and reimagining these technologies. It is also necessary to think about our

own human relationship to technology and non-human actors.

The relation between human and computer requires a second thought about

ontology. Both emerge through a process of networks and simulation dependent on

their interaction. Scholars of rhetoric have worked to intervene to make sense of this

emerging process. Ian Bogust’s work in procedural rhetoric takes a necessary

pedagogical turn, asking users to be informed in processes of gameplay, making sense

of their participation with algorithms, and to imagine and think critically about how

similar algorithms are emerging all around them (Bogost, 2008, p. 117-140). Steve

Holmes (2014) takes up the challenges laid forth by both Galloway and Bogust,

arguing the necessity for rhetorical investigation in the role of algorithms as both a

collective and individual form of governance in our lives, challenging how we might

participate and think more critically about them (p. 115-35). The previously

mentioned work of Joshua Reeves (2014) investigates algorithms in another way,

following the flow of online data, examining how websites are structured to immerse

40
the user in participation, offering us the tools to reimagine the triad of rhetor,

audience, and text and to begin to parse out our role in use of the internet (p. 314-30).

Finally, Jim Brown’s (2014) work calls for an extended look at computers as not just

middle men, but rhetorical devices unto themselves (p. 494-514). As Brown’s work

calls for, in noting how computation produces rhetoric, we can examine how rhetoric

itself is computational, further making sense of this interaction between the human

being and the computer. Emerging multimedia work in rhetoric offers important

potentials for understanding and making sense of ontological and epistemological

shifts that the computer has brought about in human lives, mediating how we think,

communicate, and order our lives. Making sense of the changing interaction between

human beings and internet media is a necessity for scholars concerned with

technology, power, and human agency, and which scholars doing work with identity

and technology must turn towards. I will take up the question of ontology and the

human/computer relationship in the 5th chapter.

A New Ontology: A New Lens in Queer Theory

Emerging work in multimedia theory offers a strong and compelling

temptation to move beyond the postmodern subject to a non-human centered world.

While I agree the necessity is there to rethink human and non-human relations, I am

unmoved to move beyond a subject- oriented ontology. As I previously mentioned,

there are both metaphysical and ontological questions that are left without adequate

answers at the moment, and more importantly, the goals of liberation and our

41
intentions for the increase of political gains for human beings should necessitate that

we don’t abandon the human as a meaningful actor. Is it not the compulsion of the

human being to design, participate with, and engage these technologies that has

emerged neoliberal order, anyway? It will be my argument, throughout this work, that

algorithmic literacy can help us trace, assess, and challenge the power of neoliberal

technologies, and, specifically in the fifth chapter, that human compulsion is what

sustains our participation with them.

Politics are made possible through ontology: the ordering of humans is

dependent on a notion of what a human is and what a human can do. Carl Shmitt in

Political Theology traces the lineage of politics through the various theological

manifestations of the time that formed what human order was. Schmitt writes that in

th th
the 17 and 18 century it was a monotheistic God in the form of transcendence to

th
the state, while in the 19 century - with the rise of pantheism and organicist

philosophy- immanence allowed for the growth of democracy: a conception of the

ruler and the ruled (Thacker, 2011, p. 95). Could we not say that modern science

today allows for a new kind of theological notion: technology as God? Examples in

popular media like The Matrix (1999), in which machines rule man; Chappie (2015),

in which brains are like thumb drives that can be loaded into robots and humanity

becomes immortal; and Ex-Machina (2014), where artificial sentience is so precise

that it cannot be detected and can overcome its own programming, all seem to take

this idea very seriously. And, of course, so do emerging internet technologies that

42
take over the functions of navigation, choosing a mate, and numerous other daily

functions. But where does this leave man and where does it leave political order? It

will be my argument that it is necessary to trace our human relationship to

information technologies, identifying and challenging our compulsive human

condition that necessitates a compulsion to participate in these modes of

estrangement. For this reason, Freud’s psychoanalysis and the death drive become

meaningful tools to locate the ways in which human behavior creates and maintains

neoliberal order. It is also why I will utilize pessimism as a lens to examine how

suicide and other methods of non-participation can reveal the mechanism of

compulsion under which neoliberal technologies persist and how we might develop

strategies to challenge their functions. I will explore these possibilities, thoroughly, in

the fifth chapter and the conclusion.

For posthumanists, it is enough to reimagine the human entangled with and

emerging simultaneously with all the non-human things that make up the political and

economic spheres of neoliberalism. This requires a decentering of the human and a

move to immanence and vitality to reconcile the metaphysical order of things. It is

Spinoza’s zoe life-force that makes such a philosophical move possible- the ordering

of life through a shared monist essence. But this appears to me to be too neat,

ignoring the ways we create, and become entangled with these economics and

technologies. If we look to the work of Eugene Thacker who is concerned precisely

with the reconciliation of human and non-human things that marks our theological or

metaphysical epoch, I think much can be gained. Thacker evokes Schopenhauer and a

43
pessimism that is not concerned with despair but the ways that “human thought in

itself always devolved upon its own limits” and “the hinge through which positive

knowledge turns into negative knowledge” (Thacker, 2011, p. 19). And what does

recognizing this limit- the fact that we see the “world-for-us” rather than the “world-

in-itself,” as Thacker deems them, do for us? First, it recognizes a limit: human

thought will always be predicated on human existence. Secondly, it offers us a point

of confrontation or what Thacker refers to as “cosmic horror”- that which is hidden is

absolute, and, here, meaning is severed (p. 80). A limit and a confrontation can serve

as the impetus necessary to push the Left to meaningful action. Algorithms are not

autonomous, but function on codes written by human beings; it is worthwhile to trace,

assess, and challenge their functions and our continued participation with these

technologies. It is necessary for cultural theorists and those on the left to engage both

the technology and our compulsions which drive and sustain them.

If we are brave enough to accept such hard truths, identifying the ways in

which our current state of postfordism arises through participation with information

technologies, two important things arise. The first is that we can adequately address

problems of ideology: 1. Why we continue to do what we know better than, as Žižek

puts it (Dean, 2011, p. 5)? And for me, it is the Lacanian/Freudian notion of drives

that will work most compellingly to explain human entanglement with information

technologies, locating and tracing human desire through neoliberal networks of

appropriation, and allowing us to make sense of our repeated failures at political

change/action. And, 2. by knowing the limits of our own human condition and

44
knowledge, we can adequately address human possibility and begin to move towards

meaningful projects of liberation. A new lens which encompasses such an ontology

will surely lead cultural studies and queer theory in productive directions for the Left.

This is a task that will be taken up in the fifth chapter.

This work will attempt to offer cultural studies a new theoretical model that

moves beyond identity politics and the pitfalls of postmodern research methods. It is

necessary to begin to see identity and technology as the new intersection of political

power. A lens of appropriation will take in mind and work to make sense of the

changing positionality of human agency through engagement with neoliberal

technologies and topographies. Developing readings of algorithmic literacy, material

notions of resistance and revolutionary action in the age of neoliberalism, and thus

sparing human agency from another abstract theoretical death, I hope to create a

space in disciplines like queer theory where we can examine and imagine what

identity and human autonomy mean in the digital age and move to take meaningful

liberatory action in the present. The following chapter will begin this work by

addressing what I feel is a trend in cultural studies, and can be seen clearly in queer

theory, as a failure of postmodern tools to address concerns of technology, power, and

identity in the postfordist present.

45
 I. An Assessment of Queer Theory

Transgressive Annihilation

Neoliberalism is appropriation. Information is capital, and no one and nothing

is exempt from its processes of abstraction. The intentions, motivations, or politics of

users on the internet doesn’t matter and neither do those of theorists: all information

is equally commodifiable. Bankers and educators are no longer so far apart;

neoliberal technologies have monetized information and identities and broken the

walls so that there is no difference between kinds of production. Algorithms consume

information and networks dictate flow of capital and resources. Everything comes out

in the wash, if you will, as all processes of production are absorbed in a singular

nexus of power which reimagines the borders of history. Neoliberalism is

annihilation.

The motivations of cultural theory- to critique systems of power and to

liberate human beings- do not protect it from neoliberal annihilation. If anything, the

simultaneous political aims and struggles of cultural theory and its reduction to

information capital produce only a mild irony, as do a number of resistance tactics

and movements today. Cultural theory partakes in neoliberal annihilation.

Annihilation is precisely the appropriation of autonomy, history, and personhood, and

the reduction of all ways of being into postfordism and instability. Neoliberalism is

the infrastructure and the horizon, nothing exists beyond it. Hence, all information is

produced through and for neoliberal appropriation, whether one knows it or not. Not

46
unlike the average Joe on the internet, cultural theorists can question and challenge

anything, and they do. The injustices that systematically structure sweat shops in

China are deconstructed; sexist tribalism is made an example of in India; racial strife

is unpacked in Africa, and the only thing that can't be done is to change or impact any

of the underlying causes which produce them. We can indeed say anything we want

but do nothing. Power has mutated into something that is not what we thought it was.

Everyone is now allowed and nothing is forbidden. The disciplinary society is

rapidly waning. Once targeted for public discipline and extinction if marked by our

queerness, we are now subject to appropriation and annihilation.

Cultural studies is suffering from motion sickness. Post modernism compels

the constant production and reproduction of identities in the constant but inevitably

doomed search for a self. Queer theory has been particularly subject to this

overproduction of selves and informations, mirroring and contributing to the

technologies of neoliberalism. Constant action and the compelling of bodies to action

is consistent with liberal capitalism itself. Žižek (2008) takes this up in the preface of

Enjoy Your Symptom, noting why resistance to neoliberal forces so often fail. In

short, we are compelled to respond to injustice, often through moral outrage, but in

our hastiness to respond, those interested in resistance or progress most often just

participate in acts easily appropriated and which contribute to neoliberal ends. Charity

and human rights campaigns are obvious examples that have been well examined, but

I think more obvious now is information itself. What we are thinking, what we care

about, and who we perceive ourselves to be are now no longer matters of

47
representation, but of capital and appropriation, through our digitally mediated lives.

This is poor news for academics of all breeds but specifically for cultural theorists

and more specifically for queer theorists who have associated bodies and identities

with resistance for some time and thus are all too keen to document such phenomenon

as possible critical tools. More and different expression does not mean liberation- far

from it, it means more information and, thus, more capital.

Queer theory does not have the tools to address the emerging age of

appropriation. While all the humanities are guilty of reckless production without

much thought to their effects in the age of information capital, queer theory often

seems to participate directly with the neoliberal project of appropriation of identities,

mirroring it in its compulsive and encyclopedic documentation of queer bodies and

their variations. In resistance to disciplinary mechanisms that once protested the very

existence of queer bodies and ontologies, queer informations did, previously, afford

the possibilities of liberation. Documenting and analyzing such examples of queer

survival and transgression could serve to inform and instruct resistance to

mechanisms of oppression; however, the mechanisms of oppression have changed.

Algorithms are inclusive; neoliberalism is equality.

I am specifically concerned with the emergence of a new kind of identity

politics that began in the 1990’s that shifted the political to the personal and the

material to the symbolic. This public protest or politics was paralleled by a shift in

work on identity in feminist, queer, and race theory that informed and were

48
simultaneously informed by these politics. A rise in the academy of disciplines

specifically interested in the study of marginalized identities would follow. When I

refer to queer theory, what I am more concerned with than the disciplinary walls that

house it are the ways these multiple theories of identity converge to speak about queer

bodies and the potential benefit or harm they offer, and this is why I have chosen to

isolate, locate, and examine theory in the ways I do in this work. Similarly, I am

aware that identity politics is a much older social phenomenon, notably arising in the

60’s and 70’s with Black, Brown, female, and queer bodies challenging institutional

oppression in North America, but my focus lies specifically with the moment it does

for the purpose of examining and critiquing strategies of resistance to neoliberalism in

the present. I will, however, explore these histories and distinctions as the work

continues, examining the relationship between changing political strategies on the left

and the simultaneous emergence of neoliberal politics and economics in the 20 th

century.

In the age of appropriation, any information, queer or not, and any identity for

that matter, amounts to neoliberal production. Postfordism is not an age of exclusion;

it is ultimate inclusion. All ways of being are subject to appropriation; neoliberalism

is annihilation. Queer theory is queer annihilation. Queer informations instruct

neoliberal technologies to queer appropriation. Queer theory cannot help but produce

the conditions in which it wishes to protest.

49
Is Queer Theory Historicist, or is Historicism Queer?

The inevitable impotence and annihilation of Queer theory can be most

directly linked to its insistence on post-modernist ontologies and, more specifically,

historicist epistemologies. Queer theory is a discipline that utilizes multiple strategies

and lenses (Hall, 2005, p. 6). What I think it is safe to say, however, is that these

strategies all involve a skepticism of any scientific or academic mastery over the body

(gender/sexuality), which Hall (2005) also notes, that lends its ontological and

epistemological positioning towards historicism. Queer theorists take pains to

examine and articulate the roles in which bodies are situated socially and culturally.

Queer theorists work from a set of tools which orient them towards cultural

deconstruction identifying partialities of experience and the limiting of gendered and

sexual autonomies through which bodies emerge. Challenging the power of

institutions to initiate and maintain notions of difference which disempower queer

bodies and maintain heterosexual privilege, and furthermore, male privilege, is what

is at stake (Foucault, 1990; Sedgwick, 2008; Wittig, 1992).

Perhaps not all queer theorists would identify with historicist methodologies,

but regardless of method, the work of queer theory does seem to inherently partake in

historicist work. I will certainly also explore work from queer theory, specifically the

later work of Foucualt and theoretical work around the anti-social thesis, for example,

which present the opportunity for important theoretical departures from what I regard

as the problematic influence of performativity and historicism that I am placing my

50
attention. At this point one might ask, however, what I mean by historicism or to

which notion of historicism I am referring, and I think this speaks to the problem

itself, and the trend that Slavoj Žižek describes as a demand on the Left to

compulsively situate and over-historicize, which is a trend in cultural studies that

needs to be recognized because it has produced little progressive or political change

(p. 9). Thus, it is the compulsion to historicize and contextualize that I am referring

to, and to the broad collection of works that pursue this goal or whose effects

contribute to it, and this is quite noticeable in works of performative analysis. For

example, the canonical works of queer theory- those of Michel Foucault, Judith

Butler, and Jack Halberstam, all engage in critical projects to locate the ways in

which queer bodies historically emerge through language, relationships to cultural

and economic institutions, and to medicine. While these authors do utilize post-

modern methods in different and various ways, it seems fair to argue that beyond

method, these works and numerous other works in the discipline pursue goals related

to contextualizing and situating the emergence of identity. Queer theorists aim to

locate the institutional oppressions that LGBT+ individuals face and the possibilities

for the expression of autonomy and personhood which emerge that might challenge

them. Historicism, as a process of identification- underlining and articulating the

emergence of social phenomena- then offers a kind of inherent queerness upon itself,

delegitimizing “natural causes” while then implying alternate possibilities in the

ongoing construction of history. Historicism has served queer theorists as a useful

vehicle in unearthing institutional oppressions that rest upon binaried economies of

51
gender and sexuality. However, it has not been without its criticisms, limitations, and

problems.

One of the most useful works to consider here is Read My Desire: Lacan

Against the Historicists (Copjec, 1994). In this work, Copjec brings up a number of

considerations towards historicism that will benefit us in our discussion on the

effectiveness of queer analysis and tactics. Copjec’s argument in a nutshell is that

theorists like Judith Butler condemn the other to history (p. 176). In short, if one does

emerge, historically, from the discourses that produce them, then there is, necessarily,

no escape from their social signification. What Butler misses, for Copjec, is not that

genders and discourses may emerge but that it is the very failure of language in its

conflict with itself that produces sex through this “experience of the inexperiencable

(which can neither be remembered nor spoken)” (Copjec, 1994, p. 175).

Deconstruction, then, collapses sexual difference into sexual indifference, unable to

further reconcile the failures of sexual signifiers (p. 179). This is important to

consider when thinking about agency and liberatory possibilities, as difference is left

without much recourse through post-modernist and historicist lenses. Copjec, instead,

affirms a Lacanian position on difference, arguing that psychoanalytic theory allows

for a recognition of the failures of signification which allows for an inexpressible

woman beyond the symbolic order and beyond history (p. 186). Woman, in this case,

can surely be interchanged with other positions of difference, for our inquiries, and

what we gain from a recognition of the internal failures of signification (and not

simply the external failures as historicists afford us) are the agential possibilities that
52
come with a difference that is not simply a matter of competing representations but

the failure of any signification to ever fully encompass the other. A beyond or an

essence then exists and much can be done where history, itself, fails to absorb or

appropriate. As such, I think it is arguable that theorists like Chris Coffman

underestimate Lacan or oversimplify his notions of sexual difference which

materializes in claims of sexism towards Lacanians like Žižek (Coffman, 2012).

Perhaps, in another way, critical theory needs precisely to explore this kind of other

that Lacan (2015) deemed women to be: a “symbolic without an Other” (p. 188); a

force of resistance without a name that could be failed by signification and, thus,

perhaps, fail appropriation. In short, what psychoanalysis offers is that what is at the

heart of sexual difference is a failure of the symbolic to ever truly capture sexual

difference or to eradicate its hostilities, and this is something that is emphasized,

recently, by Žižek in “The Sexual is Political”. It is important to note that both Lacan

and Foucault were considered to be the foundational voices for what would be labeled

as new historicism and would hold enormous weight in the 1970’s and 1980’s with

their ideological inventions that worked to focus texts within the context of cultural

and political power in which they arose. Butler and other feminists would, however,

challenge central Freudian notions of sex and the phallus in Lacan’s work to assert

gender as a result of repetized norms and cultural laws of intelligibility rather than

psychic fact (Carvalho, 2008, p. 512-513). As Copjec suggests this may present a

quite limited reading of Lacan and the subversive potentials of psychoanalytic

theories. It is not my intention to embark on long, complicated readings of

53
historicism, but simply to give a name to a series of similar ideas which present

themselves as a trend and to differentiate where I will go with theory. In this work I

will engage, primarily, the possible applications of psychoanalytic theory to make

sense of and to disrupt processes of neoliberal technologies, which I see historical

methodologies as limited in being effective at.

In a more practical way, Richard Rorty (2012) gets right at the problems of

historicist and deconstructive methods when he notes the trend of post-modern

theorists to unearth and reveal problematic social constructions while offering little to

no solutions or alternatives to replace them (p. 231). Feminist scholars, queer

theorists, race critics, and cultural theorists of all varieties clearly have no problem

revealing and critiquing the logocentrism, binarisms, and technological thinking that

permeates our heteronormative and white dominated culture but what is left when all

the figurative walls have been dismantled and what should be left in their ruins? (p.

232). To pragmatists like Rorty, deconstructionists miss the point that regardless of

the forms of power, forces like masculinity will simply arise in other shapes and,

perhaps, in even more oppressive ways. It is this adaptability that I’m most

concerned with queer theorists simply taking for granted with their overarching

insistence of deconstructive methods, which are aimed at analysis of discipline and

are poorly equipped to deal with questions of appropriation. Neoliberal technologies

transcend binarisms and logocentrism and could have the least bit of concern for

upholding traditions of any kind, and yet patriarchy, racism, and heterosexist power

have continued in new form.

54
 What this comes down to is a failure of liberal humanism in its conception of

life to adequately encompass categories of difference. This is a concern that I’m all

too sympathetic about; it is obvious that Western culture and institutions have been

exclusionary, violent, and discriminatory towards queer, trans and disabled people,

women, and individuals of color. However right deconstructive theorists might be,

and however enjoyable it might be to point to these obvious oppressions in our work,

such tools of analysis no longer produce liberatory results. “This sex which is not

one” Luce Irigaray’s double demand of the other for both equality and freedom has

never been more complicated (p. 71). Queer bodies are now commodifiable- our

information monetizable and our personhood reduced to algorithmic sustenance.

Exclusion is not the problem; rather, inclusion is, and more precisely, on whose

terms? For this project, that warrants an analysis of the particular strategies and tools

of queer theory, as well as the tactics of queer identity politics, in the present.

Queer Theory and Identity Politics

Queer Theory utilizes a number of strategies to meet its various goals. Some

of these goals and strategies have already been mentioned such as revealing

logocentrisms, challenging heteronormativity, and breaking up the various binarisms

that shape individual relationships to language, culture, and institutions. The work of

Michel Foucault (1990), Monique Wittig (1992), and Eve Kofofsky Sedgwick (2008)

all serve as resounding examples of these tendencies. A more recent trend in queer

theory, however, speaks to modern practices of identity politics where queer bodies

55
themselves are positioned as tools of resistance. This can be evidenced in the works

of scholars such as Judith Butler (2014, 2015), Karma Chavez, Jack Halberstam

(2005), and numerous others, where instances of queer ways of being are posed as

possibilities for challenging heteronormative oppression and for queer liberation.

These works mirror the philosophies of queer identity politics where “the personal is

political” and ways of being in the world are view as tools for social change. As

mentioned, there are numerous strategies and goals for queer theory, which is a broad

and growing discipline, but in this particular work I am most concerned with the

political and cultural goals associated with the progress of LGBT+ individuals and

thus it makes sense to focus on performativity and its relationship to identity politics,

addressing the possibilities and effects of these strategies. For that reason, it is useful

to spend a moment expounding examples of these works, before presenting any

critique.

Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), sums up these

affective possibilities of difference and political projects of queer identity that I’m

alluding to quite nicely when she states,

The hope of queer politics is that bringing us closer to others, from whom we have
been been barred, might also bring us to different ways of living with others. Such
possibilities are not about being free from norms, or being outside the circuits of
exchange from global capitalism. It is the non-transcendence of queer that allows
queer to do its work. A queer hope is not, then, sentimental. It is affective precisely
in the face of the persistence of forms of life that endure in the negative attachment of
‘the not’. Queer maintains its hope for ‘non-repetition’ only insofar as it announces
the persistence of the norms and values that make queer feelings queer in the first
place. (p. 167).

56
What this passage offers is a kind of ethos in queer theory that power can be

overcome through the refusal to participate in or through the failure to replicate the

norms and standards that the disciplinary apparatuses of power wish to establish upon

our bodies. The queering of practices and norms is most notably or most famously

attached to Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of performativity, which I will engage and

critique specifically. For now, what we can take from queer theory is the belief that

resistance politics can be and ought to be developed from the experiences of LGBT+

bodies. Queer theorists have done research on a remarkable amount of examples and

it is worth exploring, so we might examine tactics and possibilities as we go further. I

will go into a number of these with a fair amount of detail for the purpose of

examining the scope of these projects, their reach, and their liberatory potential.

Doing so will be necessary to my argument.

Some pertinent examples of this trend include Karma Chavez’s article about

Victoria Arellano, a male to female transgender woman, whose life and untimely

death in a customs detention center shakes the lives of her fellow inmates, offering a

critical and subversive reading of performativity and transgender identity (Chavez,

2010, p. 1-15). Isaac West’s piece about Debbie Mayne also examines the

subversive nature of performativity, as he tells the story of a transgender woman who

used public performance as activism by inciting her own arrest for cross dressing

(2008, p. 245-263). In the same vein, E. Cram takes as her site the tragic transphobic

murder of Angie Zapata, in which she argues for what she refers to as “Embodied

Witnessing”, as activists took up the cause of fighting negative media portrayals of

57
Angie’s identity, by creating posters and tee shirts with her picture on it and

disseminating them around the community (Cram, 2012, p. 411-438). In another

direction, Queer Latanidad examines the ways queer Latin bodies in a variety of

forums such as immigrants fighting for their rights, prostitutes, and those affected by

AIDS are shaped and excluded by, but also challenge cultural knowledge and

discourses (Rodriquez, 2003). Similarly, Queers of Color and the Performance of

Politics uses the notion of “disidentification” to examine the ways in which queer

minority bodies come up against, and align or misalign with mainstream ideology,

establishing countercultures and survival politics (Munoz, 1999). “Compulsory Able-

Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence”, similarly, examines how we can develop

critique and strategy from the experience of queer disabled identities to disrupt

heterormative practices (McRuer, 2002). All of the works from Jack Halberstam also

more or less fit the model of queer identity as resistance, in one form or another.

Female Masculinity (1998) examines the multitude of ways masculinity has been

performed by female bodies, disrupting heteronormative practices, and In a Queer

Time and Place (2005) examines the ways in which the lived experience of queer and

trans bodies challenge heteronormative notions of temporality and spaciality. A final

and most intriguing example of queer identity as resistance is, perhaps, Jasbir Puar’s

Terrorist Assemblages, which does take up the technologies of empire, where the

author combines analysis of such disparate identities as drag queens, terrorists, and

the burqa’d woman, by their queer resistive potentialities under the notion of

assemblage. The very notion of assemblage is, as will be discussed in the following

58
chapter, used most regularly now by theorists to denote the ways in which bodies are

appropriated under capitalist formations of production with machines. To subvert the

notion of the network to transmit flows of resistance rather than information/capital,

as I have been making light of as the beacon of neoliberal power is certainly

intriguing. However, it is not where I would draw any conclusions regarding identity,

and appears much more as a liberal fantasy of resistance. Furthermore, I would argue

that linking such disparate groups and framing underprivileged and victimized

identities as a kind of vanguard of resistance has exploitative and fetishtic effects. In

contrast, more critical and careful texts like Dean Spade’s Normal Life offer little

examination or meaningful analysis of the role of neoliberal technologies on

citizenship, despite offering useful rethinkings of discipline, law, and identity. The

idea of a system-being or a being whose identity is oriented and functions through

internet and data technologies emerges as part of a new social governance is little

bothered with in queer theory or in studies of identity. These are ideas I will take up

further in this chapter and the next.

Performativity and Identity Politics

It is worthwhile now to turn to Judith Butler and Gender Trouble to

understand performativity and the notion of queer identity as resistance that now

dominates queer theory. Although Butler draws on a number of earlier works in the

field, her influence is undeniable, powerful, and hugely influential, as evidenced by

the direction of what amounts to just a brief sampling of works that I listed. Gender

59
Trouble unequivocably pushed queer theorists to examine the subversive and

performative possibilities of lgbt+ identities. I will now examine the central tenants

of this critical lens.

Butler states of gender that,

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which
various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time,
instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of
gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be
understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of
various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self (p. 191).

In short, gender, and, also, identity, are produced through the repetition of acts and

utterances and their social signification. It is not by nature that a mannerism, habit, or

style of dress has meaning, but through its cultural signification. Butler attributes

identity categories to social performance. She states,

That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the
very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are
also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character
and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the
restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality (p. 192-
3).

And because identities are a matter of social performance, and not natural or stable

categories, it serves to reason that identities could also be subverted by performance.

Norms are, after all, only habits and thus impossible to ever fully internalize, leaving

space for subversion in their failure (p. 192).

It is the performance of drag that Butler specifically uses to illustrate this

possibility in Gender Trouble. As a culturally deemed male body takes on the

60
mannerisms and dress of the female social category in an exaggerated form, the very

exaggeration or habitualization of femininity is revealed. Butler explains,

The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the
performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence
of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender
identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct
from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the
performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and
performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance (p. 187).

It is dissonance that is the important notion in this passage and the resounding topic

or ideal that is the focus of so many projects after Gender Trouble. Here, it is the

dissonance of anatomy with perceived gender and with experienced gender that

illustrates the seams of the social performativity of gender, itself. As Butler

summarizes, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of

gender itself—as well as its contingency” (p. 187). This strategy of reveal and exploit

is inherent to a number of projects in queer theory, in which the experiences of

LGBT+ lives are so often excavated and utilized to develop strategies, tactics, and

tools for scholars interested in queer resistance.

To summarize, performativity critique utilizes a two-step critique to offer

queer possibilities for identity and resistance. The first is to deconstruct a social

phenomenon, highlighting its performativity and revealing its cultural/historical

development/construction, thus delegitimizing its appearance as a natural and stable

phenomenon. And the second so often seems to be to explore, exploit, and create a

generalization/political strategy out of a dissonant performance whether that be found

in “the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that

61
exposes the phantasmatic of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (p.

192). A number of questions now arise surrounding the effectiveness of performative

tactics and the ethics of resistance politics involving LGBT+ identity politics.

Although Butler and company have made it clear that they do not wish to put

the burden of social change on the backs of the least off, instead, carefully relegating

their actions as potential strategies for academics, there does at least seem to be a kind

of sensationalism that appears, at the very least, as an effect of such inquiries.

Similarly, it is important to note efforts taken by Butler to delegitimize the flimsy

perceptions of agency drawn from Gender Trouble that were addressed, most notably,

in Bodies That Matter, and through the addition of her concept of precarity, which I

will specifically address in the following chapter. In Bodies that Matter, Butler

reiterates and strengthens her claim that performativity is not a matter of personal

choice but of a subject already decided through the repetition/regularization of

cultural norms (p. x). In Dispossession, performativity is compounded by the notion

of precarity and the ways different bodies are specifically dispossessed in relation to

neoliberal power. But even with these updates and nuances, the central tenants and

problems of performativity and performative transgression remain, as does the impact

of Gender Trouble, whether read thoughtfully or otherwise. This is the reason that I

took the time to offer evidence of the specificities of the kinds of performative being

done- so a reasonable analysis could be made about the ethics and effectiveness of

performativity and identity-based politics when considering the situations of queer

bodies. For the majority of women and gender studies students privileged and

62
educated enough to make sense of these works, reading about poor transgender

inmates and impoverished queer people of color, for example, written by presumably

safe and comfortable academics, lends itself to a kind of utopian thinking where the

revolution is to come from a distressed and magical “other” at the deepest and darkest

margins of our culture. And this is obvious enough if you’ve spent any time in a

cultural studies department or in an LGBT center on most college campuses in the

United States, as much excitement is generated from the possibilities of queer bodies

serving as resistance tools. One should not underplay the excitement they had the

first time reading Judith Butler as an undergrad, after all. In response, I think it is fair

to say that queer theorists engaged in these projects would echo something not unlike

Patricia Hill Collin’s (2004) defense of feminist standpoint theory- that it is more

about the social conditions that a group faces than individual experiences (p. 247), but

it is hard not to see how the damage is done. This is why Uma Naryan (2004) warns

theorists of acquiring a kind of “double vision” where we transfer some kind of

magical notions of truth and revolutionary knowledge to those who are most

oppressed by the social forces and institutions we pit ourselves against (p. 233). This

is an ironic twist because it seems not unlike the high theory equivalent of figures like

“the magical negro” and others who have been well noted by cultural theorists as

minority figures in works of popular culture who exist solely to advance the white

narrative of a film, often completely devoid and separate from the logic of the film

(Glenn, 2009). These are important points to consider because of the condition of

LGBT+ people in the United States and in the world, as transgender people,

63
specifically, face enormous wealth disparities and are the target of murder on a quite

disproportionate level (Longo, 2017). The challenges and institutional hardships of

LGBT+ people are, of course, also exacerbated for LGBT+ people of color and for

women, especially non-cisgender women. What should be raised at this point, are

serious questions of ethics- both of the researcher in engaging such populations for

political and strategic purposes and for readers and activists interested in drawing

tactical conclusions from, or in tandem, with the group of inquiry. If we compare the

previous works mentioned to similar works in Sociology, for examples, such as

Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East or Kristen Schilt and

Laurel Westbrook’s “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normal’s,’

Transgender People and the Social Maintenance of Heteroesexuality,” we see much

more careful attempts to make light of sensitive issues such as gay and lesbian

experience in the middle east, violence towards transgender women, and the

experience of transgender men in the workplace, followed by pragmatic examination

of policy and law and their possibilities. This is far removed from the kind of

sensationalizing or drawing undo political consequence or importance from the

other’s body or experiences, despite being analysis born of the same kind of inquiry

and concern. Beyond what Hill-Collins proclaims about examining the shared social

conditions of a group, it is more worthwhile to turn to the conditions of power

themselves, as doing so will reveal a shift in the forms and distributions of neoliberal

power, and more importantly, the changing technologies through which our lives are

mediated. At such a time, identity politics will really be beside the point, and

64
performativity will need to be reassessed as a process of digital appropriation. Queer

theorists have long been engaged in a kind of project to flesh out Foucault’s

Discipline and Punish, acknowledging that while all bodies are disciplined by

institutions and social formations of the state, they aren’t done so equally. Here, each

scholar takes a turn yelling out a different minority group to which the specific

particularities of oppression will be examined, along with the possibilities of

resistance that coincide. It is probably long past time to turn back and diagnose power

again; things have changed. Ironically, Foucault did this in very meaningful ways in

his later work, arguing powerfully against self-identification and distinctions of

gender and sexual identity he saw as problematically developing in the aftermath of

’68 (1978). It is, after all, one of Foucault’s major accomplishments, from his very

earliest works, to illuminate the connection between the emergence of positive

knowledge of human bodies and the corresponding institutional techniques that would

follow to manage them (Behrent, 2013, p. 77). Now, it is neoliberalism in full bloom,

and its technologies of appropriation that we must address against identity-based

political resistances. The kind of compelled disclosure that Foucault draws a history

of in the confessional and in medicine is now a relation of culture; it is decentralized

and surrounds us, comprising our activity on the internet and between each other. The

expectation of offering or being asked for a preferred pronoun in the transgender

community is a serious example of this. Such an expectation transcends trust and

autonomy thus reproducing the demands of information capital, rather than allowing

identity to emerge or to not emerge on one’s own terms. Shannon Winnubst’s (2012)

65
work, for example, which utilizes the work of Foucault from this period to draw

critique of the new ontological condition that neoliberalism produces is a useful and

important work linking identity studies to postfordist being is particularly necessary

in cultural studies, as is transcends the gap between technology, micro and macro

political concerns, and locates neoliberal power via their connection.

I would like to draw upon a specific example of queer performative work

because I think it will more thoroughly elaborate these contentious points of ethics

and tactics that I’m calling upon in performative analyses and also help us move

toward the problems of the present. Elis L. Herman’s (2014) “Tranarchism:

transgender embodiment and destabilization of the state” is a useful piece to draw

from because of its stated goals to serve anarchism- an anti-authoritarian political

philosophy opposed to the state and to capitalism-by examining how gender

transgression can be used as a tool to undermine and destabilize systems of power.

Utilizing a Foucauldean understanding of discipline and surveillance, Herman argues

that the incongruence of government issued documents such as drivers licenses, birth

certificates, and passports for transgender individuals presents subversive and

disruptive opportunities at border crossings, the airport, the workplace, and other sites

where scrutiny of identity has increased post 9/11. Herman isn’t unaware of the

conflict and violence that transgender people face at these sites because of the

incongruities of their bodies, documents, and identities, but rather contends that these

conflicts can be exploited by activists, thus, in effect, weaponizing transgender bodies

and exploiting the conflicts that their bodies produce in relation to these procedures of

66
the state. The author is, again, quite considerate of the poor social status of

transgender individuals and is quick to transfer the acts of rebellion from their person,

instead, transferring it to those with the cultural capital to participate in protest against

the state. While this caveat of social awareness is important, it does also seem to

displace transgender agency, while exploiting their hardship, and this is something

that I will take up in an analysis of performative tactics here and in the following

chapter, in consideration with neoliberal power. This and a number of other ethical

questions arise with Herman’s article and they are indicative of the trends I’ve

mentioned with performative identity politic projects.

Ellis and other queer theorists are quick to shift the burden of revolutionary

acts from poor and dispossessed queer bodies who have limited resources and who

face enormous amounts of institutional oppression, as previously mentioned;

however, these scholars seem to fail to account for the effects of the romanization

that occurs when considering that their audience and peers are of a majority

composed of white, educated, cisgender heterosexual individuals of considerable

economic standing, far removed from the situations they’re describing. Furthermore,

when Ellis only slides over the violence and conflict that transgender people face in

highly policed areas of institutional surveillance, it is hard to imagine that he is really

considering the humiliation, pain, and violence that transgender people face in these

areas of suspended personhood, as they are subject to verbal, physical, and sexual

abuse as their bodies are made the target of unfair and aggressive interrogations. Even

as a transgender woman of adequate social standing, I have faced such interrogations,

67
and have been made the subject of invasive scrutiny, both publicly and privately at

airports, sadly, by members of the same and the opposite sex. Politicizing these types

of events for the purpose of resistance, in this case, does seem to generate a number

of ethical questions, albeit for ends I’m certainly in favor of. It is difficult to imagine

just how this author and numerous others that I’ve mentioned would accomplish what

they’re proposing on a material level; are we asking queer individuals to go to jail,

face violence/deportation at borders, etc? All of these works seem largely theoretical,

and, after the fact ruminations about what scholars can take away from situations of

queer conflict. Queer theorists seem often to be taken away with the kind of

romanticism that their work produces for younger undergraduate audience. That is to

say that practical tactical examples are hardly offered, if at all, and what is really

being produced from these articles is really an encyclopedic accounting of queer

bodies and informations. Queer theorists can indeed talk about anything- even

challenges and disruptions towards neoliberal ends; what they cannot do is challenge

their own oppression and infringe upon the mechanisms of neoliberalism. Far from it,

the production of such texts only contribute to neoliberal power; constructing and

generating more informational capital. Our very words betray us but we cannot stop

speaking.

Queer theorists champion the interpersonal acts of identity politics. While

there is much that can be gained for theory by examining how we perceive and think

about bodies and their categorizations, there is little to evidence from these works

towards how these acts would challenge global economic bodies of trade and the

68
neoliberal flow of information and capital. All we are left with from these works are

vague impressions and analogies, such as Elis’s notions of trans bodies and

mismatched documents or Butler’s inverted gender performances in drag, that fail to

materialize and translate into notable challenges to neoliberal power. Robert Samuels

was not wrong when he directed anger towards emerging fields in cultural studies

when he noted a kind of hypocrisy that amounts to a lot of talk about resistance and

very little done, even in academia, to curb oppressive conditions. Queer theory is

clearly overly focused on the individual and has lost sight of the ways in which power

works, failing to develop critical tools that can produce liberatory potentials in the

present, effectively forsaking the individual on the backside. Ironically, this is

doubled by questions of agency and ethics where studies about gender and sexual

identity are being done towards the furthest reaches of the earth and little is being

done to challenge material oppressions even in our own academic backyard, as

Samuels argues. I will later consider the possibilities of collective participation in

tactics, considering who can participate, but for now it is important to note that, at

present, cultural theorists are often concerned with distant matters and unrealizable

tactics that they fail to mobilize, and unconcerned with utilizing tactics for matters of

oppression they can impact such as challenging the decrease of pay for professors, the

hiring of adjuncts, rising tuition, and other protocol that disadvantages minority staff

and students. Focus must shift out towards power, addressing how neoliberal

technologies appropriate and monetize our efforts and identities. Perhaps, the way out

is actually out this time, addressing the global flows of information and capital, and

69
doubly, the way back in to recover and assume a point from which agency can be

redressed begins with adequately understanding the ways in which power functions.

Queer theory has become inverted, mirroring the compulsion of information capital in

its ceaseless documentation of bodies and their possibilities; performativity is

neoliberal because subversion is data generation.

Queer Compulsion

There is a compulsion that underlies queer theory and it is the same

compulsion at the heart of information capital; to produce. This division and

generation of sub genres or fields in academia, specifically in cultural theory (eg, race

theory, queer theory, etc) is also born of the same compulsion. Similarly, LGBT+

identities have splintered, fractured, and produced a number of countless new identity

categories. While these are undoubtedly hopeful phenomena for queer theorists to

document, the effects are far from disruptive, generative, or revolutionary; the results

are unequivocally advantageous for information capital: more identities equate to

more data, resources, and commodities. In his critique of accelerationism, Steven

Shapiro notes quite wisely that “transgression is the actual motor of capitalist

expansion today: the way that it renews itself in orgies of ‘creative destruction’.” (p.

5). Technological capitalism will not simply over extend or exhaust itself, making

itself available to leftist appropriation, as theorists like Michael Hardt (2004) might

hope for, because the subdivisions of information capital, down to “ever-ramifying

metalevels of self-referential abstraction”, are precisely where neoliberalism thrives

70
and regenerates itself- in creative destruction. So, quite simply, queer theory and

identity politics contribute directly to a process in which the processes of packaging

and repackaging of identity, stemming from algorithmic data collection and

generation, are consistent with information capital and the drives of neoliberalism

itself. Transgression is the ultimate end of performativity and it is the means by

which information capital and neoliberalism are sustained.

To put it frankly, queer theorists cannot accept that representation is not the

struggle any longer. As Alexander Galloway (2012) notes the question is no longer

that of Spivak’s ultimate utterance, “Can the subaltern speak”, but, today, the

question is rather, “Can the subaltern stop speaking?”. “Data are extracted from

everything we feel, think, and do” (Shaviro, 2013, p. 5). The threat to our minority

bodies is ever increasingly less that of discipline, and ever more so- appropriation.

We would once fear that our bodies, if recognized as queer, would make us the

subject of violence and humiliation; today our fear should be that recognition will

mean that they are no longer our own. If we look to work in queer theory and the

activism of identity politics, it is obvious that we on the left are unprepared for this

shift from the disciplinary age of Foucault to that of the control society that Deleuze

depicts where power and capital are no longer centralized but decentralized in the

flows of information and credit. It is not what we are being excluded from, but,

rather, our ceaseless inclusion in processes of mediation through neoliberal

technologies. Neoliberal governance is about managing the unforeseeable and

governing the ungovernable; it is about structuring possibility and writing directly to

71
the virtual, rather than removing or forcing a shift in anomalies (Invisible Committee,

2014, p. 113). Identity is no longer a weapon; transgression is detrimental. Our

revolution is here to bail out an otherwise failing market.

The Personal is Not Political…Even if it’s Queer

In December 2015, Time Magazine reported that the LGBT+ civil rights

movement in the United States had hit a roadblock and that despite the momentous

victory of legalizing marriage for same sex couples, the achievement of future goals

seemed unpromising. The battle for gay marriage was already a touchy topic for

many in the LGBT+ movement who felt that matters of workplace and housing

discrimination, as well as homelessness, were of higher importance. Alas,

organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign and Freedom to Marry, utilizing

the coffers of well to do gay males, invested heavily in the public promotion of

marriage equality, and the identity politics of “same love” swept the country with

equal signs inundating social media. With a song of the same name, white, male

heterosexuals, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis crooned an identity politics ballad that

dominated the airwaves, reaching number 11 on the Billboard 100, while, also,

receiving a Grammy nomination. Marches swept the country, and the Supreme Court

ruled in June of 2015 that it was unconstitutional to deny same sex marriage.

The identity politics of “Same love” had won a major victory for LGBT+

equality and civil rights in America. LGBT+ people were now one step closer to a

seat at the table, but it wasn’t our table. Unfortunately, the equal signs would come

72
down from the Facebook profile pictures, and as also noted in the Time Magazine

piece, funding to LGBT+ organizations would begin to dry up. “Same love” was a

not a long term political or economic strategy for LGBT+ people; it reduced a vast

and diverse group of peoples of varied races and economic statuses with a number of

social needs and viewpoints to a single issue and plight, and that issue was over.

LGBT+ movements lacked political and economic strategies to advance the causes of

workplace, housing, and other rights that were sorely needed. “Married on Sunday,

fired on Monday, and evicted on Tuesday” is a phrase that bitterly embodied this time

for many who felt not only that marriage equality was not only an issue for the most

privileged members of the LGBT+ community, but one that wrongly favored equality

at the expense of equity, abandoning the rich differences and struggles of queer

peoples in the United States.

Despite poor strategizing and funding, the LGBT+ movement would make

strides with the unlikely ally of big business. Major corporations took to the defense

of LGBT+ peoples in defense of major attacks on and backlash from the attention

garnered for marriage rights, specifically targeting the rights of transgender people to

use public spaces. In North Carolina, for example, more than 120 companies stood up

to anti LGBT+ legislation that didn’t include protections for sexuality and gender

identity, and legislation that specifically targeted Transgender individuals’ use of

public restrooms (McGregor, 2016). If the LGBT+ movement couldn’t win

protections on the governmental level, Corporate America was there to lend them a

hand and to extend the umbrella of liberal multicultural protections under their

73
employment. After all, as the Huffington Post noted, “the combined buying power of

lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults in the U.S. hits $884 billion — fighting

on behalf of LGBT employees and stakeholders has logically become good

business”. Multinational corporations, including the United States’ largest employer,

Walmart, championed LGBT+ expression with a number of emerging protections in

the workplace (Green, 2016). Rainbow capitalism had arrived.

Neoliberal technologies exacerbate this phenomenon; information capital is

equality. Data mining is a process whereby all bodies are included and all work is

extractable data on the internet. Here, the privileged white and cisgender male

heterosexual and the poor transgender woman of color have everything in common-

all distances are collapsed under the neoliberal horizon: all identities are productive.

The data of each is extracted from their online activities, packaged, repackaged and

sold back to them. Representation is no longer a problem; algorithms are

indiscriminate, and all identities produce extractable capital through their data. All

that is left in common is data; all identities are reduced. Equality is annihilation; the

neoliberal reduction of all things to extractable data.

The LGBT+ community has all been too happy to oblige in these processes.

New terms continue to emerge to make sense of and represent queer experience.

Celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Ruby Rose both dominated mainstream magazine

covers for using terms like “genderfluid” and “non-binary” (O’Hara, 2015; Mooney,

2015). A conservative estimate would put the multitude of queer identity categories at

74
well over twenty-five with new terms popping up quite regularly (Campaign, H.R.).

While, I am sympathetic to the variety of reasons these categories emerge to meet the

needs of the individuals who find the current categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual,

transgender, and queer, to be too limiting for important reasons of autonomy and

ethics, the effects of such splintering, fracturing, and reimagining are clear:

transgression is neoliberal generativity. This generation of categories in the LGBT+

community mirrors and actively participates in the destructive creativity of capital,

rather than challenging it, and participates in neoliberal processes of reduction.

LGBT+ celebrities like Laura Jane Grace might boast that “gender is over” on their

tee shirts, but it isn’t: it just has numerous new variations, all with the same

underlying problems of oppression and annihilation.

The Queer Subaltern Cannot Stop Speaking

The Foucauldean assertion from The History of Sexuality to challenge

institutional discourses and medical labels by refusing to name our queer practices is

left with almost no vestiges in the LGBT+ community, today: The queer subaltern

cannot stop speaking. We have forgotten what non-participation looks like. Queer

theory participates in the tactics of identity politics through performativity, which

offers little in terms of resistance in the present moment, and instead contributes to

the inequality of wealth and power by way of digital mediation, which neoliberalism

produces. We are left without tools to challenge the annihilation of queer identity

under neoliberal production. This is the task I find that should be at the center of

75
queer theory today. The Liberal Multicultural strategies which LBGT+ movements

engage, excludes and leaves behind those who choose not to forsake their autonomy

and become postfordist.

Cultural studies need to develop a toolkit to challenge neoliberal annihilation.

Disciplines like queer theory that focus on identity are without meaningful ways to

challenge how identity is mediated by neoliberal technologies. The questions that

face us now and in the future, will increasingly be those of appropriation rather than

representation. What is called for, is a multidisciplinary lens that could critically

analyze and makes sense of issues of neoliberal appropriation would necessarily

include a reimagining of ontology, political theory, and media studies, which work to

make sense of the agency and abstraction of human bodies, minds, and processes in

the present. Queer theory has the difficult task of making sense of identity in the

present, which is no longer not only a stable construction, but one which is ever

mediated more thoroughly by digital processes and abstractions. I see this not only as

a task for queer theorists, critical scholars, and academics, but for the left who must

also take pains to make sense of our current political, technological, and human

conundrum of capitalism. I will work to build this critical lens in the following

chapters which focus respectively on politics, technology, and ontology.

76
 II. A Meditation on Neoliberalism

The Neoliberal Horizon and the End of the Subject

Neoliberalism is the annihilation of life. It is the reduction of all things to

moving parts in global networks of resources and information. It is decentralized and

technological. Neoliberalism is the postfordist state of temporary labor, permanent

job training, and the sharing economy, which reduces all aspects of the personal to

capital. Neoliberalism is the permanent management of crisis. It is the creative

capacity to produce resource, capital, and opportunity from ecological, social, and

national disaster. Neoliberalism is permanent insecurity, because insecurity is creative

capacity. Neoliberalism is the shift from nation states to empire and the global flow of

capital which now supersedes borders and determines positionality. It is information

technologies that capture resistance and intensify global capital (Dean, 2009, p. 2).

Neoliberalism is the horizon and the end of history.

Neoliberalism, for our intents and purposes, is the shift from a disciplinary

state employed through wage capital towards an affective technological capitalism

which engages bodies and human behavior without borders in network flows of

information and resources. It is the decentralized management of subjects through

credit/debt and access/inaccess to information and resources through the global flows

of networks (Deleuze, 2000, p. 90). It is the reduction of all beings, and more

importantly, ways of being to postfordism. Neoliberalism is war against the civil war

of difference and the flattening of human intensities (Tiqqun, 2010b, p. 72-3). It is the
77
appropriation of all expression and positionality to data potential and capital. It is

humans, data, and machines as indistinguishable components of networks.

Neoliberalism is the end of the necessity of discipline and the fading memory of

difference. It is the neutralization of hostis and the desubjectivation that is

postfordism. It is multinational rainbow capitalism. It is empire.

What differentiates neoliberalism from former epochs of capitalism is

information technologies. Information technologies are affective technologies that

allow for communication with human beings, allowing for creative potentials that

integrate human behavior and experience, converting thought and feeling into capital.

Algorithms proffer endless possibilities which transform our participation on the

internet and with modern technology into unpaid labor, directing flows of resources

to a global elite who use the same technologies and resources to assess, purchase, and

gamble on resources all over the globe. Information, like debts and stocks, are

packaged, and repackaged into an infinite number of combinations which further

create financial possibilities in the network flows of empire. Neoliberalism is the

shift from wage labor to the monetization of idle Facebook scrolling. It is the

emergence of a vectoral class where economy and governance is reduced to the

means to extract data (Wark, 2004, p. 318). It is the end of the distinction between

work and leisure. Neoliberalism is the infinite management, maximization, and

appropriation of being. Postdfordism is without limits. Neoliberalism transcends time

and space. It is outside of history (Hardt, 2000, p. xv).

78
 Neoliberalism is not just more capitalism: it is the shift from capital as a wage

relation to a social relation (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 91). It is the end of

Western culture as a distinction and the beginning of empire as a totalizing and

universal phenomenon (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 91). It is the homogenization of

the first and third worlds through the means and reach of communicative capitalism

(Hardt, 2000, p. xiii). It is the end of political economy; it is cybernetic governance

through mathematical certainty (Invisible Committee, 2014, p. 107-8). There is no

outside or inside; everything becomes foreign, including one’s self. Neoliberalism is

the forfeiture of capitalism as a thing, for capitalism as life, itself, and where life and

everything else are now exchangeable on the level of thingness. Capital disappears in

redundancy as a signifier. It is the shift from a governance of people to a governance

of technological landscapes (Invisible Committee, 2014, p. 111). Neoliberalism is the

machinic enslavement of bodies to assemblages of machines and data (Lazzarato,

2014, p. 35). It is the unimpeded flow of networks. It is the end of subjects.

Queer Theory and Academic Contagion

Queer theory is postfordist. Deconstructionists delight in the partiality and

disenchanted position of the postfordist subject, but performative theorists have no

intention of returning to the postfordist his/her/their autonomy because it is only to

the theorist that the illusion of autonomy can exist via their recognition of historicism

and partiality. But academia itself is fully committed to the production of postfordist

subjectivity; even scientists participate, without thought, in the process of reducing

79
human beings to part and parcel. In this way, the queer theorist just partakes in a

perverse delight of having such knowledge, yet the further hacking up or dissection of

behaviors into social mechanisms doesn’t change the conditions upon which they

arise. The neoliberal horizon precisely cannot be overcome because we cannot step

outside the totalizing indifference from which we were produced and in which the

world is constantly produced for us: the reduction of all to thingness. We are

interchangeable- human, idea, and thing. And thus our knowledge is interchangeable

is well- we, as academics, constantly learn, write, challenge our colleagues, and yet

we are only going through the motions. The network flows of empire regurgitate

resources, turning our production of information into capital and we remain lost in

our own indifference to it all. Here, Dean’s understanding of circulation is prophetic.

Dean argues that when we participate on social networks that we get a feeling of

accomplishment when we produce content, but in effect the message is exchanged for

circulation, with the production of the post serving the greater flows of information

capital. Could the same not be said though for academic articles- with the months (or

years) of a scholar being reduced to a number of citations and keywords upon

publication? We’ve been cynical about our own craft long before we shook our fists

at our students longingly gazing into their cell phone screens.

This dissertation is written in the language of postfordist resistance. Why not

abandon academic restraints? If you listen hard enough, can you not hear the

murmurings of almost any scholar in any department at any university, speaking with

an uninterested disgust that their scholarship is really a waste of time because the only

80
people who will read their work are the handful of people who peer review it?

Afterwards, it is disappeared into Jstor or whatever scholarly search engine and the

broader flows of capital, ever ready to be ignored, or, at best, cited in future projects,

born of the same indifference. “A century ago, scandal was identified with any

particularly unruly and rauc0us negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation

that fails to tremble” (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 92). It is not that we cannot say

what we want, it is that we can and we do and that it only further produces our

indifference towards ourselves. Ever more students follow their passions and engage

in cultural critique in a growing number of subfields, deconstructing to their hearts

content, but what they produce only lends them to their thingness, and their

subsumption in the flows of neoliberal capital. Deconstructionists, armed with their

metaphorical scalpels meticulously carve away at scholarship, filling “lacunas,” and

offering new “theoretical frameworks,” while in the larger scheme of things, doing

the work of information capital by parceling out information into ever more

commodifiable possibilities. “You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning

give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the

literary inelligentsias” (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 92). Cultural critique is in the

service of stabilizing the neoliberal horizon; it is already what information capital

does in reducing all things to commodifiable data and algorithmic possibilities.

Deconstruction is the thought of empire: “Deconstruction is a discursive practice

guided by one unique goal: to dissolve and disqualify all intensity, while never

producing any itself” (Tiqqun, 2010b, p. 145). This goes beyond individual

81
methodologies in Cultural Studies or Queer Theory, and extends to the constant

deconstruction and repackaging of theory into ever more subfields in Cultural

Studies, mirroring the work of algorithms and information technologies, which are

constantly fracturing, and repackaging information into ever greater configurations of

capital potential.

So why not be certain? Or abrupt? Why not say as little as possible and as

succinctly as one could? Why not raise some long-buried intensities from the grave or

imagine some for yourself? This is certainly the language of postfordist resistance

that we can see from works that inspired this project such as those by The Invisible

Committee and Tiqqun. Furthermore, we can see it from multimedia scholars like

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker in their work, The Exploit: A Theory of

Networks, and in Mackenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, which are comprised

mostly of aphorisms, metaphors, and a cynicism and sincerity that academia hasn’t

successfully drained them of. What better way to challenge the postfordist

appropriation of bodies and knowledge than with certitude, which resists part and

parcelization through its refusal to offer doubt or critique? And what could be utterly

less academic, while being so remarkably full of delight? The language of postfordist

resistance, after all, has to challenge the totalizing indifference of neoliberal

subjectivity through which the postfordist emerges only through their annihilation and

reduction to thingness in the flows of information capital. If neoliberalism succeeds

by implementing the rhythm of information capital as the inevitable pace and

structure of our lives, then it stands to reason that another language must be spoken or

82
participated in to form its resistance. This counter rhythm would not be infectious or

spread like a contagion; rather it would resonate in different ways in different

populations leading to a multitude of resistances (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 12).

It would not bury us in doubt or leave us indifferent to even our own creation. The

language of postfordist resistance, thus, must not be academic- the spread of

university influence in the West has not led to rebellion, but has served to further the

expansion of information capital and the horizons of neoliberalism. “Rather than new

critiques, new cartographies are what we need” (Tiqqun, 2010b, p. 216). If you

prefer the parlor games of the academy or the self-importance of the intelligentsia, so

be it. The language of postfordist revolution has to say something on its own terms

and in its own language. We must speak in a way that resonates.

To address postfordist subjectivity and neoliberalism, I have already engaged

a number of theoretical lenses. Most notably, in this chapter, much will be borrowed

from Deleuzean analysis or from thinkers who draw heavily from Deleuze such as

Michael Hardt, Tiqqun, and Maurizio Lazzarato. I will also engage and draw

conclusions in this chapter from political theory heavily attuned to psychoanalytic

inquiry. My thorough use of Dean and Žižek throughout this project evidences my

confidence in psychoanalytic method; however, much specific and plentiful work on

neoliberal technologies has been done by thinkers of the Deleuzean variety and I

don’t find it to be in conflict in its basic assumptions or description of the events of

neoliberalism or postfordist life with those arising from psychoanalytic theory in any

meaningful manner. It is precisely on the level of ontology, and, thus, in agency and

83
tactics where I have disagreement and I think it is fair to utilize and appreciate this

work, and to draw the line there. I will specifically take this up in the fourth chapter,

arguing that compulsion is what binds human bodies to neoliberal technologies, and

thus, also appears as a meaningful point of rupture. I don’t agree with the Deleuzean

reading of imminence in regards to neoliberal technologies, and believe this is an

exaggeration of the current situation, as Dean also contends (p. 30). I think neoliberal

technologies can be better understood through the negative Schopenhaurean will and

I will contend thoroughly that the psychoanalytic notion of compulsion can offer a

space of agency. With this defense in mind, I don’t find my cultural theory faux pax

or frowned upon mixing of sacred texts to be too grave. Too much of philosophy and

critical theory has indeed been interested in squabbling over minor distinctions and it

is indeed also the current state of leftist identity politics. This predicament must be

overcome to realize shared struggles and the inhuman condition of postfordism if we

hope to challenge neoliberal power. On that note and in that spirit, solutions are

where my interest lies.

Neoliberal Embodiment

Neoliberalism is postfordist decay. It is the proffering of indifference.

Postfordism is marked by “the individualization of all conditions- life, work, and

misery (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 29). It is post job security, post permanence,

post-ethics, and it is post expectations: it is the pure flow of network. It is evidenced

by “diffuse schizophrenia”, “rampant paranoia”, “hysterization of contact”, and “an

84
antomization into fine paranoiac particles” (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 29). What

else could you expect from the totalizing and inescapable experience of biopower and

spectacle which writes the very possibilities of one’s existence and its possibilities

(Tiqqun, 2010a, p. 9)? This is the simultaneous flow of bodies, data, and machines.

This is desubjevtization and it is prediscursive: it is the programming of raw human

materials. Lazzato explains this through the Delueuzean notion of machinic

enslavement,

…the production of the individuated subject is coupled with a completely different

process and a completely different hold on subjectivity that proceeds through
desubjectivation. Machinic enslavement dismantles the individuated subject,
consciousness, and representations, acting on both the pre-individual and supra-
individual levels (p. 12).

This is not the divisionary practice of the disciplinary society, which functions

through its arbitrary categorical differentiation of bodies into hierarchical social

positions and roles. Far from it, this is the marking of neoliberal difference and the

efficiency and ability of information technologies to flatten difference by engaging

humans directly into the processes and flows of networks. Social subjection is not

over; it is just becoming increasingly irrelevant, and is on its way to obsoletion.

Cultural theorists, and, specifically, queer theorists have no problem identifying

processes of social subjection, but struggle with an understanding of the functions,

purposes, and capabilities of neoliberal technologies that exist outside their realm of

expertise or modus operandi of representation, discipline, and semiotics (Lazarato,

2014, p. 12). I will delve further into Lazzarato to emphasize this difference between

processes of discipline and desubjectivation.

85
In machinic enslavement, the individual is no longer instituted as an ‘individuated
subject,’ ‘economic subject’ (human capital, entrepreneur of the self), or ‘citizen.’ He
is instead considered a gear, a cog, a component part in the ‘business’ and ‘financial
system’ assemblages, in the media assemblage, and the ‘welfare-state’ assemblage
and its collective institutions (schools, hospitals, museums, theatres, television,
Internet, etc.) (p. 25).

What differentiates the postfordist condition from the Foucaultian disciplined

subject is the Deleuzean notion of dividuation. Neoliberalism has no interest in the

creation of subjects, as information technologies make possible the direct transfer of

human identity and experience into codes, information, and the raw materials of

network. “Subjection produces and subjects individuals, whereas in enslavement

‘[i]ndividuals becomes ‘dividuals,’ and masses becomes samples, data, markets, or

‘banks.’ (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 25). This is not a semiotic process; this is the direct use

and conversion of bodies, thoughts, and feelings into the commodities of network. It

is achieved through our participation with affective technologies that capture our

choices, preferences, and beliefs through algorithmic engagement, rendering our

identities into components of the network itself. This is capitalism asserting itself no

longer as a wage relation but as a social relation. It is the omnipresence of the

market, indistinguishable from culture. The results are a new form of governance and

power, and a singular way of being in the world: postfordism.

We no longer act nor even make use2 of something, if by act and use we understand
functions of the subject. Instead, we constitute mere inputs and outputs, a point of
conjunction or disjunction in the economic, social, or communicational processes run
and governed by enslavement. (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 26)

86
 What we are experiencing is not alienation. We have not lost ourselves; we

have become postfordist (Tiqqun, 2010a, p. 5). The horizons of neoliberalism have

closed in on us and we, sooner and sooner, lose our resemblance to former ages. This

is why Butler and others are mistaken with notions of precarity: we are no longer

tethered to anything, especially each other (Invisible Committee, 2007, p. 44). We

are not partial any longer; we are fully postfordist, or as Tiqqun puts it: we are fully

Bloom.

The last man, man of the street, man of the crowd, man of the masses, mass-
man; that’s how THEY represented Bloom to us at first: as the sad product of the time
of the multitudes, as the catastrophic child of the industrial era and the end of all
enchantments. But even there, no matter the name, there’s still that shiver; THEY
shiver before the infinite mystery of ordinary man. Each of us feels a pure force
growing behind the theater of our qualities, hiding out there; a pure force that we’re
all supposed to ignore (Tiqqun, 2010a, p. 4).

Bloom is the end of partiality and the neoliberal shape of things is a sneaking

suspicion in us that gains ever more force. I will argue later the importance of this

“force” on an ontological level using notions from recent nihilist theory, but for now,

it is important to continue to examine, more deeply, the postfordist subject, or,

perhaps, de-subject. “Bloom is the name of a certain Stimmung [mood], a

fundamental tonality of being” (Tiqqun, 2010a, p. 6). It is a temporality and an

ontology which imposes itself. We are outside of ourselves and we are outside of the

world. We are fully postfordist. And we know it.

This Stimmung doesn’t come from the subject, like a kind of fog clouding perception,
or from the object, as a liquified version of the Spirit of the World; rather it is the
basis upon which the subject and the object, the self and the world, could exist as
such in the classical age, i.e., as clearly distinct from one another…Because it’s

87
“how” every being is the way he or she is, this tonality is not something unstable,
fleeting, or simply subjective; rather it is precisely what gives consistency and
possibility to each being. Bloom is the Stimmung in which and by which we
understand each other at the present time, without which these words would be no
more than a succession of meaningless phonemes. (Tiqqun, 2010a, p. 6)

There is no longer any separation between human being and their foreignness

to the world, and as such, to call this alienation would only be to misuse a term from a

previous political era. Neoliberalism is permanent crisis: it is the totalized experience

of global insecurity. It is stable; nothing else is. This is the dividuation of all things.

Understanding the postfordist situation will be necessary to untangling questions of

agency and for developing new strategies and tactics for the left and for queer

theorists, and I will take up these possibilities later in this chapter and in coming ones.

It will be useful now to turn back to performativity, which I challenged in the first

chapter on specifically postfordist grounds.

Precarity and the Death Throngs of Yesterday

Precarity is the attempt by Judith Butler to bring performativity into the

neoliberal age. Precarity, in many ways, serves as a kind of synonym for postfordist

identity, serving to account for the neoliberal effects of economic fluctuations, war,

and the end of stable work, on citizens and non-citizens, recognizing the unequal

distances of position that one is dispossessed by the State. While precarity certainly

does benefit the lens of performativity by accounting for the changing economic and

political impact that neoliberalism brings, it still suffers from the same kind of

historicism that underlies performativity as a notion. In short, it assumes at its core,

88
that there could be an outside to history, and in this case, an outside to the state,

which only becomes more problematic when we consider the reach, decentralized

position and technological engagement that neoliberalism produces to ensnare

postfordist subjectivity and participation. Dispossession itself is a kind of alienation

that assumes a kind of link to one’s self or others beyond the state or, even more

misguided, that is produced through postfordist subjectivation. This wholly ignores

processes of desubjectivation and the unique function and effects of neoliberal

technologies which separates neoliberalism, not in quantity, but in form from the

disciplinary society and past configurations of capital. It is worth engaging her

(2013) text with Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the

Political, to examine this further.

Athanasiou explains dispossession in a nutshell:

…dispossession implies our relationality and binding to others – in all its subtleties of
anguish and excitement – but also our structural dependence on social norms that we
neither choose nor control. Dispossession entails the different and differential manner
in which the anxieties and the excitements of relationality are socially distributed (p.
92).

Here, we see the focus of dispossession is still centered around subjectivation and the

ways in which bodies are disciplined and categorized. The injection of precarity into

performativity serves to account for the differences that bodies face in accordance

with their social and economic position under empire, but not the ways in which

neoliberalism functions in a matter that is unique from the disciplinary society. In

short, it cannot account for the change in subjectivity- the postfordist condition.

89
Athenasiou writes that,

In other words, if prevailing norms decide who will count as a human or as a subject
of rights, then we can see that those who remain unrecognized are subject to
precarity. Hence, the differential distribution of norms of recognition directly implies
the differential allocation of precarity. (p. 89)

And, as such, Butler and Athanasiou account for the effects of neoliberal crises and

the final days of the police state, but not the difference in form, recognizing the

impacts of financial collapse, terrorism, the emergence of temporary work, and the

disproportionate ways in which bodies are affected. “Differential allocation,”

however, also speaks to the different and uneven ways in which we are alienated by

the state and this is something the authors offer, such as in the way Butler offered in

Gender Trouble in that subversion becomes possible through performativity and

could offer liberatory potential. It does not account for the ways that bodies are

mediated through neoliberal technologies and oriented as parts in machinic

assemblages.

Butler writes,

Being dispossessed by the other (in other words, being disposed to be undone in
relation to others) is simultaneously a source of anxiety and a chance ‘to be moved’ –
to be affected and to be prompted to act – isn’t it? The subject’s ‘passionate
attachment’ to regulatory and productive power is linked to the displacement of the
self-sufficient ‘I’ as a form of possession (Butler, 2015, p. 93).

Neoliberal subjectivity, to Butler, produces an alienation to one’s self and to others

who experience these same effects, albeit in different ways and to different degrees,

but in emergence with each other. The precarity or dispossession that we share, then,

also allows for the potential to move closer or to develop liberatory relationships and
90
to act through our shared dispossession. While I certainly cannot disagree that

soliditarity under shared conditions of oppression is a necessary key to revolutionary

action against neoliberalism, the question for the Left is, essentially, if this can be

achieved through models of resistance oriented towards subjectivation, or identity

politics. It will certainly be my argument that it cannot, and that Butler’s notion of

precarity, while recognizing many of the effects of neoliberalism, fails to recognize

its unique form and the growth and reach of information technologies. It also fails to

adequately understand the ways that bodies are not only detached, from other bodies

and themselves, but how they’re reoriented as pieces of neoliberal assemblages.

Butler’s reading of neoliberal capitalism is too simplistic, it is one of capital in excess

or in the throngs of empiric decay. Dispossession cannot account for the creative

capacities of information technologies to manage and benefit from crises and

destruction. Desubjectivation is beyond the scope of performativity.

Identity Politics and Subjectivized Agency

Identity politics are the realization of performativity and the resistance mode

of choice for scholars engaged in subjectivized analysis. It is the fracturing of larger

political parties for the pursuance of specific rights and advantages of social groups

with a shared identity. Identity politics are championed by postmodernists because

they create representation and offer the possibility for political gains for

disenfranchised groups, who often have no other means of achieving political

victories. However, the effects of identity politics do not often match these worthy

91
intentions and numerous other political and economic considerations arise. Jodi Dean

(2009) succinctly details the history of identity politics,

In brief, the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a set of profound changes in the
world economy, changes associated with declines in economic growth and increases
in inflation and unemployment. As the following chapter explores, powerful figures
in the corporate and finance sectors took this opportunity to dismantle the welfare
state (by privatizing public holdings, cutting back on public services, and rewriting
laws for the benefit of corporations). For the most part, the American left seemed
relatively unaware of the ways business was acting as a class to consolidate political
power – a fundamental component of which was the passage of a set of campaign
finance laws establishing the rights of corporations to contribute unlimited amounts
of money to political parties and political action committees.21 Instead, coming out of
the movements associated with 1968, increasingly prominent voices on the left
empathized and fought for personal freedoms, freedoms from parental and state
constraints as well as freedoms for the expression of differences of race, sex and
sexuality. While these ideals were situated within movements for social justice, their
coexistence was precarious, as tensions at the time between workers and students
made clear. (p. 33)

Identity politics, in effect, arose from a division of the Left over matters of social

justice and economics, while at the same time significant evolution was occurring at

the level of power, altering the ways in which capitalism and the State have the ability

to govern. The Right adhered to this adaptation of capital, which we would

eventually term neoliberalism, and designate by its communicative and information

technologies, which greatly increase the reach of potential and capital through the

monetization of daily participation on the internet and which allow for more efficient

management of crisis, such as those which allow the elite to invest, gamble on, and

acquire the resources and debt of nations all over the world in real time. This

neoliberal evolution of power is not something the Left has many meaningful

solutions for. After several decades worth of civil rights victories, which altered the

92
way we think and speak about politics in the West, the Left remains heavily

committed to the tactics of identity politics. But identity politics focus on processes of

subjectivation and difference that speak to the vestiges and institutions of a rapidly

disappearing epoch. It thus serves us to remember that identity politics were not only

the victory of the Left and to examine the history they played in the emergence of

neoliberalism. Dean (2009) writes,

Identity politics proved a boon for the right, enabling the alliance between social
conservatives and neoliberals. The former opposed the welfare state for the way it
allegedly undermined morality and family values, encouraged criminality, abortion,
and sex outside of marriage, and benefited the drug-addicted and lazy more than the
sober and diligent. Engaged in struggles against social conservatives on all these
fronts, many leftists embraced the emphasis on freedom and attack on the state
prominent among neoliberals. The state seemed but another repressive authority, its
provisions tied to the sexism of the traditional family and the racism of the white
mainstream. (p. 34)

Identity politics and the post-1968 Left unwittingly worked in conjunction to

usher in neoliberalism and the politics, language, and culture in which capital appears

no longer as a wage relation, but as a social relation. Neoliberalism is the

convergence of identity politics and the Right. It is Steve Jobs, Google, Starbucks,

and the multinational corporations who supercede national sovereignty to offer civil

rights to Western workers. It is the belief that capitalism, and specifically technology,

can solve all the crises of human politics, alleviating suffering, and ending

discrimination and injustice. It is the end of hostis and the flattening of difference.

Steve Jobs is then not far off from ultra conservative economist and pride of the

Right, Milton Friedman, who offered in his most cherished work, Capitalism and

93
Freedom, that the market itself could solve our current predicaments of civil rights

and discrimination, and ought to be left to its own devices. Slavoj Žižek (2008) writes

of this emerging class of socially minded global capitalists as

…liberal communists,’ who no longer accept the opposition between Davos (global
capitalism) and Proto Alegre (the new social movements alternative to global
capitalism). Their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake, i.e., thrive as
profitable entrepreneurs, and eat it, too, i.e., endorse the anti-capitalist causes of
social responsibility and ecological concern. (p. 16)

Žižek continues,

The new liberal communists are, of course, our usual suspects: Bill Gates and George
Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as their court philosophers,
most notably the journalist Thomas Friedman. What makes this group interesting is
that their ideology has become all but indistinguishable from the new breed of anti-
globalist leftist radicals: Toni Negri himself, the guru of the postmodern left, praises
digital capitalism as containing in nuce all the elements of communism – one has only
to drop the capitalist form, and the revolutionary goal is achieved. (p. 16)

It is impossible to deny the reach, span, and depth of these companies, and their

philosophies into our lives. As Žižek notes, the postmodern Left is often

indistinguishable, as a number of Deleuzean political theorists take up notions of

imminence and the possibility of transforming global capital to global communism.

But how this would be possible when neoliberalism’s very growth and sustenance

relies on the crises that we might imagine would challenge it? These thinkers are

perhaps also lost in what they perceive as the liberatory potential of the growing

possibilities of technology.

Identity politics have altered the way we speak about politics and in what

ways. Neoliberalism does not employ the exclusionary tactics of the disciplinary age,

but embraces diversity and inclusion as a means to neutralize hostis and to flatten
94
identity into a singular postfordist way of being. Discipline today is an interpersonal

tool of neoliberal culture, in which individuals may take up the baton of political

correctness and become an honorary member of the p.c. police, challenging

inflammatory and discriminatory language, while also serving the goals of neoliberal

order. Dean (2009) writes, quoting Žižek,

The true victory (the true ‘negation of the negation’) occurs when the enemy talks
your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat. It occurs when one’s
specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by the enemy. (p. 7)

The true victory of the post-1968 Left is the instatement of a universal language of

neoliberal multiculturalism. Is this not what presents itself in all facets of culture

today? A superficial respect of difference is afforded and policed omnipotently. A

TV host makes a racist or sexist comment and he is fired. A store clerk tells a

transgender woman she can’t use a restroom and the store is boycotted and put out of

business. A movie does not promote women in the right way and it’s written about in

a well-read blog and it flops in theaters. Meanwhile, the institutional injustices

suffered by queer, black, and female bodies remain untouched. Identity politics serve

neoliberalism because they orient us towards pacifism, and a focus on interpersonal

abuses, reducing politics to speech, and directing us away from the functions of

economics and politics. What identity politics have effectively served to create is an

impotent language of multiculturalism that privileges victimhood and orients the

disenfranchised toward superficial battles rather than towards direct action,

subversion, and violence. Dean (2009) explains,

95
The position of victim (rather than victor) grows out of a prominent strain of
contemporary American politics, namely, the rights discourse associated with
movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of sexual minorities.7
Although often linked to left political correctness, speaking as a victim is at odds with
the long history of the labor movement as well as with the politics of the new left.
One need but recall a whole series of claims to power: ‘Black power,’ ‘Sisterhood is
powerful,’ ‘We’re here; we’re queer; get used to it,’ ‘Power to the people.’ Reducing
political speech to testimony to the suffering of victims inverts these claims to power
and subverts the movements’ activist spirit. (p. 5)

The discourse of victimhood does not produce institutional change. It produces social

milieus.

Today’s identity politics are vacuous. They have been reduced by neoliberal

technologies to a microcosm of what they once were. Today’s “social justice

warriors” are self-aggrandizing, going through the motions, and their digital protests

are in direct symmetry with the emptiness of academic social critique. Frances Lee’s

widely circulated (2017) blog article, “Kin Aesthetics: Excommunicate Me From the

Church of Social Justice” mirrors LaTour’s (2004) critique of cultural studies,

evidencing that identity politics movements today have become a divisive lifestyle

which uncritically promote elitist and superficial language/analysis and attachment to

“sacred texts” that fail to meaningfully challenge capitalist logics. When once Stokely

Carmichael (1967) called for direct action and violence, citing the ways that civil

rights movements become coopted, today #BlackLivesMatter is a savvy political

brand aimed at shaping the modern platform of the Democratic Party, unconcerned

with neoliberal imperialism (Dixon, 2015). When transgender women once threw

bricks at the Stonewall Inn and physically defended themselves against police

brutality, today the LGBT+ movement musters its collective force to fail movies that

96
don’t adequately address the perception of their history (Smith, 2015). Identity

politics have become problematic, as social justice warriors might say. Neoliberal

technologies are particularly good at orienting us towards digital milieus.

Identity politics have become hashtags and Facebook arguments. They have

become circulation; more information capital lost in the flow on neoliberal networks.

Jodi Dean (2009) explains her notion of circulation,

Any particular contribution remains secondary to the fact of circulation. The

value of any particular contribution is likewise inversely proportionate to the
openness, inclusiveness, or extent of a circulating data stream: the more opinions or
comments that are out there, the less of an impact any given one might make (and the
more shocking, spectacular, and new a contribution must be in order to register or
have an impact). In sum, communication functions symptomatically to produce its
own negation. (p. 26)

Today, issues of social justice and culture are taken up in endless ways on the internet

by ever fracturing groups of individuals, constantly reimagining their space,

positionality, and identity. Social media, blogs, group pages, and more direct lines of

communication swell with hashtags, petitions, and arguments lined with a language

of social justice ripe with lingo and abbreviation specific to the causes of internet

activists. They remain detached from means of power and economics, and are instead

easily swept into the currents of network, producing ever more information capital for

the system they wish to challenge. The internet is a cozy and comfortable place for

the disenfranchised to dump their proclivities for change. The Invisible Committee

(2007) writes of activists organizations as “empty structures, which, in spite of their

grand origins, can never be filled. In all their affairs, at every level, these

organizations are concerned above all with their own survival as organizations, and
97
little else,” but “Far more dreadful are social milieus, with their supple texture, their

gossip, and their informal hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is

oriented towards the neutralization of some truth” (p. 100). Digital milieus are no

different: they form a language, a culture, sublimate a revolutionary message, and

finally, punish and attack anyone who fails to perform their message the way they

have deemed to be fashionable. These milieus and fractioned identity politics groups

fail to convert any particulars into a universal cause or coherent Left capable of

challenging neoliberal power. They are divisive and often simply serve as a vehicle to

dump one’s rightful fears and anger about social injustices, producing a hard sardony,

as their digital contributions are appropriated and exchanged as information capital.

Dean (2009) writes,

Contestations today rarely employ common terms, points of reference, or demarcated

frontiers. In our highly mediated communications environments we confront instead a
multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive as to hinder the formation of
strong counterhegemonies. The proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and
intensification of communicative access and opportunity result in a deadlocked
democracy incapable of serving as a form for political change. I refer to this
democracy that talks without responding as communicative capitalism. (p. 22)

The digital milieus of identity politics cannot serve us. They fracture, rather than

connect, and convert useful resentment against the system into circulation. They

squander revolutionary potential. Digital milieus are the internet equivalent of

activist organizations and thus exacerbate the already existent problems of

management, exclusivity, and production, through the reach, scope, and capture of

neoliberal technologies.

98
 Identity politics and digital milieus converge with neoliberal technologies to

orient us to nonviolence, toward issues of culture rather than institutional awareness,

and toward matters of the interpersonal, because this is what is achievable via the

method of digital milieus and the internet, such as through petitions, social media, etc.

Identity politics are particularly attuned and skilled in making it known that a

particularly movie might be racist or even that an act of police brutality has occurred,

but not in highlighting or addressing the ways in which systems function. Digital

milieus, in short, orient us to matters of subjective, rather than objective violence.

Slavoj Žižek (2008) explains the difference, as

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same
standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a
non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of
things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’
state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level
standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic
violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart
to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into
account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions
of subjective violence. (p. 2)

Digital identity politics address egregious shows of force that emerge and appear on

top of the regular functions of economics, politics, and our daily routines, which

disappear in mundanity. We can stop a bill from passing that would victimize

transgender women, or get a cop put on trial for killing an unarmed black man, but

identity politics cannot address the imperial and domestic violence of capitalism; it

cannot impede the rhythm of empire. Politics are thus reduced to subjectivized

dilemma, and often reduced further to the smallest microcosm of interpersonal

99
interaction since internet technologies allow even the most ordinary civilian to hold a

lens at all places and times in the public sphere. Identity politics becomes lost in the

exchange of all things that the neoliberal shift from capital as wage relation to social

relation produced. Digital milieus cannot challenge the flows of information and

capital in network because it is contributing to them through the conversion of their

revolutionary anger to circulation. However, I would like to consider what form

resistance might take to disturb and counteract the flows of empire. In the following

section I will examine what kind of force might make way against the objective

violence and processes of desubjectivation through which neoliberalism sustains

itself. I will attempt to offer solutions.

Whatever Violence and Neoliberal Empire

There is no viable solution in engaging identity politics, subjetctivized protest,

and nonviolent resistance. In How Nonviolence Protects the State, Peter Gelderloos

outlines how nonviolent tactics further disengage disenfranchised minorities,

downplaying the violence that minorities already face from neoliberalism. “Put quite

plainly, nonviolence ensures a state monopoly on violence” (p. 33). Identity politics

do not have the means to challenge the violence of desubjectivation. Digital milieus

can offer some smaller scale victories, mitigating or lessening the effects of

neoliberalism, but participation in identity politics orients us towards problems of an

interpersonal scale that match its reach and successes, and insure further the objective

violence that structures neoliberal order. As Gelderloos (2012) unabashedly puts it,

100
“Any struggle against oppression necessitates a conflict with the state.” (p. 33). I will

continue by exploring meaningful direct action against neoliberal empire. I will

define direct action, in opposition to the reformist methods of the activist

organizations and digital milieus of contemporary identity politics, as any action

which directly challenges, subverts, or cripples neoliberal processes. Violence needs

to be reappropriated as resistance.

Slavoj Žižek (2008), reading Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin,

proposes a reading of “divine violence” as an anger beyond reason that cannot be

sublimated or compromised with (p. 194). Žižek states that, “When those outside the

structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate

justice/vengeance, this is divine violence” (p. 194). Divine violence cannot be

coopted because it is without purpose and without identity; it is pure resentment. It is

beyond the flows of neoliberal appropriation; it is hostility unreduced. It is unbound

by time and space, and strikes regardless of consequence, producing possibilities that

can challenge and disturb ways of being, allowing space for new interpretation and

experience. In revolutionary terms, it is the reckless anger of a youth in rebellion

(Invisibile Committee, p. 9-10). Divine violence is a tool of direct action to be used

to challenge the neoliberal production of postfordist being. I propose reading it

alongside Agamben’s notion of “the whatever,” which can speak to resistance more

specifically attuned to neoliberalism and the postfordist condition.

101
 The whatever is the possibility to form the fractured particulars of the left into

a universal cause to challenge neoliberalism. The whatever community is belonging

without the pretense of identity causes; it is the co-belonging of singularities. It is

pure being and acceptance of whatever one is. Whatever being is without identity; it

is not empty, however; it is fully itself. The whatever is a concept constituted by

Georgio Agamben; Alexander Galloway (2013a) explains,

In The Coming Community Agamben explains his use of the term in greater detail:
‘The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with
respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French,
being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is.’20 And later: ‘Whatever is the figure
of pure singularity. Whatever singularity has no identity, it is not determinate with
respect to a concept, but neither is it simply indeterminate; rather it is determined
only through its relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities. (p. 139)

The whatever thus resists both traps of subjectivation and desubjecitivation; it is unto

itself. It also resists the milieus and divisive traps of identity politics of the

mainstream Left, allowing for the possibility of collective resistance, the reemergence

of hostilities, and the expansion of ways of being outside postfordist existence. This

is no longer the battle between proletariat and bourgeiousie or even between state and

state, but between humanity and desubjectivation. It is the culmination of the human

rejection of what capital has amounted to in neoliberalism.

It is my contention that we should read the whatever and divine violence

together: whatever violence. After all, what could possibly herald the whatever

besides a pure, indefinable, unrestrained anger? The singular humanity or the singular

force of humanity in resistance to neoliberal empire is rage. What a whatever violence

can or should offer us is the unrestrained temper of youth. To reject organization, to

102
reject milieus, and to resist signification: to do nothing but honor the singularity of

our anger and to emerge in resistance.

The Shape of Post-Neoliberal Things to Come

It probably sounds pretty strange to abdicate identity and orientation in a

project about queer identity. But wouldn’t queer theorists, in one way or another,

already challenge the ways that queerness could be our own? Butler certainly does

that with her notion of performativity, and I’ve been arguing throughout this project

that neoliberal technologies infringe upon and mediate our queerness through

processes of appropriation. I think then the queerest thing to do, is to abandon

ourselves and fully become our singularities. In fact, what could be more queer then

to abandon identity and “don’t ‘let it be,’ leave be,” as Galloway puts it (p. 143)? The

resistance to neoliberalism and the future don’t reside in the milieus and organizations

of identity politics but in the communes of whatever. Tiqqun (2010) writes, ever so

poetically, that

There is a politics of whatever singularity.

Which consists in tearing back from Empire

the conditions and the means,

even interstitial,

to experience yourself as such.

This is a politics, because it presupposes a capacity

for confrontation,

and because a new human aggregation

103
corresponds to it. (p. 207)

The strategy is singular: to be, to resist, and to expand ways of being.

“Remove all obstacles one by one” (Invisible Committee, p. 110). Restore the broken

relations between body and world and between body and other bodies. Don’t just

imagine, as academics do, but be compelled towards other ways of participating,

communicating, and subsisting. This is not an empty appeal to the specious utopian

arguments of a space where one can finally be free, but a space that is free because

one has finally let be. If one does drugs, or performs songs or does things creatively,

it is not an attempt to further a self, but precisely because they have already let go and

not because they are trying to. If one squats, or hops trains, or prefers to drink beer

with similarly minded peers who also refuse the mediocre oppression of wage labor

and the burdens of domesticity, then it is because they would never choose to do

otherwise. No greater reasoning need exist beyond that, because all reasoning

belongs to postfordism. As Curtis White (2015) puts it, a resistance based in art and

philosophy is far less likely to succumb to politics, whether they be based in a future

utopian ideal, or more of the mundane torture we’ve learned to endure (p. 17). The

commune ultimately waits for convergence with other communes (Invisible

Committee, 104). If there is skepticism about the purity of the notion of a commune,

whatever. The point is that a line be drawn between the milieus tactics of identity

politics and revolutionary attempts of the left to move beyond capitalism and any

pacifism or reformism that upholds neoliberal empire. The line between a milieu and

104
a revolutionary entity can obviously become very scant and very quickly and this is

why a boldness or certainty beyond academic skepticism is surely necessary.

Every commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It
seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it degenerates
into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on which it is founded. There
are all kinds of communes that wait neither for the numbers nor the means to get
organized, and even less for the ‘right moment’ – which never arrives. (p. 102)

A new culture will arise someday. Identity will return: signification will occur

again. Perhaps, queerness will then be our own. These are the stakes for resistance

and we must understand how neoliberal technologies of capture and appropriation

function. We needn’t spend too much time on the particulars of our future because

necessity is our imperative, and freedom, unlike ideals, does not manifest in one

particular form. A Left must converge beyond the fractured particulars of identity

politics to become a singularized universal force of resistance to empire. The horizon

can fall, and we can bring it down. Neoliberalism doesn’t need to be the end of

queerness.

105
 III. A Meditation on Technology

A Cybernetic Reimagining

There is an order of things. The internet is not free nor is it neutral. There is a

protocol. The great technological revolution of communication came and was

materialized but it found more efficient uses of its mechanisms than the much talked

about arguments of free speech and democratization, which many had hoped for.

What it would realize, instead, is a new human being; a being that was being realized

through its commitment to algorithmic computation and information technologies.

The digital order of things is not the old order that made use of information about

human bodies, but reduces human bodies entirely to digital code.

The new human being is a product of cybernetics and the fruition of a new

form of governance that emerged through the work of a liberal technocratic elite. This

group of self-chosen scientists would manifest from earlier workings of engineers and

computer specialists in organizations like IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electrical

Engineers) who set protocol for technical standards (Galloway, 2006, p. 189). While

the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), where most internet initiatives begin

today, is open and features public discussion, it is produced in a homogenous

platform where technological innovation occurs though standardization and

universality (p. 191-95). The experience of the internet is fixed and the flows of

information and power are directed. Neither open source software, nor freedom of

expression can surpass the systems of control which make up the internet’s form.
106
New governors are tech people imagining and materializing the texture of the world

(Invisible Committee, 2015, p. 106). As Curtis White so aptly puts it, previously the

unskilled masses would replace a skilled and elite minority as technological

advancement made a particular task easier, while today the opposite is occurring: a

small number of highly skilled and technologically elite individuals hold the keys to

our economy as they reimagine work, government, and our new social landscape

(2015, p. 22).

What separates information capital from other forms of governance is the use

of algorithmic computation. Algorithmic computation allows for the engagement and

capture of human creativity through the extraction of data possibilities. What this

produces are ever more efficient techniques of governance and what Deleuze refers to

as the control society (Deleuze, 2000). In short, physical discipline is replaced with

processes of data surveillance, and the governance of credit and debt. Access is a

passcode. Everything endures neoliberal annihilation; we are reduced to data and join

the flows of coded information which stand in for capital and resources.

What separates algorithmic technologies from other technologies is that it

creates a second level of engagement. In The Phaedrus, Socrates expresses fear and

condemnation of the tool of writing because of the effects he perceives that it will

have on human memory and intellect. Due to the focus of this project, there is little

need to engage broader definitions or questions of technology, besides to draw on one

specific difference that information capital produces: the algorithm is not only

107
written, but it writes back to us, and, in turn, it writes us. Unlike other technologies

that we participate in, algorithmic computation produces a second level of mediation,

which then engages us by communicating with us, effectively altering the shape of,

not only our behavior or our intellect, but also our engagement with a world that now

repurposes us as data beings or beings who live through information technologies.

Algorithmic computation closes the feedback loop that other media left

unidirectionally open (Galloway & Thacker, 2007, p. 124). Government becomes the

social landscape itself, and we become system beings interacting with interfaces

(Invisible Committee, 2015, p. 110-11).

Neoliberal technologies function through their use of data. Algorithmic

computation allows for the capture and monetization of information- splicing data,

and repackaging it through infinite combinations. A vectoral class emerges, who have

the tools to create and capture and who direct the flows of information and

monetizable possibilities. “With the commodification of information comes its

vectoralization. Extracting a surplus from information requires technologies capable

of transporting information through space, but also through time” (Wark, 2004, p.

318). The internet is not democratic because the means to command, store, and use

information are not democratic. Despite the appearances of spontaneous emergence

of protocol, open software, and freedom to speak, access to the internet is

homogenized, and flows of capital and information are decidedly directed. A

technocratic class has emerged; power is realizing itself in new and more effective

ways.
108
The Algorithmic Religion

There is something going on behind the scenes. We are just participating in

our daily routines: clicking for directions where we need to go, looking at one’s daily

matches on a dating site, or scrolling through Facebook, but we are completely in the

dark about what happens behind the screen of our devices. We are engaged,

however, and we have faith in the processes. That is to say that we never stop to

wonder when we go to make our next click if the result we expect to happen will

occur: further posts from friends will appear when I drag the cursor to scroll through

Twitter, directions will appear when I click the search button after typing an address

in Google Maps, etc. Many analogies could be drawn to make sense of this faith and

engagement in our interfaces but I think a particularly useful and important one is that

of the cathedral.

In his recently published work, What Algorithms Want, Ed Finn explores this

analogy in detail. Citing both George Dyson and Eric Chandler’s important works

exploring the metaphor of the cathedral, Finn writes that,

perhaps the best analogy was offered at the IEEE Computer Society in 1988:
‘Software and cathedrals are much the same—first we build them, then we pray.’
This was meant as a joke, of course, but it hides a deeper truth about our relationship
to the figure of the algorithm today. The architecture of code relies on a structure of
belief as well as a logical organization of bits (Finn, 2017, p. 13).

It is the process of engagement that comes with belief and is materialized through our

uses with information technologies that is important to this particular work. This is

what I refer to as postfordist being; the production of neoliberal mentality and way of

109
life that is developed and maintained through participation with information

technologies. Algorithms are “cultural machines,” as Finn puts it because they are not

only created by us, but they effect and shape us and how we exist, in return (p. 48).

This two way or multimodal flow of effects we engage in with computational

technologies is what Alexander Galloway refers to, in his work of the same title, as

“the interface effect”. Galloway (2013a) writes, “interfaces themselves are effects, in

that they bring about transformations in material states. But at the same time

interfaces are themselves the effects of other things, and thus tell the story of the

larger forces that engender them” (p. vii). We don’t know what goes on behind the

screens of our devices and nor do we care, but their functions were written, and, in

return, we are being written as we face our own mediation. “Interfaces are not things,

but rather processes that effect a result of whatever kind”(Galloway, 2013a, p. vii).

This notion of process, and of shifting focus to effects, is what Galloway criticizes

media theorists like Lev Manovich and New Media theorists for undervaluing, as

focus is spent on operation and function, missing the unique dilemmas posed by

information technologies (p. 24). Literacy in algorithmic technologies is what I will

call for, later in this chapter: for Cultural Studies to take in development of a new lens

that can critique and challenge matters of identity and power in the age of neoliberal

technologies.

What we become immersed in through our use of information technologies is

a way of being that shapes our interaction with the world. Its reach is vast and it is

110
seamless; it is not something we engage but something that engages us. Citing Ian

Bogost’s “The Cathedral of Computation,” Finn writes that

while we imagine algorithms as a pinnacle of Enlightenment, rationalist thought, our

engagements with them function in a very different mode. Through black boxes,
cleanly designed dashboards, and obfuscating Application Program Interfaces, we are
asked to take this computation on faith. Just as the poorly paid factory workers who
produce our high-tech gadgets are obscured behind the sleek design and marketing of
brushed-metal objects that seem to manifest directly from some kind of machine
utopia, untouched by human hands, so do we, the eager audience of that utopia,
accept the results of software algorithms unquestioningly as the magical products of
computation (p. 14).

We become postfordist through our engagement with information technologies: we

are the workings of capital materialized. “The commodification of the Enlightenment

comes at a price. It turns progress and computational efficiency into a performance, a

spectacle that occludes the real decisions and trade-offs behind the mythos of

omniscient code” (Finn, 2017, p. 14). This is the cost of the reduction of all things to

code, or neoliberal annihilation as I’ve put it.

The computer is not this or that; it is the mediation of states. Algorithmic

technologies don’t alter how we perform a task, they change, not only the task, but

how we live. Galloway writes that “the computer is not an object, or a creator of

objects, it is a process or active threshold mediating between two states” (p. 23).

What is produced via the threshold is a being whose interaction is premised and who

speaks to and through information technologies. Wendy Chun explains that “Fiber

optics threaten an infinite open circle of the ‘representable’ – they melt and stretch the

glass so that nothing screens the subject from the circulation and proliferation of

images. At the same time, they displace representation by code” (Chun, 2008).
111
Human being becomes circulation: interaction with other code- living or dead, it is all

code.

The point is to demystify the processes of computation. We are rendered as

effects and as parts in assemblages in processes that now stand in as culture itself.

Continuing Finn’s reading of Bogust,

This is precisely the apotheosis that Bogost calls out in his essay, suggesting that we
have veiled the material realities of algorithms behind a mystical notion of
computation as a universal truth. We see this faith in computation invoked repeatedly
at the intersection of algorithms and culture. Facebook’s mission statement is ‘to give
people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,’ a position
that embeds assumptions like the argument that its social graph algorithms will grant
us power; that its closed, proprietary platform will lead to more transparency; and that
transparency leads to freedom, and perhaps to empathy (p. 17).

Neoliberalism sits on the outside of history, precisely because of its appropriation of

the future which is made possible by an unending faith in computation that transcends

humans’ hostilities and makes possible a global multiculturalism which reduces all

difference to profitable data possibilities. As such, neoliberalism is only made

possible through the religion of computation, which really just stands in for empire

via information technologies.

The theocracy of computation will not merely change the world but evolve it, and it
will open new possibilities for users, linking proprietary commerce and individual
freedom. These changes will be effected not only in the material realm but in the
cultural, mental, and even spiritual spaces of empowerment and agency. The
algorithm offers us salvation, but only after we accept its terms (p. 17).

The terms are postfordist being: to indifferently become the relations of capital.

112
Totally Postfordist

What emerges from this immersion in information technologies is a system

being: a being who operates in and through computation. This is a being so steeped in

and so accustomed to information technologies, that not only are they habitually

participative, but their inclinations and instincts are to operate in conjunction with and

through these technologies. They express themselves and are expressed by them. In

short, they are totally postfordist. Their very being resonates with the insecurities and

the impermanence of neoliberal dominion. Neoliberalism is cybernetic capitalism.

The rational Western subject, mindful of his interests, aspiring to master the world
and governable thereby, gives way to the cybernetic conception of a being without an
interiority, of a selfless self, an emergent, climatic being, constituted by its
exteriority, by its relations. A being which, armed with its Apple Watch, comes to
understand itself entirely on the basis of external data, the statistics that each of its
behaviors generates. A Quantified Self that is will monitor, measure, and desperately
optimize every one of its gestures and each of its affects. For the most advanced
cybernetics, there’s already no longer man and his environment, but a system-being
which is itself part of an ensemble of complex information systems, hubs of
autonomic processes –… (Invisible Committee, 2014, p. 110)

As such, human beings are much more accurately defined as components of

information technology or as cogs in neoliberal motion: we are data flowing through

networks. The inclination to create and to operate through information technologies

speaks to a singular way of being in the world or neoliberal annihilation. It speaks to

a pure postfordism: a direct one to one ratio between being and the conditions of

neoliberalism. This is the ultimate achievement of empire, or a realization of Hardt

and Negri’s statement that the project of empire is capital without horizons (Hardt, M.

& Negri, A., 2000, p. 6).

113
 This is the shift in power from capital as an economic relation to a social one

that is made possible by algorithmic computation. It is what Chun describes as a shift

in the question of power from discipline/liberty to that of control/freedom:

Whereas disciplinary society relied on independent variables or molds, control

society thrives on inseparable variations and modulations: factories have given way to
businesses with ‘souls’ focused on metaproduction and on destroying unions through
inexorable rivalry; schools have given way to continuing education and constant
assessment; new prison techniques simultaneously offer greater freedom of
movement and more precise tracking; and the ‘new medicine ‘without doctors and
patients’ identifies potential cases and subjects at risk’ without attempting treatment
(Chun, 2008, p. 8)

Information technologies make possible the total encapsulation of capital and the

reduction of all things to code and to network flows. This changes how power

operates and, more importantly, its focus. The focus is no longer the body but the

social terrain that will shape it. This creates the necessity for new digital architecture

and digital architects who can imagine it. Power is now technological; governance

emerges from the combination of an ideology of liberal imagination and

technological knowhow.

The new city becomes simply points of network access and culture is

interaction between points in the network. Access and surveillance are much more

effective tools than discipline in the maintenance of power and wealth- bodies

integrate accordingly. We use our personal technology to do everything from choose

a mate, to directions, to managing our heart rate- think of the data possibilities, not

only financially but for security. Human animation or living, if you will, becomes a

process of integration or connection to information technologies and relations to data.

114
A transparent humanity, emptied out by the very flows that traverse it, electrified by
information, attached to the world by an ever-growing quantity of apparatuses. A
humanity that’s inseparable from its technological environment because it is
constituted, and thus driven, by that. Such is the object of government now: no longer
man or his interests, but his ‘social environment.’ An environment whose model is
the smart city. Smart because by means of its sensors it produces information whose
processing in real time makes self-management possible. And smart because it
produces and is produced by smart inhabitants. Political economy reigned over beings
by leaving them free to pursue their interest; cybernetics controls them by leaving
them free to communicate. (Invisible Committee, 2015, p. 11)

The focus of power has changed; but so has power itself. Access/inaccess is

maintained more swiftly by network controls than a baton. Communication is now the

focus of power but not the kind of communication we are used to: communication of

codes between machines in networks that we don’t use to deliver messages, but that

use us to generate data and to contribute to flows of resources and information. We

are completely hollow and we are code; we use our technology to connect us to the

world and to other postfordists, simultaneously linking up to produce data capital

while surfing the web, waiting to be connected to a rider to drive, searching for a new

work position, or a couch to crash on in the sharing economy: the economy of

impermanence.

Is this new condition or subservience to information technologies posthuman?

Well, certainly in some ways the work I’ve done supports a similar kind of thinking

in terms of neoliberal annihilation and the reduction of all things to code and data. I

would also not be opposed to arguments on a cybernetic level of our growing level of

machineness, such as Joseph Wiezenbaum’s argument that what is not computable in

algorithmic language begins to lose its importance, today (Finn, 2017, p. 41).

115
However, I would disagree with the kind of depiction of emergence that writers like

Rosi Braidotti or Karen Barad advocate for, in which things- human and non-human-

simply emerge together in cultural assemblages-like a network, for instance. I think,

in comparison, what I’ve argued for, thus far, is that there is a deliberate mediation

that occurs through use with neoliberal technologies and that there is a flow of

information and resources that can be traced, as can our involvement with these

technologies. I think causation is much less of a sketchy topic than is being presented

by new materialists and the kind of multimedia works I’ve engaged offer some very

useful and efficient ways to think about cultural assemblages and things like code and

data. By understanding how these technologies work and developing a literacy in

them, we can subvert their uses, and even challenge neoliberal governance. In the

following section, I will trace out more thoroughly the flows of the internet and how

our engagement with information technologies produce neoliberal order, before

continuing on to examine how (mis)uses of information technologies can offer

models of resistance to neoliberal technologies.

The Digital Order of Things

Participation on the internet is unpaid labor. Perhaps, what algorithmic

technologies do that is most impressive of all is that they destroy the barrier between

work and leisure, effectively turning idle hours of scrolling into capital. Everything

becomes production; every space is a factory, and, simultaneously, a space of leisure

because there is no difference: the sweatshop of indifferent, tireless social media use

116
employs all of us. Political economics are displaced; how do you quantify Marxist

notions like commodity, value, and labor against user generated content on the

internet (Proffitt, Ekbia, McDowell, 2015, p. 1-4) The internet not only produces

positive knowledge about human beings, which Foucault located at the center of

technologies of power (Behrent, 2013, p. 73) but it compels disclosure and monetizes

it, effectively swapping sites of institutional discipline for what Mark Andrejevic

refers to as “digital enclosures”. In short, the internet is dictated by the ability of

neoliberal technologies to capture, store, and commodify data. Experience on the

internet is, not surprisingly, then, guided to maximize the capture and production of

data capital. Joshua Reeves writes,

the Web’s rhetorical biases are expressed by the orientation of audiences toward
logicized multitextual consumption. Web users are always inundated with a
staggering number of ‘relevant’ possibilities, a ubiquitous rhetoric of the possible that
encourages them to expand and renegotiate their media experience (see Craig and
Flood). These fulfilled possibilities cohere into the rhetorical flows by which users
are caught in unexpected patterns of participation, engaging issues, researching
products, and exploring topics that while not preordained have been offered to them
through a digital rhetoric that is heavily biased toward keeping its users connected to
the Web (Reeves, 2013)

This is the essence of a digital enclosure- internet users become lost in an algorithmic

maze that is meant to maximize data potential by keeping them engaged and forever

clicking. The internet is then, not a democratic, or even a neutral space: it is only the

360 degree, seamless realization of capital as culture, with personalized ads and links

forever emerging to prolong your usage. Recent reporting of Facebook offering

internet access to third world nations through a limited browser that offers the world

to those users through Facebook’s eyes is an extreme example of this (Kessel &

117
Mozur, 2017). However, so are the efforts of internet companies in the US to vary the

speeds of various sites and broadband connections, thus privileging the information of

corporations who can afford to buy the faster speed, which seems to come to public

debate and congressional vote every couple years. Even more dystopic would be a

recent New York Times piece, citing Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare,

the article takes up recent backlash again tech giants like Zuckerburg, offering the

opinion that browsers could soon be reduced to something- not unlike what we’ve

seen in the cable news wars- where users pick a search engine based on their political

point of view, thus completely immersing themselves in a digital enclosure of their

choosing (Streitfeld, 2017). The internet is not the user driven mecca of free speech

that many on the left had hoped for: it is an Orwellian nightmare of capital

unrestrained, or capital as being, and we compulsively contribute.

Former design ethicist at Google, Tristan Harris (2017), likens opening our

personal technology to pulling the lever on a slot machine, in which we wait in

excitement, constantly refreshing our feeds to see if we’ve gotten a new social media

notification, message alert, or email. For Harris, what then emerges is something he

calls the “attention economy,” where there is no shortage of information, but a

shortage of users’ time, which produces a hyper competitive space where companies

compete to monopolize user head space through ever quicker and less substantial

content. This explodes an important myth of the internet- that more information

equals more democracy, when, in fact, it simply means more compulsion, and ever

more refreshes of the browser, as we become habitually conditioned to engage in

118
quicker and less substantive engagement with media. What appears to 2 billion

internet users isn’t random or inclusive: it’s purposely ordered and arranged by the

algorithms of a handful of tech companies. This massive impact on human lives is

what Harris describes as his ethical project at Google- I guess the irony of

postfordism isn’t lost.

Jodi Dean details our compulsive engagement quite thoroughly in her work,

Blog Theory, addressing the compulsion of our internet participation and to what

Harris likens to the phenomenon of a slot machine, using Jacques Lacan’s notion of

the death drive. The cyclical jouissance of failure that we get each time we check,

although each time we check we are not entirely fulfilled, keeps us engaged and

coming back for more (Dean, 2011, p. 9). All the while, we continuously produce

more data- and this is the free labor upon which information capital functions. Our

compulsion, thus, works against us, serving neoliberal ends, which further

defranchise us. I will substantially engage the notion of human compulsion and

Dean’s work as they relate specifically to postfordist being in the following chapter.

Information capital is, thus, pure equality. All participation is monetized and

all data matters; difference is only potential data commodity. Information

technologies have thus completed the impossible task of liberalism through neoliberal

annihilation: the end of class, race, gender, and sex- only postfordism. The internet is

the post-classist, post-divisionary society that has so long been talked about and it is

achieved through the abstraction of information technologies- everyone and

119
everything is appropriated. Alexander Galloway’s example of the narrative of

impoverished Chinese gamers or “gold farmers” competing in near sweatshop

conditions for money is telling here:

Each and every day, anyone plugged into a network is performing hour after
hour of unpaid micro labor. In this sense are we not gold farmers too? Why are our
dreary hours spent in front of the screen any different? We troll and scroll, tagging
and clicking, uploading and contributing, posting and commenting. They spider us
and mine us, extracting value from pure information. Our drudgery is rewarded from
time to time of course, with bribes of free this and free that, a free email account or a
free ringtone. I do not dispute the existence of a business plan. Rather I dispute the
ideological mystification that says that we are the free while the Chinese children are
in chains, that our computers are a lifeline and their computers are a curse. This kind
of obscenity must be thrown out. We are all gold farmers, and all the more
paradoxical since most of us do it willingly and for no money at all. (2013a)

We are the unpaid workers of information capital; the patrons of social media are the

advertisers, and we are the product (Harris, 2017). Our data are the bricks of the

pyramid that we- with sweatshop like conviction- continue to build up in spectacle.

Identity is lost on the internet; diversity is repurposed as data potential. Race, gender,

class, etc don’t challenge a monolithic experience, nor are they disciplined by it, they

contribute to a personalized experience, in which all identities are equally subject to

appropriation and exploitation. The control society doesn’t care about difference; it is

about neoliberal spectacle and wealth. Content is data: what we say is appropriated

through its form, reduced to mere circulation and an abundance of information, or

more precisely, code waiting to be siphoned for its endless data possibilities.

For Galloway, this brings up an added level of problems for cultural theorists

or those working on matters of identity: no longer is the problem of identity simply to

120
challenge a liberal model of humanism that is exclusionary, but a series of

technologies that precludes every area of human life that simultaneously appropriates

who they are and erases them (p. 137). This is the central question of this project:

how can Cultural Studies be equipped to combat neoliberal technologies and the

question of identity in the face of neoliberal technologies? Disciplines like Queer

Theory are obviously very useful at and well equipped to address the question of

Liberal exclusion but unprepared to think about the challenges of information

technologies and neoliberal appropriation. In the following two sections, I will try to

lay out some answers, which might offer, both some tools to identity scholars to

address neoliberal appropriation, and a path to resistance against neoliberalism

through the exploitation of information technologies.

Algorithmic Literacy

What should be obvious from my work, thus far, is the need for Cultural

Studies scholars to develop tools to incorporate readings of information technologies

into studies of power and identity. What this begins with necessarily is algorithmic

literacy. Readings of algorithmic literacy can begin to help us think about how

identity is formed in more effectual ways, realizing the processes of appropriation

which identity goes through via our participation on the internet. A number of

important texts have emerged within the last decade that take up this task, attempting

to establish ways to read the mechanics and processes of algorithmic computation.

121
 Ed Finn’s What Algorithms Want (2017), which I’ve already cited quite often

in this chapter, is perhaps one of the most comprehensive texts on this topic, taking as

its cause to demystify what we think algorithms do and ought to do, by exploring its

history through cybernetics, computer science, symbolism, and culture. Finn takes up

a number of important works, arguments, and cultural examples to try to present the

tool of an algorithmic reading. Finn puts the dilemma of reading algorithms plainly:

To truly grapple with the age of the algorithm and our growing entanglement with
computational cultural processes, we need to take action as scholars, teachers, and
most of all performers of humanistic inquiry. We need an experimental humanities, a
set of strategies for direct engagement with algorithmic production and scholarship,
drawing on theories of improvisation and experimental investigation to argue that a
culture of process, of algorithmic production, requires a processual criticism that is
both reflexive and playful. This is how we can begin to understand the figure of the
algorithm as a redrawing of the space for cultural imagination and become true
collaborators with culture machines rather than their worshippers or, worse, their pets
(p. 21-22)

Finn’s call for a reflexive and playful reading of algorithms for the humanities is

precisely what I am pinpointing as the missing link for investigations of identity study

today, linking concerns of multimedia scholars and critical theorists with macro level

concerns to scholars taking up projects of identity, such as those in Queer Theory.

Alexander Galloway rightly notes that there is a gap between thinkers like Jack

Halberstam and Slavoj Žižek, and what could unite these projects which vary the

importance/focus of identity and neoliberal capital is an algorithmic understanding of

the ways in which information technologies appropriate the one for the benefit of the

other (p. 14). We are all mediated by algorithms. This is how power functions in the

present.

122
 A number of important works in rhetoric have also taken, recently, to

developing tools for algorithmic literacy, with the most important probably being Ian

Bogost’s Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. Bogost

develops what he calls “procedural rhetoric” or the tools to understand our

participation with algorithmic technologies. Bogost’s focus is in computer games,

but the message carries over to more mundane experiences on the net, such as with

social media, etc.

As we evolve our relationship with video games, one of the most important
steps we can take is to learn to play them critically, to suss out the meaning they
carry, both on and under the surface. To do this requires a fluency in procedurality,
the core representational form of computing. But programming or using computers is
not the sole answer to such a charge. Rather, we need to play video games in order to
understand the possibility spaces their rules create, and then to explore those
possibility spaces and accept, challenge, or reject them in our daily lives (2008, p.
137)

What Bogost is calling for is what I’ve stated that it’s necessary for Cultural Studies

scholars to take up: we need to develop tool to makes sense of how algorithmic

processes shape, appropriate, and mediate our beings. We need to interrogate our

algorithmic lives and build a competency so we can read the processes of our own

engagement with these technologies. This is a necessity for Queer Theorists and other

identity theorists to locate identity in the flows of resources and information through

neoliberal networks.

Other works such as Jim Brown’s (2014) “The Machine That Therefor I am,”

the previously cited work of Joshua Reeves (2013), “Temptation and Its Discontents:

Digital Rhetoric, Flow, and the Possible,” and Steve Holmes’ (2014) “Rhetorical

123
Allegorithms in Bitcoin” all, also, contribute to the cause of building tools to develop

algorithmic literacy. Each of these works use rhetorical strategies to examine how

algorithmic computation produces various rhetorics and the way that computation,

itself, could be read as a rhetoric. Similarly, Alexander Galloway’s (2013b) piece,

“The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” works to identify the ways

that recent works in ontology mirror the object-oriented computer language of

neoliberalism. Such is an important step to interrogating the relationship between

computation and language, and in interrogating computations mediating effects.

Finally, while not always specifically concerned with developing algorithmic

literacy, it is important to consider how works in multimedia theory concerned with

media and effects contribute to a reading of algorithms. Works I’ve cited by Jodi

Dean, Alexander Galloway, Wendy Chun, Friedrich Kittler, and Eugene Thacker, as

well as numerous emerging works in Multimedia Theory serve to show us the

profound impact or mediation that occurs as we engage with internet technologies. It

is necessary to engage these technologies and their relationship to power and agency

from a variety of critical angles if we hope to interrogate and challenge the role they

play in shaping postfordist subjectivity and in producing and maintain neoliberal

governance. Developing a reading of algorithms is a first and necessary step for

Cultural Studies to take in addressing matters of identity and power in the present. At

this point, I will now shift the reader’s attention to possible models of resistance to

neoliberal technologies.

124
“Whatever” Hacktivism

If the shape of power has shifted, so must tactics of resistance to be effective.

The emerging Left must realize methods of resistance to challenge the function and

mechanics of information technologies. A counter argument may present itself to

what I’ve presented so far, advocating that the internet through forms like social

media can and have been used for purposes of popular protest. What this argument

fails to grasp is precisely the point that Dean is articulating with her notion of

“circulation”: messages on the internet are always second to their form (p. 41). In

short, their reduction to data capital. Furthermore, it is important to consider the

potential of a tactic. When one hashtags that “Black Lives Matter” or changes their

Facebook picture to reflect support for same sex marriage, they are contributing to

neoliberal multicultural politics, not challenging it. Social media makes tactics of

identity politics so appealing because they lend themselves so smoothly to the

mechanics of circulation. Remember that multinational corporations like Facebook

offered user options through their sites to express celebration when marriage equality

passed- this is not revolution. Yes, Facebook and Twitter can be used to organize

meaningful protests, but they can also be used to store the personal information of

protestors, as well as protest logistics, later making them available to law

enforcement- and they have. Make no mistake, “the streets are dead capital,” as Rita

Raley puts it, and the use of neoliberal avenues like social media to promote

revolutionary ends are equally fruitless (2009, p. 2). If the internet is going to be used

for revolutionary causes, it won’t be through adhering to or promoting traditional

125
routes; it will be by addressing power as it sits now, jamming and disturbing the flows

of information and resources which it collects and which flow through it.

“Storming the Winter Palace is no longer an option, as has frequently been

noted, but what would be its postimperial equivalent?” (Raley, 2009, p. 24). With the

passing of the Foucauldean age of discipline and its conveniently centralized locuses

of power, it is time we consider methods that speak to and challenge the mechanics of

our decentralized postfordist technological condition. I would like to delve into this

claim by exploring the actions of two specific “hacktivist” groups- organizations that

use illegal tactics on the internet to challenge power and injustices- participating in

online resistance. So we are clear, a hacker is someone who can engage or intervene

in the process of abstraction or data reduction and produce new possibilities (Wark,

2004, p. 008). First, I will examine the work The Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) whose

exploits are taken up nicely by Rita Raley in her work, Tactical Media.

The arguments of Critical Art nicely sum up the new protest against neoliberal

power, its necessity, their own contribution, and what is at stake:

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) argues that the shift in revolutionary investments
corresponds with a shift in the nature of power, which has removed itself from the
streets and become nomadic. Activism and dissent, in turn, must, and do, enter the
network, as we will see from the new media art projects I address in this book. These
projects are not oriented toward the grand, sweeping revolutionary event; rather, they
engage in a micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education (Raley, 2009, p.
1)

The Critical Art Ensemble are, perhaps, most well known for their DDoS attacks- the

use of what is called a botnet to engage multiple computers at the same time to target
126
a website to slow it down or momentarily disable it- targeting major symbols of

neoliberalism such as “NAFTA, CAFTA, the School for the Americas, the U.S.

Defense Department, Samuel Huntington, Rep- resentative Sensenbrenner, and

others” (Raley, 2009, p. 42). A DDoS attack is essentially like a virtual sit-in and

what CAE was protesting was the oppression of anti –neoliberal uprisings in Mexico

via the Zapatista movement.

CAE uses art and technology to challenge oppressive power systems. A

perfect example of their work is the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which by

jailbreaking a cellphone-configuring it in ways that do not correspond to (and violate)

its terms of service-allowed immigrants who were illegally crossing the border to

have access to maps, which led them to useful resources such as water, as well as

poetry to guide them along their journey (Nadir, 2012). The Transborder Immigrant

Tool, as well as the DDoS attacks on major representatives of neoliberal authority,

serve to illustrate uses of information technologies that challenge neoliberal

governance. Co-founder of EDT, Ricardo Dominguez explains of EDT’s electronic

protests that “activists break the law, while artists change the conversation

theatrically, by disturbing the law” (Nadir, 2012). This is a useful example of

“whatever violence,” which I offered in the previous chapter: the spontaneous

emergence of authentic, undefined resistance.

Similarly, it is my claim that another group, Anonymous- who participate in

similar acts of digital resistance- represents the ethos of “whatever violence,” through

127
its commitment to non-hierarchical and faceless internet attacks against authority

corruption. “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forget. We do not

forgive. Expect us,” writes Anonymous (2008), or more accurately is spoken to the

subjects of warning videos on YouTube through a voice modulator and under a Guy

Fawkes mask. Anonymous inhabits a Dionysian energy, argues Gabriella Coleman

(2014) - they mix playfulness in their full out assault of sources of power they believe

have committed some kind of wrongdoing against the populace, most often associated

with violating a belief in free speech they hold sacred for the internet. Some examples

include DDoS attacks, phishing efforts-attempts to engage organizations online to

fraudulently allow access to secure material- and acts of doxing- publicly releasing

the private information of institutions or individuals- against the government of

Tunisia, The Church of Scientology, and Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal who denied

donations made to Wikileaks- , a whistleblowing website that releases leaked

information to promote transparency and to fight corruption. Anons (members of

Anonymous) communicate through chatrooms in which anyone can join, throw out an

idea, and emerge as part of a plan to take action. At its highest point, estimates offer

that up to 10,000 individuals from around the world participated simultaneously in

some form in coordination with Anonymous (2012). What I would argue is that

Anonymous speaks well to my concept of “whatever violence,” and embodying the

spontaneous nature of the revolutionary commune who emerges with no greater

purpose than itself, waiting for convergence with other revolutionary groups. 10,000

Anons can’t be wrong, can they? Anonymous is the antithesis of the compulsive

128
disclosure, which the internet and information technologies readily compel us

towards. Anonymous is anti-compulsion- a notion I will engage and flesh out, in

terms of its revolutionary character in the following chapter: they are here for the

lulz- enjoyment at someone else’s expense- in this case, power.

What I think Anonymous and CAE illustrate is essentially how algorithmic

literacy can be used for revolutionary ends. I don’t think Finn or Bogost or any of the

theorists I’ve mentioned dealing with algorithmic literacy would identify the purpose

of algorithmic literacy as a revolutionary tool, per se, but rather as a lens of benefit to

their disciplines. It will be my claim that it is necessary to go a step further as

academics interested in Leftist projects and to identify precisely how hacktivist

groups have and can use a fluency in algorithmic language to disrupt and challenge

neoliberal power. What hacktivist groups show us is that by understanding how

algorithms work, we can use technology in counterhegemonic ways for revolutionary

purposes. It is useful to recognize how algorithmic literacy can serve academic ends

or even to speak about how it is used against power, but it is more useful to make the

case that the challenge to neoliberal power resides in our ability to use these literacies

against it.

In a project engaging in resistant hijinx not unlike those taken by Anonymous,

Queer Theorist and Multimedia Theorist, Zach Blas, writes of an art group called

Queer Technologies who began development on a Facial Weaponization Suite

(2012). Blas’ work is a useful example of the kind of undertaking that I’m imploring

129
identity theorists to engage in. Playing on the notion of “fag face”- the idea that a

gay person’s face is recognizable as such, Queer Technologies developed masks

comprised of many gay men’s faces in one single 3d model that when worn would

throw off facial recognition software. Blas’s work builds from a (2001) piece by

Media Theorist, Phillip Agre, which outlines the potential dangers of facial

recognition software, which share many of the problems of data mining- potential to

store information/faces, potential to profit and abuse power, etc. Blas’ argument,

then, essentially arises from the same base as Anonymous and from what I’m calling

“whatever violence” in conjunction with The Invisible Committee’s notion of “the

commune”. Where we would nonetheless disagree is Blas’ vision and use of Jack

Halberstam’s notion of “darkness,” which, I think, unfairly fetishizes identity-

sexuality, in this case- as postmodern rebellion or resistance is tied to the standpoint

or standpoints of a particularized experience or experiences of oppression. I don’t

think that revolutionary anger is historical; but that its inherently, “whatever”.

Neoliberalism doesn’t differentiate us- it unglues us from our differences via

technologies of appropriation, but anger can work as a kind of anchor which unites

us. The difference, here, is a recognition of the appropriation that occurs as

postfordist subjects via our human compulsion, which is not unique but a shared facet

of being human, and, thus, could work to engage neoliberalism in an ahistorical

revolution where it has nothing to appropriate or sustain itself. Postmodernism is the

ultimate tool of neoliberalism because of its promotion of endless context and

position. Halbterstam’s attempt to recoup revolution as a postmodern effect of

130
identity can properly be read as a result of what Žižek calls the liberal democratic

matrix which reassesses political choice in terms of its openness or closedness and,

thus, its relation to the stopgap of totalitarianism (p. 9). Postmodernism opens all

possibilities of discourse, while revolution or Marxism necessarily limits and sets its

terms, thus appearing unappealing to Leftists via this matrix. Halberstam’s reading of

Queer Darkness seems to be a way to compromise between the two sides of the

matrix or to force a postmodern reading of revolution, while the problem is that this

fails to account for the deteritorialzing nature of capital that already uproots context

and position (p. 9). Neoliberalism is postmodern; it is ahistorical.

The most important question of digital resistance, remains, however, and it is

not a question about theory, but, simply, if it works or not. And, of course, the answer

is to varying degrees with some writing of digital revolution as mere disturbance or a

thorn in the side of power without much real effect. Either way, I think it is clear that

we are aware that the new fight against power is online. Consider an example from

popular culture in 1999, in the popular film, Fight Club (Fincher, 1999). The battle to

free ourselves from corporate power consisted in the ability to storm the buildings of

credit card companies to burn all their records of debt. In 2015, that same battle was

staged by hackers on the critically acclaimed television program, Mr. Robot, and it

wasn’t physical data that was being erased, it was digital, and it was done by

trespassing in networks and not building. We might also note that if we can’t gather

conclusive material findings on the revolutionary capabilities of digital resistance

tactics that we could appeal to the consequences or the actions taken against hackers
131
by neoliberal authorities. Because of something called the Computer Fraud and Abuse

Act (CFAA), which was greatly emboldened after 9/11, online protestors face

egregious, lopsided, and exorbitant jail sentences in comparison to physical protestors

(2012). We can recall, for instance, that Aaron Swartz faced dozens of years in jail

and was even likened to a rapist by the prosecution, all for attempting to liberate

JSTOR articles from MIT because he argued they were publicly funded and, thus, the

public had a right to benefit from them (p. 152). Neither MIT nor JSTOR wished to

press charges, but after mounting pressure from the three letter organizations pursuing

his case, Swartz committed suicide. Similarly, former United States Army Soldier,

Chelsea Manning was imprisoned for treason, before President Barrack Obama

commuted her sentence, for releasing video footage to Wikileaks of US atrocities in

the Middle East. Julian Assange has spent five years in the Ecuadaorian Embassy in

London, fearing extradition and related charges for his role as the founder of

WikiLeaks. To give Assange his due, after the recent Clinton-Podesta email leak

fiasco, it is fair to say that Wikileaks has accomplished its mission by becoming The

Fifth Estate, changing how information and communication shape politics. Likewise,

the exploits of Anonymous opened up a public discourse about the previously closed

abuses of Scientology and helped contribute to the Arab Spring Uprising by creating

a serious challenge to the tyranny of the Tunisian government who felt a world unite

against them. Many Anons have faced jail time, even when they only participated in

limited roles in Anon actions, and governments and big corporations have spent a

fortune in security and anti-hacking contractors to defend themselves, evidencing the

132
way that power functions and how hacktivists have changed how we participate in

politics.

The outcome may never be certain for hackers but there is an impetus- a

“whatever”- and a divine thirst for justice that can’t be quenched, which finds itself

emerging in the hack. For this reason, I would also liken it to Slavoj Žižek’s notion of

“the act,” which is driven and spontaneous for the individual, and for which they

could not have chosen otherwise. I will explore “the act” in greater detail in the

following chapter. On a final note, I am aware that I haven’t covered all the

concerns, nor even all the challenges being made to information technologies in this

chapter. I have limited my focus for the sake of the greater project, primarily to

questions of data mining for which I’m concerned, but it is worthwhile to note how

mounting concerns with information technologies such as in areas of surveillance or

copyright, for example, which I did not go into depth on, only further the importance

of investigating and challenging these powerful and pervasive technologies. Cultural

Studies and disciplines like Queer Theory must engage readings of information

technologies and consider strategies of resistance against them if they mean to take

seriously the challenges and threat that neoliberalism presents in the construction of

postfordist identity.

133
 IV. A Meditation on Ontology

If We Are Compelled to Suffer…

Queer theory needs nihilism. Despite its tireless tendencies to deconstruct just

about everything, queer theorists are not nihilists. What remains in their compulsive

attempts to pull apart the deepest vestiges of culture is a perverse desire to uncover

some kind of freedom lurking behind the walls of social construction. But all that is

revealed through their efforts is a compulsive mechanics in human nature that cannot

be overcome. This mechanics is at the very source of neoliberal appropriation and is

the machinery of enslavement in information technologies. It is a trap that

performativity cannot overcome, because it is performative itself. There are no seams

any longer. Neoliberalism is the horizon with all life reduced to its mechanics.

Nihilism is the ontological tool that can be realized to illuminate the conditions of

human compulsion which bind human beings to neoliberal practices and can serve to

create a resistance and an ethics beyond its horizons. Nihilism is nonparticipation; it

is non-compulsive; it is the wedge jammed in the gears of neoliberalism; it is an

opportunity for something more.

Queer theory needs new ontological commitments. And this goes far beyond

the work of the anti-social thesis, to consider the ways in which participation with

neoliberal technologies constitute new ways of being, citizenship, and technological

governance. Historicism fails to offer meaningful alternatives to capitalism and

parrots the compulsion of neoliberal technologies through deconstruction.

134
Transgression doesn’t offer a way out of the maze, it deepens the creative possibilities

of information capital and further traps us in its mechanisms. In pulling at the seams

of liberal humanism, queer theorists, perhaps, have revealed more than they wished to

about the human condition, successfully undermining the exclusivity of the

humanist/rationalist conception of bodies, while opening the door to metaphysical

questions they were not prepared to contend with. The holds of capital go far beyond

social construction and institutional power; neoliberalism is a mediation of the human

psyche with information technologies. Information capital is the appropriation of

human compulsion. Nihilism can offer a lens to address human ontology in the

snares of information capital and offer possibilities that challenge its mechanisms.

Furthermore, nihilism can and should replace performativity in the decline of the

disciplinary age. Ambiguity is the basis for ceaseless data production; nihilism

provides absolution against compulsion, refusing fracture and appropriation. It offers

a foundation for resistance.

What About the Anti-Social Thesis?

One cannot discuss nihilism, futurity, and resistance for queer bodies without

discussing the anti-social thesis. The anti-social thesis was a remarkably important

moment for queer theorists to consider queer politics, inclusion, and the future of

LGBT+ people in society. The work in the anti-social thesis was important because it

pushed back against liberalism, identity politics, and a multiculturalism in which

inclusion meant assimilation to capitalist being and futurity. The anti-social thesis

135
takes much from modern nihilism, drawing from Freud’s notion of the death drive

and utilizing pessimism as a critical tool of resistance for queer bodies- both of which

I will consider later in this chapter to develop strategies of resistance toward

neoliberal governance.

The anti-social thesis is, perhaps, most famously associated with the work of

Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani. Both writers challenged the hope and political futurity

of queer theorists at the time and opened broader discussions about the agency and

ethics of queer people in society. Leo Bersani, in works such as Homos and “Is the

Rectum a Grave?” finds homosexuality, and specifically non-monogamous relations,

a site which undermines the compulsion and antagonisms that we associate between

sexual joussiance, politics, and power. Similarly, Edelman’s No Future stands out

against texts doing similar work in queer theory such as Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer

Time and Place precisely because of Edelman’s reading of Freud. While both works

recognize the ways that queer identity challenge notions of time and space through

sites of non-reproduction, AIDS, and non-monogamy in the LGBT+ community, for

example, Edelman is unwilling to reconcile a new political future, instead challenging

compulsion and recognizing the ways that all human and political futures are marred

by the death drive and the futility that comes with a futurity reduced to reproduction

(p. 297). While it is true that Halberstam seems to abandon the belief that queerness

itself can challenge neoliberalism in The Queer Art of Failure, this abandonment

emerges through a pessimism that arises from a fetishization of queer identity, linking

the rebellious possibilities of queerness to its unique bleak postfordist experience.

136
This queer darkness coincides with other forms of darkness relative to the experiences

of other marginalized identities, and I believe falls into the same traps of

appropriation as performativity or other queer models of identity as resistance. It

mistakes that the underlying tenant of neoliberal success is human compulsion, and

thus mistakes how neoliberalism functions and maintains power. Postmodernism,

essentially, after all, replicates the compulsion of life in its tireless pursuit to open

discourses and contexts. Similarly, while Edelman and Bersani do present brave and

critical ideas by highlighting the ways in which queer identities are antirelational,

resisting both politics and futurity, these works are also not concerned with the

changing technological and economic challenges that neoliberalism presents to

identity and ontology. Such is where I would begin my critique of the ways in which

queer theory fails to use the work of nihilism in meaningful ways.

The anti-social thesis generated important debate in queer theory about queer

politics and tactics of resistance, lasting a decade if not more (Caserio, Edelman,

Halberstam, Munoz, & Dean, 2006). Edelman and Bersani opened a scab in queer

politics about assimilation that spoke to the emerging liberal politics of reform that

would lead to the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the legalization of gay

marriage. What their works provoked were conversations about queer politics, queer

behavior, and what was potentially radical about being queer and queer identity.

Perhaps, most importantly, was the question of futurity that arose and produced

productive conversation between Halberstam, Edelman, Jose Munoz, and others. For

example, useful conversation was generated from Edelman’s use of The Sex Pistols

137
lyric, “no future,” with Halberstam arguing against Edelman’s strict pessimism, by

way of the radical potential that queer identity presents through examples like the

actions of Valerie Solanas, Jamaica Kincaid and others (p. 824). Similarly, Munoz

argued that out of the darkness of queer experience, there is nothing but possibility,

articulating hope as a tool of resistance, in a reformation of the politics of utopia (p.

825). While I think all of these works make useful ontological strides in an important

discussion about identity, it is apparent that they undervalue or lack concern for the

mechanisms of neoliberalism and information technologies. In short, it is useful to

engage questions of pessimism, politics, and identity. The question of ontology,

today, is one that must necessarily arise in relation to our rapidly evolving human

identity, which is in constant mediation and negotiation with technology. The

question to be considered, is, thus, not how any specific identity is formed or shaped,

or even what effects it might produce, but how it emerges through desubjectivation to

exist in network with neoliberal technologies. When we consider neoliberal

governance and our changing relationality to information technologies, pessimism

arises as a critical tool to challenge compulsion and our technological relationship to

the world that reimagines identity not as a tool of resistance, but one of capital. For

this reason, the anti-social thesis is limited because its positioning remains situated in

and against a former understanding of politics, economy and identity: resistance is no

longer a matter of opposing other human beings but resisting one’s relationship to

neoliberal networks of power that underlies and exploits all life, rather than dividing

138
them. In this chapter, I hope to push cultural studies and queer theory further in this

direction to see and use nihilism as a tool of political and social rebellion.

Pessimism as the Last Human Hope

What modern works in nihilism can offer us is an unfailing pessimism that

fails to be coopted. Pessimism is not counter-production, but it is anti-participation; it

is a deliberate and universal failure to act. Information capital requires networks to

continuously communicate flows on information and a failure to communicate is

detrimental. Nihilism refuses mediation; pessimism is beyond appropriation.

Nothing- as in the absence of a thing- cannot be fractured, splintered, and repackaged;

it is not information, but it’s lack: it fails to continue. Pessimists refuse even the

persuasion of life; nihilism is antinatal.

There is much to explore in modern works of nihilism that I will contend

could pay important dividends towards the creation of resistance theory and strategies

against neoliberal technologies and appropriation. Principle among these is the failure

to be persuaded. This is a central component to modern nihilist works and ontologies.

Perhaps it is nowhere more present than in Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and

Rhetoric, posthumously published after the author’s suicide. Michelstaedter’s notion

of being returns to the PreSocratics and to suffering. As Parmenides notes, human

beings confuse ways of seeing with being, itself, and Michelstaedter similarly

believes that life is a state of lack where desire is never fulfilled as we are in a

constant effort to fill the gaps of meaning and enjoyment by building our character

139
with social functions that never quite add up to anything (2004, p. 8,47). The solution

is, thus, to remove one’s self from the state of rhetoric or social persuasion, and to

accept the true conditions of life or what the author refers to as (self) persuasion: a

resignation and self-power that comes from acceptance of our meaningless and

unsatisfiable condition (p. xvi).

This argument for resignation from persuasion and acceptance of suffering is

evident in two works of nihilism defending suicide- On Suicide by Jean Amery

(1999) and Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Death by

Sarah Perry (2014). Amery outlines the ways in which logic and life correspond to

each other, leaving death and, thus, suicide completely outside the limits of reason (p.

32-3). This will be something to come back to as we consider the logic of algorithms

and information capital, and what will be necessary to challenge them, recognizing

where logic resides. Suicide is, after all, the absolute form of non-participation; it is

not absorbable. Amery writes of the suicide that the he (or she) is the person who will

never trust or be persuaded that life is worth it (p. 91-2). The suicide, then, is just

another form of the pessimist. As Michelstaedter puts it, if you bite into a crabapple,

then spit it out (Michelstaedter, 2004, p. 4). Amery and Perry are both concerned with

the liberal humanist compulsion to force life and, thus, participation in neoliberal

culture through the constant rescue of the suicide need be read along the compulsive

medical attempts to prolong life even at the detriment of the patient. Perry’s work, as

well as that of David Benatar’s (2006) Better Never to Have Been reach a step further

and articulate an ethical argument against future procreation, citing the inevitable

140
harm associated with existence. These works challenge liberal western notions that

life is inherently good, arguing that such notions fail to consider the reality of social

and biological conditions, which justify life and discourage suicide, presenting a case

for an ethics of human extinction. If suicide is absolute non-participation,

antinatalism is ultimate and finite resistance. Extinction is opposed to annihilation; it

transcends its logics: it refuses production and appropriation. Again, I think much

can be drawn on to theorize possibilities of resistance here.

Ligotti’s The Conspiracy of the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, sees

human existence as a kind of over evolved trap of suffering, where consciousness has

grown far past the needs of human existence, forcing social and cultural life to be a

process of its own betrayal, whereby human beings are a kind of animated puppet,

who because of evolutionary restraints, can rarely put an end to their own disturbing

condition, driven by innate and senseless biological forces (Ligotti, 2011, p. 17). For

Ligotti, the pessimist is he or she who precisely cannot accept and justify the

absurdity of human life and the suffering that comes with it, and for whom hope can

never spring (p. 64). In The Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Eugene

Thacker pans out from a focus on the human to our black relationship to the universe.

For Thacker, there are no higher values or a hope to reconcile a Zarathustran man,

only a Schopenhaueran acceptance of the inevitability of suffering, and an inverted

will to nothing, recognizing the unavoidable and meaningless place human beings

hold in an unconcerned universe (Thacker, 2011, p. 19). Thacker develops a notion

of cosmic horror in a world and a universe beyond our understanding and with no

141
relation to our human centric experience (p. 80). Potentially, themes of horror from

which these authors have drawn from, such as Ligotti’s notion of the puppet (which I

previously mentioned) and drawn from to make light of our relation to neoliberal

technologies and to move towards possible strategies of resistance. I will continue

such analysis later in this chapter and think there is a useful connection that these

authors draw from such suspenseful states as suspended animation and possession

that can translate quite nicely to our relationship with neoliberal technologies.

Although not specifically a nihilist work, I would almost mention Ernest

Becker’s The Denial of Death, which, at the very least, has nihilist premises. Becker

is consumed with the same line of inquiry or thought that Ligotti is, noting the logical

reality of our suffering and our conscious ability to recognize it (Becker, 2011, p. 2).

While Ligotti is content to draw from sources such as Zapffe’s The Last Messiah,

examining the ways external cultural processes limit consciousness, Becker is

concerned with the psyche and the internal, drawing heavily on Freud and Rank to

draw a historical portrait of our subjective reconciliation of suffering and meaning. In

summary, Becker feels that in order for human beings to cope with their condition of

suffering and inevitable suffering, human beings concoct narratives of heroicism to

transcend their morality and subconscious fears of death (p. 4). This notion of

morality-transcending heroicism will be useful to exploring our relationship and

commitment to neoliberal technologies, and I will take this up shortly. It is also

important to note that while Becker does take up Freud directly, all the works I

mentioned either owe some debt to Freud or are in conversation with works that take

142
up similar causes. For this reason, I think it will be important to outline Freud’s

notion of the death drive briefly, and to address one work of political theory that

already effectively makes use of his work to critique information capital and

neoliberal technologies.

Freud and the Death Drive

Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is essentially a treatise on compulsion.

Marked by a shift from the libido and sexuality, for which Freud is well known,

towards man’s existential plight, Freud contends that there must be drives beyond

those that are life affirming. Freud postulates the notion of the death drive or drives

to explain actions that human beings are compelled to take which do not accord to the

principles of pleasure that he made so famous in his earlier works (Freud, 2015, p.

79). Freud works to make sense of compulsive and repetitive behaviors that do not

serve the motives of the pleasure and are furthermore, destructive:

…the facts of the matter are not fully accounted by the effect of the motive
forces of currently known to us remains to justify a compulsion to repeat; and this
compulsion appears to us to be more primal, more elemental, more deeply instinctual
than the pleasure principle, which it thrusts aside (p. 83).

Despite clearly recognizing an important facet of human behavior and psychology,

Freud’s attempt to draw a larger theory of human nature would be problematic.

While Freud’s notion of the death drive has been widely utilized and engaged

by a number of scholars in a number of contexts and disciplines, it has been widely

criticized as a theory of human nature, and serves more reasonably as a lens to

143
address compulsion. This is probably because of Freud’s reluctance to abandon

notions of the libido and instinct in any meaningful way, trying, instead, to reconcile

his newer findings with his older research (Becker, 2011, p. 98). To summarize his

position, Freud deduced that the function of the death drive was to deliver man to a

previous state of human development prior to external disturbances (p. 108). It is the

human striving not to induce death but to preserve the conditions under which one

can achieve death and ultimately return to inatimacy on one’s own terms (p. 110).

The key in all this is a return to non-existence or more specifically, inatimacy, as the

reason for compulsive and destructive behavior that escapes the governance of the

pleasure principle. In his own words,

But what is the nature of the connection between the realm of the drives and
the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot help thinking that we have
managed to identify a universal attribute of drives- and perhaps of all organic life-
that has not hitherto been clearly recognized, or at any rate no explicitly emphasized.
A drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living
organism to restore a prior state, which prior state the organism was compelled to
relinquish due to the disruptive influence of external forces; we can see it as a kind of
organic elasticity, or, if we prefer, as a manifestation of inertia in organic life. (p. 108)

Here, we might acknowledge that Freud did reference the infancy of his

studies in this line of thought and forgive him, as well as understanding moves away

from Freud’s death derives that theorists like Ernest Becker and others took,

accepting the premises of Freud’s notions of compulsion, while moving in other

directions and towards other conclusions. For Becker, that would mean abandoning

Freud’s already contested notions of instinct and libido, while focusing on man’s

anxiety and existential existence. For this work, it is enough to notice the connection
144
between compulsion and the ways in which human beings participate with neoliberal

technologies, acknowledging that a number of possibilities arise which may help us

make sense of the mechanics of the human/non-human relationship of neoliberal

networks, as well as resistive possibilities. Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory takes an

important step in this direction, utilizing Lacan’s reading of the Freudian death drive

to create a lens to critique our participation with social media. It is worth exploring

this impactful work in greater detail.

Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory is a work about the reflexivity of communicative

capitalism and how neoliberal technologies and our participation on the internet serve

global capital. As Dean puts it, “Communicative capitalism is that economic-

ideological form wherein reflexivity captures creativity and resistance so as to enrich

the few as it placates and diverts the many” (2011, p. 4). Neoliberalism moves

beyond the media experience of a screen to processes of mediation through data

mining, by way of algorithmic technologies. Participation on the internet is thus a

multi-way flow whereby user’s information choices are captured and whereby

algorithms prompt further choices or opportunities for capture. It is the promotion of

compulsive repetition that neoliberal technologies demand and this is precisely where

the death drive is a useful theory to utilize as a lens to address our continuing

participation. Dean (2011) utilizes Lacan’s reading of Freud to explain that

… desire and drive each designate a way that the subject relates to enjoyment. Desire
is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance
that can never be attained. In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive
process of not reaching it. Failure (or the thwarting of the aim) provides its own sort

145
of success. If desire is like the path of an arrow, drive is like the course of the
boomerang…The subject gets stuck doing the same thing over and over again
because this doing produces enjoyment. Post. Post. Post. Click. Click. Click. (p. 40)

Much like information capital, drives are not singular or of a single

dimension. Just as information capital diverts, fractures, and repackages transgressive

acts, drives produce more drives. Here neoliberal technologies mediate and make use

of the human condition, and human participation tirelessly contributes to the

generation of information capital, producing ever new possibilities in an endless loop

of production. Human and machine become inseparable in the flows of information

and capital in the networks of empire. In Dean’s words,

Lacan emphasizes that the drives are partial drives. He specifies this idea as ‘partial
with regard to the biological finality of sexuality.’ I understand the point to refer to
the variety of changing, incomplete, and dispersed ways subjects enjoy. Drives do not
develop in a linear fashion from infant to adult. They fragment and disperse as the
satisfy themselves via a variety of objects. As Copjec writes, ‘It is as if the very
function of the drive were this continuous opening up of small fractures between
things.’ Her language here is precise: the fractures are not of things but between
them; the parts that are objects of the drives are not parts of wholes but parts that
appear in the force of loss as new expressions of a whole. (p. 59)

Information capital is successful because it entraps the human psyche in

repetitive loops that mimic its own mechanisms and functions. Our daily

participation on the internet is the compulsive production of abstract monetizable

data. And this is hardly a secret. It would be very difficult to ignore the custom

advertisements and the lengthy end user agreements that we must scroll through even

if we usually don’t read them. Dean (2011) utilizes Slavoj Žižek’s notion of ideology

to reconcile this contradictory behavior.

146
Ideology is what we do, even when we know better (for example, I know that quizzes
on Facebook are ingenious ways of collecting information from me and my friends,
but I take them anyway). The psychoanalytic notion of fetishism provides a
convenient shorthand: ‘I know, but nevertheless… (p. 5)

Indeed, a new reading of ideology is necessary that moves past liberal rationalist

notions of false consciousness towards an identification of “beliefs underlying

practice”. What this offers is a route to address the apparent compulsive behaviors

we engage in, in spite of ourselves, that “bind us to practices of domination” (Dean,

2011, p. 5). Queer theory has been engaged historically in efforts to undermine

rationalism, as it has been used as a tool to challenge emerging positions which

challenge logocentrism. Neoliberalism, however, presents deconstructionists with

new challenges, transcending logocentrism and the confines of Western logic,

emerging as an all-encompassing force of inclusion and monetization. Queer theory

has been unable to address as Richard Rorty hypothesized what it would mean to

challenge a power that exists beyond binaries, and worse, appropriates and reduces all

positions to its own financial logics. Žižek’s notion of ideology addresses the logics

of neoliberal technologies and our compulsive participation, which drive them.

Psychoanalytic readings of ideology can persist beyond the historicist lens developed

to contend with a former age of discipline, presenting tools for cultural theorists to

use in the age of information capital.

Where psychoanalysis and nihilism converge is around the psychoanalytic

concept of the lack. For Freud and Lacan, human life is inherently negative, always

striving to fulfill desire or to reclaim a lost bond- and for Freud, this is what we all

147
know in his discussions of libidos and parental obsession. For Michelstaedter and for

nihilists, this is the shear impossibility of human fulfilment and the knowledge that

despite all the efforts we take to belong or to succeed, that life cannot ever be whole

or meaningful. For both psychoanalysts and nihilists, identities are merely the

attempt to encapsulate a meaning or wholeness that despite relationships, social

participation, and cultural life, cannot be complete. Anxiety and compulsion are the

result of human convergence with the unfulfillable void we face at odds with a

universe that is wholly indifferent to our being. Dean’s work is only one possible

application of many that could work to unearth the ways human beings and neoliberal

technologies collaborate to serve the networks of empire. It is worthwhile to explore

further what a turn away from the rational and towards underlying belief and

compulsion could offer. I will explore these concepts throughout the chapter.

Digital Mediation and Death Transcendence

Ideology is not stronger than death. In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

proclaims that what dominates the human condition is an attempt to offset the reality

that we will die. For Becker, the history of humanity really comes down to heroic

narratives or attempts to transcend death and the knowledge of its inevitability- some

more hopeful than others (consider a life’s work to create a vaccine versus

participation in a religious war) (2011, p. 3-4). In chastisement of thinkers like

Herbert Marcuse, Becker argues that this is not a condition to overcome, whereby

ideology or future prospects such as the scientific, political, or economic might

148
alleviate our existential condition (p. 265). Becker asserts that even psychoanalysis

can only bring man face to face with himself, but that this cannot address the

fundamental questions of our existence, such as, “Why am I here?” or “Does life hold

meaning” (p. 192-94). Metaphysics is necessary to address human anxiety, and for

Becker this means the full circle move from Freud to Kierkegaard, closing the

existential loop, and developing a healthy condition of repression through a

transcendental heroic expression (p. 284).

Information capital can be read as the human attempt to close the loop

between metaphysics and mortality through technology and economics. Algorithms

create omnipotence through the mediation and generation of human knowledge, and

networks, in their vastness, present information as immortal. Ernest Becker’s

renderings on the repression of death and the need for heroics to answer for our

human existential condition offers a useful ontological framework from which to

process the technological and scientific drive towards godliness that is the foundation

and the result of information capital. It is, precisely, an attempt not to overcome

death, but to trap our existential condition and to repurpose it through a process of

technological transcendence. This is the heroic complex in exacerbated

technological, political, and economic terms. In On Civilization and its Discontents,

Freud postulates that humanity will build a mechanical God to the heavens, and

thereby science will replace religion altogether, as the cultural source of knowledge

and belief. Freud was of course referencing the tremendous growth of technology and

economy during the industrial revolution. And technology and capital certainly have

149
not stopped growing, so much so, even, that one could argue it is not science that

replaced God but liberal capital. After all, what good would technological innovation

be if it did not serve capital? Here, neoliberal technologies almost certainly sit at the

peak on innovation, marrying science, capital, and technology all through networks

that can regulate everything from stock flows to information about the biology of

individual bodies. When the majority uses such commonplaces as “they’ll think of

something” to answer for questions that plague the cultural psyche with uneasiness

such as terrorism, climate change, or cancer, the “they” whom they are referring to is

certainly not the church, but it is also not, specifically, science or government: it’s the

amalgam of neoliberal forces that make up empire. And why not? They have made

possible everything from drones to instantaneous investment around the world, as

well as numerous other technologies to measure things as slight as differentiations in

an individual body, and in the atmosphere: everything is under control or more

precisely, unified in the flow of the networks of empire. There is the well touted

phrase in cultural studies by Mark Fisher that “it is easier to imagine the end of the

world then the end of capitalism” but I think the end of the world is itself becoming

harder to imagine and all that is left is empire. Indeed, neoliberalism has no horizon

(Shaviro, 2013, p. 7). It is worthwhile to consider this by taking a look at popular

culture, momentarily.

In his (1935) work, Permanence and Change, which strives to make sense of

the changing epochs of humanity, Kenneth Burke suggests there is much to be

learned from entertainment in terms of the direction we are headed. Since the early

150
2000’s, popular media has been dominated by works about the end of the world. 28

Days Later (Boyle, 2002), Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006), The Book of Eli (Hughes,

A., & Hughes, A., 2010) , and Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015) are just a few

examples of wildly popular movies about what life would be like when civilization

inevitably comes apart. Similarly, Cormac McCarthy’s (2006) The Road and Max

Brooks’ World War Z serve as pertinent example in literary form, although both were

also turned into popular films. In addition, Jericho (Chbosky, Trutletaub, Steinberg,

Schaer, 2006-8) and The Walking Dead (Gimple, 2010-), both, thrived as television

series, with the latter now beginning its 8th season. However, during this

apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic cultural boom, a second trend was emerging that I

would argue is now surpassing it. Films like Disney’s Wall-e (Stanton, 2008), Ex-

Machina (Garland, 2014) Chappie (Blomkamp, 2015), The Martian (Scott, 2015),

and Passengers (Tyldum, 2016) as well as tv series such as Humans (Vincent &

Brackley, 2015-), Mr. Robot (Esmail, 2015-) and graphic novels including Alex +

Ada (2013) and Ancestor (2016) mark a shift away from the end of the world towards

a vision of a technological salvation in which a technocratic order overcomes

immortality by doing everything form artificially constructing cognition, to creating

the stable conditions of life necessary to live on other planets, even downloading

cognition directly into networks- a little on the nose, no? It is not my argument that

this trend of technological salvation has replaced the popular trend of post-

apocalyptic, but that one has emerged from the other for very real political and

ideological reasons. As The Invisible Committee (2015) put it, cybernetics are

151
inherently apocalyptic, emerging in the unraveling of liberalism to “impede the

spontaneously entropic, chaotic movement of the world…” (p. 109). Trust, or,

essentially, any kind of bond between government and citizen is replaced by the

absolutism of algorithmic certainty with every possible factor being determined in

real time (Invisible Committee, 2015, p. 108). Clearly, post apoctalyptic media are

not new- The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (MacDougall, 1959), The Omega

Man (Sagal, 1971), and The Terminator (Cameron, 1984) serve as popular examples

from 20th century pop culture. However, the influx and scale of these works post 2000

does speak to growing insecurity and doubt in the cultural psyche. When faced with

issues such as economic instability, terrorism, and climate change, all of which

surround us through the 24-hour news cycle, it is not surprising that fear and anxiety

are pervasive in the Western psyche. Entertainment often mirrors our current times

and struggles, albeit in exaggerated and consumable ways. The current move in

entertainment towards technological salvation, speaks to our very real daily

engagement with topics like hacking, a deteriorating environment, surveillance

technologies, and data mining. With the rise of drones, the impressive connectability

of cellular technologies, and the impressive range of NSA spying efforts- which we

ironically know about because of information leaks- it may truly feel like one is living

in a dystopian science fiction fantasy, and this double side or underside of

technological salvation is something I will engage later, and, quite possibly, what is at

stake to be worked out through these cultural works. After all, who would doubt that

“they” can save us from climate change when Matt Damon takes us to Mars and

152
develops the capability to sustain life, or when our futures are secured as human

colonies are built on other planets such as in Wall-E or Passengers? Two examples-

Wisdom of the Crowd (Humphrey, 2017) and Downsizing (Payne, 2017)- are,

perhaps, the most telling, as the former is centered around the use of a cellular

technologies by everyday citizens to catch criminals, while the latter features a plot

about using technology to shrink humans to minimize their carbon footprint, thus

saving the planet. What could be more telling of the neoliberal faith in technologies

that is so commonly shared now? Information capital is a technocracy that pervades

every area of human and non-human life, reassessing and reducing all things to its

logics, including our fears. As Curtis White (2015) puts it, the ideology of the present

is shaped by a twofold commitment to an inevitable technocratic reality in which all

things exist to stabilize a world of techno capital and in which all phenomena can be

explained by their mechanics- a becoming of robotics, if you will (p. 16). “They”

once referred to the state in a shadowy and ominous way: now “they” is only the

ambiguous and inevitable process of flows of information and capital through empire.

The human/non-human divide is falling and it is worthwhile to take this up further,

pitting nihilist ontologies against current theoretical attempts to make sense of our

human/unhuman predicament.

Posthuman vs Unhuman

Posthumanism is the attempt by critical theory to make sense of the

reconfiguration of bodies and non-bodies within neoliberal networks. Theorists of

153
such varieties contend to move past more basic notions of causation, rationalism, and

anthropocentrism, to realize the ways in which people and things emerge within

assemblages dictated by disperse flows of power and information (Bennet, 2010;

Barad, 2003; Braidotti, 2014). It is a recognition of, but a step beyond the

anthropocentrism and semiologies of modernist and postmodernist critique towards a

recognition of the ways in which humans and nonhumans emerge in collaborative

regimes of production. As Karen Barad (2003) puts it,

There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot be fully claimed as

human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but
because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another
part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolatable, but rather they are mutually
implicated (p. 829).

What posthumanism does particularly well is to locate the human within the

unique bind of information and resource flow which neoliberal technologies

reimagine his/her being within. Posthumanism rightly challenges

rational/humancentric models, which cannot account for the ways that human activity

and work emerge within networks of human and nonhuman actors. Thus, human

knowledge and experience are integrated and produced within these empiric

configurations of capital. These premises are quite agreeable and not at all removed

from the assessment of neoliberal technologies that I have forged thus far. However,

the conclusions and possibilities that posthumanists have drawn from these grounds

do not appear to be as reasonable to me.

154
 To address and to challenge the human/non-human assemblage of things,

posthumanists like Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennet make a turn towards Spinoza and

monism. It is within the essence or vitality of life itself, that these authors locate

human agency and a possible resistance to neoliberalism. A reformation of scientific

disciplines, as well as those in the humanities, is called for by these authors to address

and challenge the appropriation of human and nonhuman lives by capital. Braidotti

(2014) writes,

Post-anthropocentrism is marked by the emergence of ‘the politics of life itself’

(Rose, 2007). ‘Life’, far from being codified as the exclusive property or the
unalienable right of one species, the human, over all others or of being sacralized as a
pre-established given, is posited as process, interactive and open-ended. This vitalist
approach to living matter displaces the boundary between the portion of life – both
organic and discursive – that has traditionally been reserved for anthropos, that is to
say bios, and the wider scope of animal and non-human life, also known as zoe. Zoe
as the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself (Braidotti 2006, 2011b) stands
for generative vitality. It is the transversal force that cuts across and reconnects
previously segregated species, categories and domains. Zoe – centered egalitarianism
is, for me, the core of the post- anthropic turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded
and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of
Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism. It is also an affirmative reaction of social
and cultural theory to the great advances made by the other culture, that of the
sciences. (p. 60)

While, again, posthumanism does seem to take many first important attempts

in addressing questions of agency and the ways in which human bodies are both

dominated by and exert domination over each other, animal life, and the environment

through neoliberal assemblages, there is much to question about posthuman solutions.

In fighting what Braidotti (2014) refers to as the necropolitics of capitalism

(borrowed from Mjembe), she and other posthumanists invoke a vitalist framework to

155
repair what they think is a severed human connection to the earth and to life by

capital (p. 122). This, as evidenced by the section above, is referred to by the author

as “unsentimental” and a move towards connecting or uniting the sciences and the

humanities. For a nihilist, and I would think for many scientists, monism would not

nearly be as agreeable or as removed from emotion as Braidotti might hope. It seems

to, in some ways, mirror the queer historicist hopes of locating the problematic

aspects of injustice to the social realm, while ignoring any biological possibilities in

human beings. Furthermore, the capitalist logics of human dominion seem to far

surpass the realm of capital, and are found in a number of religious, social, and

cultural belief systems. To attribute the nature of environmental domination and

necroworship simply to the reductionist logics of capitalism seems to be ignoring a

number of ideological systems which work to ground and sustain its dominion. If we

locate necropolitics within deeper cultural narratives, we put ideology at stake and

Braidotti’s system of zoe into question, because as I’ve outlined, nihilist works such

as Becker’s poke serious holes in the culpability of human beings to commit to

anything that cannot assuage their death anxieties. It is thus not only unlikely that zoe

would serve as a palatable alternative, but it seems that Braidotti has seriously

overestimated the agency of human beings, while ignoring major flaws in design such

as compulsion and fear, which serve as reasonable causes for the adherences to

cultural myths and ideologies, all of which capitalism appropriates and uses to ground

and sustain its dominance. In short, capitalism works because it appropriates and

monetizes human compulsion and situates itself in cultural narratives which serve the

156
deepest mechanics of the human psyche, assuaging death anxieties. If we wish to

become unsentimental, or have any hope for challenging neoliberalism, it seems far

more reasonable to begin from the space of non-participation that begins with the

acceptance of the cold and scientific indifference of the cosmic horror that Thacker

writes about so enthusiastically. Life is a poor solution to necropolitics.

Posthumanism recognizes the need for new commitments beyond the identity

politics of post modernism. It is unclear, however, what identity might mean to

posthumanists. As I’ve outlined, posthumanists put a great deal of effort into a

critique of the failures of a humancentric framework and are committed to a move

beyond semiotics. It is difficult to say just where significations such as race, class, or

sexuality come out in the posthuman revolution and what that means for individual

agency, if that is even still conceivable. Braidotti (2014) writes,

Becoming-posthuman consequently is a process of redefining one’s sense of

attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space: urban, social,
psychic, ecological, planetary as it may be. It expresses multiple ecologies of
belonging, while it enacts the transformation of one’s sensorial and perceptual co-
ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction
of what we still call the self. This is in fact a moveable assemblage within a common
life-space that the subject never masters nor possesses but merely inhabits, crosses,
always in a community, a pack, a group or a cluster. For posthuman theory, the
subject is a transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-
human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations. The zoe-centered embodied subject is shot
through with relational linkages of the contaminating/viral kind which inter-connect it
to a variety of others, starting from the environmental or eco-others and include the
technological apparatus. (p. 193)

It is clear from posthuman texts that posthumanists think that there is a kind of

empowerment and an epistemic privilege that comes from recognizing one’s

157
embeddedness in networks of human and non-human assemblages. However, it is

entirely unclear how this power might be utilized and how this knowledge could be

put into action to challenge neoliberalism. Vitalism, here, appears to be an

afterthought and an attempt to conjure a force of nature outside the bounds of capital,

although it remains unclear how this could be possible. Agency appears to go through

a kind of double loss, first by neoliberal embeddedness in concert with nonhuman

actors for means that produce one’s own captivity, and second to zoe, which imagines

life as a collective force of imminence rather than through individual subjectivtity.

Within vitalist ontologies, things and people just kind of arise, as Žižek (2015) puts it

in critique of Bennet (p. 15).

Posthumanism presents a number of tactical difficulties and due to its monist

commitments, it appears to be more of a metaphysical project then it would like to

admit. The problems of agency that arise in the human/nonhuman assemblages that

neoliberalism generates remain beyond the scope of posthuman theorizing.

Nonparticipation eludes posthumanism, as human meaning and value are simply

passed off to monism, and compulsion is thoroughly under dealt with as ideology and

processes of the human psyche are overly reduced to capitalist production.

Nihilism begins with nonparticipation. Compulsion is the inner drive of life

that forces one to continue and endure unjust suffering. Braidotti unashamedly offers

us zoe, but is unwilling to scrutinize life itself, rather leaning on the necropolitics of

capitalism to justify its value in opposition. Only the pessimist offers an unabashed

158
refusal to participate. Life is compulsion; it is the drive to continue and to produce.

Neoliberalism offers us one model of this, and vitalism another. But for the latter not

to contribute to the former, we must be willing to undermine the forces of life which

make neoliberalism possible. Compulsion is the mechanics of neoliberalism and it is

the foundation of life itself; pessimism refuses compulsion because it refuses

participation. Within nihilism lies the possibilities for meaningful resistance. A

different assessment of the human/nonhuman bind will be necessary, and I will now

turn to Ligotti and to Thacker to explore how nihilist analyses of the genre of horror

might be borrowed to address this problem.

The Algorithm as Undead Horror

The scene has been set. A fascination looms around the increasing capabilities

and around the ever-expanding role that technology plays in human lives. But there is

an accompanying dread and anxiety lurking behind the optimism of each new

technological innovation. Hacking, technological warfare, and, even human

obsoletion are not uncommon fears. Information technologies are closing the circle

between human life and infinity, but where does humanity stand? Ligotti (2011)

writes of the supernatural horror motif atmosphere as,

Atmosphere is created by anything that suggests an ominous state of affairs beyond

what our senses perceive and our minds can fully comprehend. It is the signature
motif that Schopenhauer made discernible in pessimism – that behind the scenes of
life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world. That is
something, this ominous state of affairs beyond what our senses perceive and our
minds can comprehend (p. 151).

159
This is the cosmic horror that Thacker describes- a universe of indifference in which

we are not welcome. Atmosphere is then something that is specific to human beings.

Ligotti writes, “It must be remembered that the atmosphere of a supernatural world

and its horror exists only in the human imagination. There is nothing like it in nature,

nor can nature provoke it” (p. 158). Atmosphere is, thus, the product of

consciousness and the human attempt to make meaning: “We are alone in our minds

with the atmosphere of a supernatural world and its horror. We are both its creators

and what it has created – uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of

creation.” (p. 158). Our human experience in the universe has always been uncanny-

we live according to our own perspectives, constantly at risk of exposing our realities.

What I’d like to propose is that information capital has created a double bind: an

appropriation of our consciousness via a layer of technological mediation through

which our uncertain and existential attempts at meaning making face a second

simulation. Our participation with information technologies is not indifferent- far

from it: atmosphere is no longer an unknown pernicious force, but consciousness

trapped, extracted, and made omnipotent through the network flows of empire. In

short, the neoliberal horizon is atmosphere realized and we are made constant

participant to its uncanny procedures which appropriate the simulations of our

consciousness through a mediation of algorithmic technologies through which we

experience ourselves.

Here, I must disagree that there is a predicament of human and non-human or

human and thing, as posthumans would have us believe; what information

160
technologies encompass is all too human; it is unhuman. The distinction between

human and nonhuman within neoliberal networks could be more adequately imagined

as conscious vs unconscious with much more technology evolving to trap,

appropriate, and simulate conscious production to generate more algorithmic

possibilities for information capital. In this way an algorithm is alive- it participates in

activities of human consciousness, albeit at a highly accelerated rate and capacity, but

it is not living, and it is without its own cognizance: it is undead. The algorithm will

also not stop without command: it continues ceaselessly in the projects of data

retrieval, packaging, and commodification. The algorithm is unhuman. It participates

in the network’s flow of information and resources, constantly generating production

from information long after the user has surrendered it. The network thus transgresses

the living and it is beyond death; consciousness is now infinite and nothing is beyond

its reach. Ligotti borrows some of the opening lines of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu,

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black
seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each
straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing
together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of
our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee
from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (p. 157)

Information technologies have closed the loop between man and infinity, and thus,

between man and cosmic horror. The neoliberal horizon is atmosphere materialized:

we have realized omnipotence and we cannot escape. The pernicious and indifferent

force of the universe is consciousness itself. Nature is only an aside. There is no

tether. Our experience is, now, infinite.

161
 What is uncanny or terrifying about algorithmic technologies is their

similarity to human patterns of thought. They appear alive through their animation

and through their production. But this is terrifying on a second level perhaps, not

because they mimic us, but because we mimic them. We realize the simulation and

our compulsive and futile attempts to create personhood out of an indifferent and

purposeless state. Ligotti (2011) describes human beings, themselves, in terms of

animated puppets, or wind-up toys:

Wound up like toys by some force – call it Will, élan vital, anima mundi,
physiological or psychological processes, nature, or whatever – organisms go on
running as they are bidden until they run down. In pessimistic philosophies only the
force is real, not the things activated by it. They are only puppets, and if they have
consciousness may mistakenly believe they are self-winding persons who are making
a go of it on their own. (p. 18)

Algorithms continue ceaselessly as if driven by some innate animated force; is this

not the same for human beings? Caught in flows of network production, algorithms

continue to generate further data revenue, just as human beings continue to work,

sleep, reproduce, vote, etc., despite indifference towards the process. This is the

second bind I refer to: atmosphere has a face and we are not sure if it is our own or

the computer screen. Thacker’s reading of the demon as a figure of horror literature

(Thacker, 2011, p. 26-27) is, thus, complicated further if we try to read networks in

this way. Transcending an unknown other or limitation, the network becomes the very

realization of human omnipotence through the raising of human consciousness to the

level of Godlike status, where the flows of information capital encapsulate all

162
possibilities of knowing. It is, in turn, also the maximization of human suffering as

consciousness is cosmic horror.

There is an opportunity to make sense of our unhuman predicament through

Schopenhaur’s negative will. Networks are ceaseless and information is endless; what

they project is the omnipotent and omnipresent terror of consciousness, as life

marches on driven by some innate and indifferent force. Information technologies are

then a work of true horror. An encapsulation of man in his faulty condition,

defenseless and naked for all to see. Posthumanists are wrong when they appeal to

life as a positive force which can somehow undermine man’s necropolitics; life is the

force aimed solely at projecting us to death, and ensuring an endurance through the

injustice of nature. Consciousness was the only challenge to its inevitability, but it has

been refashioned through neoliberal logics as a technological force to generate

evermore horror, engulfing all of our creative capacities in its network flows, and

projecting us blindly into the cosmic horror. Neoliberal technologies are thus not

unlike the ooze monster so famous in works of horror. Thacker (2011) describes one

particular rendition: “…Caltiki proceeds to engulf houses, cars, animals, and people,

able to grow and divide itself in the process” and with “no motive, no vendetta, no

program of action, other than simply that of ‘being ooze.’ This anonymity is matched

by the affective sliminess of Caltiki, as if it in itself were literally the bowels of the

Earth.” (p. 90) Here, the bowels of the earth can be substituted with the bowels of life

via compulsion and made possible through the vehicle of consciousness. In a second

example,

163
“in ‘Black Gondolier’ oil is described as an animate, creeping ooze that already is on
the surface, and that immanently courses through all the channels of modern
industrial civilization, from the central pipelines feeding the major cities to the
individual homes and cars that populate those cities” (p. 92).

Consciousness could very easily stand in as a double for the ooze, flowing

between bodies and algorithms within neoliberal networks. Algorithms mimic the

compulsion of life and the unhuman/human bind presents itself in a lack of distinction

through consciousness. Similarly, “… ooze is not just a biological amoeba, and not

just the mud of the Earth; here ooze begins to take on the qualities of thought itself.”

(p. 91) But again, is the problem simply our relation to non-human processes in an

unequitable and exploitative technological bind? I think what is revealed about our

human lives and practices speaks to much deeper questions about human nature,

compulsion, and ethics. Life is not a good thing. Nihilism provides an opportunity to

excavate this predicament more thoroughly and the genre of horror a number of

literary themes to explain the unhuman, for which I’ve only outlined a possible few

for the purposes of example. Now that I’ve put a focus on possible lenses to

understand the issues at hand, I will turn to draw possible forms of resistance that can

be drawn through nihilism.

Killing the Machines

Suicide is anti-compulsion. Antinatalism is anti-neoliberalism. Suicide defies

the logic of life and thus the logic of capitalism. Neoliberal technologies are based on

the compulsive codes of life and suicide breaks every one of them. Furthermore,

164
antinatalism, or the refusal to reproduce, defies the logic of information capital to

generate and produce, resisting neoliberal networks by stunting flows of resources

and information. Suicide is not the Bartlebyean “I’d prefer not to,” which would

simply divert flows of capital elsewhere, it is a refusal to exist at all; it is nothing.

Nihilism is beyond appropriation because it is beyond preference.

Queer theory has failed because it has left the single most powerful piece of

liberal humanism untouched- the notion that life is inherently good. Notice that my

word choice was “good” and not “valuable,” because these are two profoundly

different things that are often at odds, but this common conflation in Western thinking

is not often troubled by queer theorists. For example, I could say that life isn’t good

because it involves suffering, but that suffering creates a kind of meaningful and

valuable experience, which Perry (2014) notes as a common cultural belief (p. 41). I

will not address the question of life’s value because this is a much larger

metaphysical question and one with no certain answer: however, I will contend that

from nihilism we can take a kind of pessimism that denies and detests the logics of

suffering and oppression at all cost, which does seem to, in effect, place a high value

on peace and autonomy. Western ideologies, most notably liberal humanism, which

prop up neoliberal rule, depend on inequality, injustice, and righteous violence, which

undeniably cause harm. Pessimism is ideology proof, and for the nihilist, nothing

could justify the suffering that human beings inevitably go through as a result of

being born. To understand that life is harmful, however, does not amount to an

indifference that would proclaim capitalism as just another form of harm, as

165
pessimists refuse all argument and all coercion to accept that any form of life could

be good. Nihilists would thus find a vitalists claim to embrace life as absolutely

terrifying because life is inherently the reason we are forced to suffer. Historicists

unnecessarily limit their claims of evil and injustice to cultural institutions when

nature is the cruelest master of them all, providing illness, inequality, and inevitably,

death. We are anxious and compulsive because we are limited and vulnerable animals

according to nihilist thinkers. Because queer theorists often fail to take this final step

of inquiry into suffering, often out of distrust for science or for fear of any absolute

description of human beings, they insert a value of good where there inherently is

none, and, thus, lack the adequate tools to undo the deep hooks neoliberalism has

extended into our lives through the appropriating of human compulsion. Queer

theorists often mimic the logics of liberal humanism, in that abuses are bad because

they rob a person of the good in terms of rights that they ought to be entitled to, but

this is unnecessary and costly, because as we’ve seen in the last decade, empire is

often the first to hand out human rights protections, ushering all bodies, albeit at

varying speeds, into the neoliberal horizon. Pessimism refuses all of these pretenses.

The suicide realizes that life does not add up with human rights, social success, class

belonging, or any other model of the self- Western or otherwise. Life is a cruel series

of sufferings that doesn’t add up to anything. As such, Queer theory is entangled in a

costly defense of life when it fails to engage pessimism and the compulsion of life is

what makes neoliberalism possible. Suicide refuses life.

166
 David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been rests upon a simple exercise of

logic and ethics. Benatar recognizes the undeniable- that life necessitates suffering

and that if one isn’t born then one remains not only free of suffering but free of any

expectations of good or enjoyment, thus the never born are not robbed of anything but

pain. (p. 3) It would be reasonable to say that nihilism begins from this position of life

as undue suffering and that being born is, in short, very bad luck. The question that

follows is then what to do about it. For Benatar, one answer is simple: stop having

children on the ethical grounds stated above. For the suicide, it is to immediately

cease living on grounds that the suffering found in human life cannot be offset by any

personal, religious, or cultural attempts at meaning or enjoyment. The suicide and the

antinatalist are beyond metaphysics and beyond reconciliation with reason and

cultural mediation. They hold the only position which may undermine the logics of

life, reason, and capital which underscore neoliberal order. In short, they are beyond

appropriation.

Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cole sums up the essence of the modern

nihilist position in True Detective when he states,

I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a
pessimist... I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became
too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are
creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the
illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings,
programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact
everybody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our
programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last
midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. (s01e01)

167
While the raw deal is precisely what Benatar has offered- a life of inevitable suffering

that none of us chose and which can never be balanced by attempts at meaning-

making, as Michelstaedter makes clear--we could also extend this thinking to regimes

of suffering in the network, and the oppression which presents itself as life, to us,

neoliberalism. The suicide wishes to surpass the horizon of suffering and critical

theorists wish to challenge neoliberalism, not often recognizing a connection. The

difference is, of course, that suicides see the underlying causes and mechanisms of

human malfunction that make tyranny and injustice of all kinds possible via the

faulty, decaying, and compulsive state of human beings, whereas those interested in

political change focus too heavily on the instruments of oppression themselves.

Antinatalism and suicide are both heavily contested positions in Western culture, with

suicide being far more controversial because of its overt and disturbing presentation

of resistance to life. Not coincidentally, I will then argue that suicide is as readily

policed as it is because of its radical potential. I would like to examine this more

thoroughly.

Suicide is a threat because it works to undo the liberal humanism which

capital emerges from, in that it questions precisely that life is good. This justification

actively works to shield the compulsion that causes human beings to endure the

inevitable suffering of life and which neoliberal technologies appropriate to ensnare

human participation. Therefore, all efforts must be taken to delegitimize suicide as

something that exists beyond the realm of rationalism. Amery (1999) writes that that

is not even imaginable because logic is life itself (p. 14). Queer theorists should be

168
perking up because the move to deem an identity that questions the logics of liberal

capitalism as insane or criminal is precisely what was done to gay and transgender

peoples in the United States and elsewhere. Furthermore, radicalism itself is often

discussed in terms of maladjustment, unhappiness, and moral delinquency in the news

media, public education, and by other influential institutions. Suicide is the ultimate

act of radicalism because it undermines the ability of institutions of power to

determine how and in what ways bodies will be used. It is to literally throw one’s self

outside the logics of life and resource flow which circulate bodies and capital.

Authority must act on life to maintain power, but life itself predicates authority when

we assume it has virtue. Suicide is the opportunity to undo the basis from which

power emerges. For this reason, it will be policed and absurdly so.

Suicide is not illegal in the United States, but curiously assisted suicide is,

giving it the unique distinction of being the only act for which assistance is a crime

while the act itself remains legal. It is the predominant claim that suicide is caused

by untreated depression: however, Sarah Perry (2014) notes that there is little

evidence to support this claim beyond suicidal behavior being listed as a symptom of

depression, thus creating a self-fulfilling cycle of diagnosis (p. 147). Enormous

efforts have been taken to mark suicide as taboo, unacceptable, and something that

must be prevented at all cost. Anti-suicide groups have succeeded in creating a

popular rhetoric that all suicides can be prevented, thus creating a culture where

suicide is heavily policed on an individual level, and where suicide must happen

privately in a demoralized position, devoid of respect and dignity (p. 146-148). This

169
humanist liberal shift to individual and cultural policing is evident in a recent cultural

phenomenon 13 Reasons Why on Netflix, which follows the clues left by a suicide, as

the characters lament how they could have intervened and stopped the act from

occurring. Suicide is depicted graphically and as a harm to the teenager who was

portrayed as a tragic and immature person who needed to be saved. Popular examples

like this one help to create a culture that is ever vigilant against suicide, despite

suicide not being a crime, and freedom being an ideal of importance in Western

cultures. Preferential ethicists will argue that the limited number of suicides

compared to the general population evidence a strong value on life, but this

completely ignores the heavy social emphasis against suicide, the barricades to

access, and the high physical and social cost of being rescued and forced into

treatment (p. 157-8). Perry (2014) notes that line of thinking relies on a faulty

symmetrical model of human choice that fails to recognize the higher value human

beings intrinsically place on loss rather than gain (p. 157-8). The heavy focus on the

suicide’s wellbeing and, specifically, depression shifts focus away from power and

the economic, social, and cultural conditions and injustices that often cause

individuals to have poor feelings about being alive. While this individualist view of

suicide shows remarkable respect and adoration for life, it completely ignores

autonomy, ethics, and personal choice, in consequence serving neoliberal ideology,

while maintaining the flows of information and resources which require our

continued participation. Life itself must be examined, undermined, and reimagined

for a meaningful notion of agency to arise and to present a meaningful challenge to

170
neoliberal order which appropriates its powers. Suicide presents this opportunity for

subversion, challenging the compulsion to sustain life. Any revolutionary proposal

that maintains an unquestioned notion of the goodness of life thus relegates the

human to the horizons of capital.

This cultural policing of suicide is, of course, only doubled or compounded by

evolutionary and biological restraints. Ligotti (2011) comes remarkably close to

Freud; nihilism and psychoanalysis show their point of intersection when Ligotti

writes that the real problem of human beings is an evolved consciousness that

supersedes our physical purposes (p. 28). Designed to work, procreate, sleep, and

die, human beings find themselves with enormous abstract reasoning capabilities

beyond their need. With the ability to recognize that life is painful and without

demonstrable meaning, human beings are forced to find ways to bind or dull their

intelligence or suffer enormous existential pains (Ligotti, 2011, p. 41). Neoliberal

technologies are, thus, so successful because they sublimate human consciousness

and compulsion through constant participation with algorithmic technologies. On the

issue of meaninglessness and the problem of consciousness, Ligotti and Becker see

eye to eye, but while Becker finds this drive for meaning inevitable, arguing that the

need must be filled (metaphysically reconciling Freud with Kierkegaard), and seeing

the impossibility of human fulfillment on a social level, Ligotti contends for and

hopes that we might take the credo of McConaughey’s solution seriously and, simply,

walk off the edge of existence. Furthermore, but in more descriptive terms, Ligotti

contends, as Freud did, that we often live on past recognition of suffering because of

171
inner drives compelling us to motion, not unlike a windup toy or a puppet animated

by some indistinct and unyielding force. (p. 54) What better way to describe Freud’s

notion of compulsion than with a windup toy, acknowledging that compulsion is what

binds our bodies and our minds to the repetitive horror of a mundane existence. We

march on knowing very well that existence is hell and that extinction is the only

answer to our predicament, but we are biologically compelled to live, and stuck

helplessly, in motion. (p. 37) There are of course a number of coping strategies, both

scientific and otherwise, that human beings apply to try to make their lives tolerable,

but ultimately, they don’t add up to anything, thus Becker’s call for a metaphysical

solution. (Becker, 2011, p. 275-7) To return to a previous inquiry, for example,

Ligotti contends that transhumanists or posthumanists who seek either the scientific

logos of tomorrow or a reimagining of our positionality cannot get around the

evolutionary blunder of consciousness and realize that life is uncurable because it is

inevitably going nowhere. (Becker, 2011, p. 103) It is too difficult to accept

extinction as the reasonable solution to this unsufferable quagmire of existences, and

from psychoanalysis we have many lenses to examine why. Compulsion is what

binds us to a raw deal for which we know better.

Suicide undermines compulsion and presents the opportunity to examine how

the logics of life, which are appropriated and which sustain and define the logics of

neoliberal technologies, may be resisted or broken. I am not advocating for suicide:

however, I think it is clear from the arguments I’ve presented that I am not going to

devalue or challenge it as an individual’s course of action. Suicide has already been

172
used as a method of resistance, e.g. Buddhist monks who lit themselves on fire in

protest in South Vietnam and American Indians seeking to avoid slavery by the

regimes of Columbus. I am arguing that suicide can and should be utilized as an

epistemic tool to examine how the logics of life via compulsion can be undermined as

a radical example of non-participation. Psychoanalysis provides us with the tools to

do so.

Suicide is the ultimate example of Žižek’s radical act. Borrowed from Lacan,

the radical act is that which creates liberatory possibilities by creating a break or a

space of doubt in the sociosymbolic order. As Henry Krips (2012) puts it, the act is

an “encounter with the Real that disturbs the subject to the point of threatening not

only the dissolution of his or her symbolic order and speech, but also (therefore) of a

subjectivity that is grounded in the pattern of un-speech that punctuates what he or

she says” (p. 314). It is the dissolution or the space of doubt caused by the act that

one is afforded the opportunity to reimagine possibilities that were once fixed through

existing logics. The act is something that one is compelled to take and for which the

results are uncertain. Suicide, for example, is often quickly written off, once the

initial shock has dissipated, as an act of depression, as I discussed. However, its

disturbance often has numerous other effects, such as the fear of contagion, political

awareness, etc. What I am arguing is that within this discussion or space that suicide

creates, we might look further at the logics of life which cultural theorists seem to

take for granted when theorizing resistance towards neoliberalism. For Žižek, the act

is a political action aimed at liberation from the inescapable matrix of liberal

173
democracy within which, “any move against nationalism, fundamentalism, or ethnic

violence ends up reinforcing Capital and guaranteeing Democracy’s failure” (Dean,

2011, p. 2). Here Žižek argues that in accepting global capitalism, the Left remains

trapped within a democratic fundamentalism which denies possibilities of radical or

progressive potential (Dean, 2011, p. 13). I will go further and contend that in failing

to challenge the liberal western tenants that life is inherently good, we are unable to

challenge the compulsion of human bodies which remains as the foundation and

serves as the driving force of networks and neoliberal technologies. To take one’s life

can be an act of resistance against empire, refusing to participate in the symbolic, and

undermining the compulsion of human life which endlessly produces data capital.

Suicide is the act par excellence for Lacan, according to Žižek, precisely

because it does not only reshape the subject, it is their extinction. “The act differs

from an active interaction (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the

act is not simply something I ‘accomplish’- after an act I’m literally ‘not the same as

before” (Žižek, 2008, p. 51). One thus undergoes an act rather than completes it, as

what is at the heart of the act is an “irreducible risk”- the act arises out of pure

negation and everything is secondary to the act (Žižek, 2008, p. 51). The act as

resistance to neoliberalism is refusal to participate in the symbolic; the production of

data capital. It is non-being. Suicide is a wrench in the machine; antinatalism turns it

off. Human extinction is opposed to neoliberal annihilation.

174
Conclusion: Nihilism as Anti-Compulsion

Neoliberalism relies on human compulsion. For this reason, it is unrealistic to

rely on neutral and historicist positions about human life. A new ontological position

is necessary for queer theory to address human being in its state of mediation by

information technologies. Nihilism provides an ontological framework that can

unpack the ways in which human behavior propagates and serves neoliberal

technologies. It is my contention that the tools to understand human compulsion are

prevalent in psychoanalytic theory and that nihilism can be used to further serve their

intent and to develop strategies of resistance to information capital by presenting a

coherent conception of human mechanics and human agency. Nihilism presents an

ethics which matches the enduring condition of human consciousness in which

information technologies are grounded and multiply.

Queer theory has been unable to properly address or challenge the ways that

neoliberal technologies appropriate human behavior because of a failure to address

human life on a mechanical level. At a mechanical level, nihilism reveals human life

as horror: compulsion without purpose. It is compulsion that information technologies

require to generate more data and to maintain the flows of capital. Deconstruction is

an act of compulsion, fracturing, splintering, and ultimately producing more

possibilities for neoliberal capital, rather than challenging its logics. Neoliberal

technologies are, thus, performative themselves, creating, generating, and

reproducing through repetition and through transgression of their own laws. Liberal

175
rationalism has failed to address the irrational hold of capital, but so has

perfomativity, pushing us ever deeper into the snares of information technologies, as

each queer transgression only generates further creative possibilities. The antisocial

thesis while making important strides to bring notions of pessimism to queer theory,

fails to consider the role and function of neoliberal technologies. By recognizing the

mechanics of human compulsion and the ways in which information capital

appropriates creativity, mimicking their compulsive behavior, human agency can be

reimagined in ways that might challenge our tacit relationships and participation with

neoliberal technologies.

Nihilism offers the strongest ethical position of non-participation and offers a

base for developing methods of anti-compulsion, thus providing a number of possible

lenses for addressing the human/nonhuman bind for which we find ourselves engaged

with information technologies. I have only begun to explore these possibilities and I

think there is evidence here to support the importance of developing nihilist ideas

further in cultural theory as possible resistance strategies for the left. Nihilism

provides the most compelling attempts to break with the compulsions that tether

human being to undue suffering and it only makes sense that we work to explore how

these possibilities could serve to challenge neoliberal technologies and the logics of

empire. Neoliberalism is annihilation, but it is not extinction: it is the reduction of all

beings to capital. Nihilism, in contrast, challenges life as an unjust experience of

suffering, and as such, provides the opportunity to diagnose and to resist

neoliberalism as a multiplying force of human consciousness and horror.

176
 Conclusion: Is This the End?

Pessimistic Possibilities

I think an immediate reaction and criticism of this work would be that it is

overly pessimistic, both in tone and in proposed solutions, but also more specifically

in my estimation of the reach and power of neoliberal technologies. This is not an

unreasonable claim and it is one taken up by authors doing similar work about

algorithmic technologies (Dean, 2011; Raley 2009). I think, for some, it might be

imaginable even that this might feel like a work about the end of the world- but I did

mention Mark Fisher’s claim that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than

the end of capitalism for a reason: whether neoliberalism is bringing us to the end of

the world or not, it is bringing us to the end of notions of autonomy or personhood

outside of its mediation (Shaviro, 2013, p. 7). In that regard, I don’t think my

arguments that the internet is not a democratic space, but rather one of appropriation,

or about the mirroring and utilization of human life and compulsion by neoliberal

technologies are unfair. Power works in new and more effective ways, and the

neoliberal horizon is expanding. Neoliberal annihilation and the reduction of all ways

of being to postfordism is in progress.

I think it is not unfair or even pessimistic to question the role of academics in

their own appropriation of minority bodies and revolutionary tactics, which they

continue to convert into academic capital and information capital with little link to

any material impact in terms of liberation in the real world. Far from it, I think it is

177
counterintuitive to our own goals to ignore the inherent ethical questions that come

from our own monetization of revolutionary ends that, while I do think are beliefs

that are sincerely held by the academics doing this kind of work, are not realized

materially. The link between postmodern mechanisms in algorithms and the

repackaging of academic genres, classes, and theory in Cultural Studies is too glaring

to ignore. We have an opportunity to explore the effects of such academic moves,

and it is important to do so in line with what multimedia theorists have shown us

about the nature of algorithms and the function, capacity, and power of neoliberal

technologies. This is, perhaps, the first and central argument I make in this work.

The way I’ve been using the term pessimism, in contrast, is generative- rather

than self-defeating. The scope of neoliberal power is immense, impressive, and can

appear insurmountable, but this work- as well as the many I’ve taken up to form this

defense- chooses to develop and engage strategies of resistance. This is in contrast to

works in Cultural Studies and Queer Theory that compulsively promote identity as a

tool of resistance- I think partly because they are so readily available and also because

they produce a kind of illusory high- “gender is over,” “the future is non-binary,”

etc.- but seem to be unconcerned with the limited political effects they produce, as

they are instead absorbed into larger neoliberal projects of multiculturalism. To be

specific, I refer here to the commonly repeated theme in Queer Theory that non-

traditional embodiments of gender and sexuality or identity-based politics are

liberatory or transgressive, when in reality they simply do the work of information

capital, producing new configurations of data. Such repetitive failure and jouissance

178
by attempt- in essence, the death drive- speaks much more relevantly to impotence

and self-defeat. Neoliberal multiculturalism attempts inclusion by way of the

reduction of the hostilities that come with difference, effectively annihilating

diversity, and identity politics- in their own abdication of violence through the

utilization of methods largely based in communication/rhetoric- contribute to these

projects. This stands in contrast to methods of algorithmic literacy taken up in

hacking, which I’ve presented as an anonymous form of online resistance that

adequately considers, assesses, and ultimately intervenes within neoliberal networks

to disturb and disrupt the flows of information and resources which make up empire.

Hacking does not contribute to multicultural strategies but emerges as a vital threat to

empire, resisting appropriation, as I evidenced in the third chapter. Algorithmic

literacy and hacking present examples of resistance to neoliberalism that scholars

should consider in formulations of neoliberalism and tactics that present a threat to it.

The notion of pessimism I have presented arises out of a refusal to

participate, rather than as a model to simply participate in politics in other ways,

which I’ve documented as problematic because of their contributions to data capital.

Pessimism rejects the compulsion of life, which neoliberal technologies appropriate

and use to sustain relationships of inequality and power. Civilization mirrors the

impotence and impermanence of life, compulsively creating, but inevitably returning

to dust. The nihilism I have offered would reject this compulsion and offer the

opportunity for new ways of being. I’ve presented pessimism as the proper ontology

for revolution because it produces the wherewithal to begin to birth alternate notions

179
of social relations, or “the commune,” which I have borrowed from The Invisible

Committee. As Alexander Vasudevan notes in The Autonomous City, a work which

well documents the recent history of squatting as a form of resistance, alternate social

experiments are not simply about non-participation or withdrawal from capitalist

society but produce the very potential or capacity to create new social relationships.

Pessimism presents itself as the impetus to move the Left in this direction, away from

identity politics and deconstructive methodologies that lend themselves to neoliberal

appropriation. Pessimism is the refusal of neoliberal annihilation.

A particularly useful example of my reading of the commune, as well as one

that illustrates how I believe my notions of pessimism, “whatever,” and neoliberal

resistance converge, is in the cultural site of traveling kids. Traveling kids or oogles

are a tribe of homeless teenagers and young adults in North America who embrace

punk rock ideals, aesthetic, and culture (Days n Daze, 2013). They are as Days n

Daze puts it “flea bitten drifters,” engaging in a subterranean existence, squatting,

hopping trains, engaging in substances, and resisting the tyranny of neoliberalism by

failing to become postfordist subjects. Traveling kids, far from embracing the

compulsions of life and culture, embrace the qualities of their own impermanence,

celebrating their own decay and futility, rejecting the impermanence of society and

life, by rejecting notions of home and safety, while simply enjoying one another

without any thought of future or cultural notion of success. They, thus, also reject any

kind of absorption into larger projects of multiculturalism or identity politics by

refusing to be marked by any kind of identity; they emerge as they are simply to

180
disappear. By engaging pessimism and the anti-authority values of punk music,

traveling kids embrace “the whatever” in a kind of non-identifiable, singularized

identity outsides the bounds of neoliberal appropriation, which emerges with no

quality besides the resistance of postfordist being, refusing capital, work, and the

appropriation that comes with participation in neoliberal culture and with information

technologies. Furthermore, they can be summarized by their contentment to decay- to

simply exist among themselves in whatever way that might be, without thought of

future or politics. This singularity, or fulfilment unto itself, presents a different

element of punk then the one which Halberstam, Edelman, and Nyung’o present and

disagree over in queer theory - one that is not so much concerned with rebellion,

another notion of utopia or futurity, but exists in “the whatever”. Traveling kids

evidence the possibilities of creation and political possibility through pessimism.

Whatever, What About Violence?

I think a second concern that might arise from this work may regard my

defense and theorization of violence as a useful strategy against neoliberalism. I

have, after all, made significant claims about Queer Theorists and identity politics

fetishizing identity as a tool of resistance: it seems plausible that some may accuse me

of underestimating the cost or ethics of violence. While I don’t think that is

unreasonable, I think it may ignore the context from which my arguments have

arisen. Namely first that as Slavoj Žižek notes, what constitutes violence is only what

is set against the violence of neoliberal mechanisms- war, sweatshops, and inequality

181
of various kinds- that manifest themselves simply as the social backdrop or reality

(Žižek, 2008b, p. 2). If this basic condition of empire is recognized, any disturbance

to social relations of power is automatically perceived as violent. In psychoanalytic

theory, violence and disturbance are synonymous in a kind of way, as they both

present a challenge to the symbolic, and are thus useful in making sense of ways to

disrupt postfordist subjectivity. My acknowledgment of violence as a useful tool of

resistance, and my theorization of “whatever violence” arises through the

understanding that violence is a social relation that neoliberalism makes use of, thus

requiring a symbolic disturbance to cut through its ahistorical rendering of power.

Identity politics have failed to produce revolutionary results largely because

their methods are aimed at redirecting social relations for the purposes of inclusion,

rather than disturbing them. As I outlined in the third chapter, identity politics

privilege those with wealth and power and the ability to speak and use rhetoric

effectively. For the LGBT movement, this has meant the constant privileging of

issues related to gay, white, cisgender males- as I noted in the second chapter, gay

marriage. The methods of identity politics favor and contribute to the liberal

democratic mechanisms of lobbying, political organizing, etc. Identity politics shape

the platforms and messages of political parties. Jodi Dean’s recognition that George

W. Bush’s victory in 2000 was tantamount to his use of developing the rhetoric of

identity politics towards disillusioned white voters is remarkably important to

recognize here (2009, p. 5). Do we not even now have a president who tweets and

claims he will make America Great Again, thus utilizing the tools of identity politics

182
and the narrative of victimhood, which it developed, to win political victories?

Identity politics should thus be recognized for what it is: a political tool of liberal

democracy, and not one of radical resistance. What I am calling for, in comparison, is

the development of tools that challenge capital and the governmental authority from

which it arises. This necessarily involves violence because it means disturbing the

symbolic foundation that reduces all politics to neoliberalism.

I have called specifically for an ahistorical violence- or a violence without

context or identity- because of the neoliberal conditions of empire that make it

necessary. Namely that neoliberal technologies are so effective at reducing contexts

and identities to neoliberal circulation and information capital. This is what I have

constantly referred to as neoliberal annihilation throughout this work. It is remarkably

important that those on the Left and those concerned with the plight of marginalized

people recognize the ways in which neoliberalism reduces everything, including

resistance and opposition to oppression, to neoliberal flow. Ahistorical violence or

“whatever violence,” as I have termed it- a nameless, faceless, anger without

restraint-- necessarily emerges in opposition to empire with the ability to disturb the

foundations of neoliberal authority by way of posing a disruption to postfordist

subjectivity. “Whatever violence” cannot be appropriated.

A very useful example, to explore for a final time the kind of violence I am

advocating for, are the films of Lars von Trier. What von Trier presents in his

Depression Trilogy, Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac, is the power and

183
disturbing nature of an ahistorical violence (von Trier, 2009, 2011, 2013). More

satisfyingly, von Trier does so through his female leads who categorially resist

identity politics, as Magdalena Zolkos offers via the title character, “She,” in

Antichrist, by resisting victimization and the context of being female (Zolkos, 2011,

p. 8). Zolkos writes that von Trier’s filmmaking is indicative of the Dogme95

manifesto, created by von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, which calls for “a return of

the real,” through the resuscitation of the subject, thereby challenging the current

postmodern and deconstructive trends in filmmaking (p. 2-3). In short, the goal is to

produce trauma and emotional affect through character identification, as subject, sign,

and thing come together (p. 3). This notion is not all too different from Žižek’s work

in psychoanalysis and what I identified as “the act” in the previous chapter. What

von Trier’s films are doing by attacking ambiguity, is producing trauma or

disturbance through a kind of violence which cannot be rationalized or narrativized,

thus creating symbolic doubt and allowing for a space of change. This is, essentially,

what I have articulated as the affect that “whatever violence” could produce against

postfordist subjectivity. “She” from von Trier’s Antichrist, as well as Justine from

Melancholia, are unreceptive to postfordist subjectivity, as they not only reject or

rebel against rationality and masculine power, but remain uninfluenced by it,

mocking the horrible fate of the men in the film who take comfort in and believe they

derive power or control from such logics. All three films are highly controversial,

facing numerous claims from feminists, as the three stories use the same technique of

traumatic identification with the female leads through disturbing acts of

184
sadomasochism, which all inevitably end in violent climax (Zolkos, 2011). What

Zolkos states of Antichrist, and what I think is true of all the films in the trilogy, is

that through ahistorical violence von Trier is simply presenting another kind of

heroine, one who can intervene and challenge logics of masculine and capitalist

authority (p. 9). Aside from small gains of reform, it is unreasonable to say that

identity politics have achieved that potential.

The postmodern claims of anti-feminism against von Trier could also perhaps

be leveled against my theorizations of violence, so it may be meaningful to explore

how I think the actions of his characters are useful before continuing. She, in

Antichrist, refuses the logics of masculinity, which move to dilute her emotion and

teach her how to grieve; Justine in Melancholia recognizes that life and civilization

are violent and impermanent and is content to witness the end of the world, which she

does; and Joe in Nymphomaniac rejects her feminine sexual position through her

shameless acceptance of numerous sexual acts of deviancy, while ultimately

murdering the man who both attempted to help her come to terms with her sexuality,

and rape her. Thus, in all three films, von Trier undoes the narrative of victimization,

and forces the viewer to witness another kind of trauma, which is not unlike what is

necessary to challenge postfordist subjectivity and the totalizing projects of neoliberal

multiculturalism. What I think these films can offer us is a model for violence that is

both beyond the realm of identity politics, and neoliberal appropriation, and offers a

model for disturbance in which disenfranchised groups can resist the oppression that

they face as postfordist subjects. This is essentially what I envision “whatever

185
violence” to do: to create effective resistance against neoliberalism through

anonymous, ahistorical violence, which resists the appropriation or flattening of

difference.

A second critique of the Depression Trilogy, and one I could see being

relevant to this work, specifically in the 4th chapter, is that of fetishizing mental

illness. In Antichrist, we are presented with a woman, who just after losing a child, is

suffering unthinkable grief and depression. Melancholia centers around a woman who

is suffering from manic depression, and who we see is merely biding her time, often

dangerously and irresponsibly, until life on earth perishes. In both films, the viewer is

forced to identify with the lead character through trauma. There is little ambiguity,

except that in Antichrist, She emerges through a close connection with nature, forcing

the viewer to imagine a kind of pagan relationship, as animals talk, and numerous

references to the devil are made, with flashback scenes implying that She may have

purposely tortured her child. The film ultimately climaxes with a self-given

clitoridectomy and the torture of He who receives a grindstone bolted through his leg.

In Melancholia, the viewer is, similarly, made to wonder if Justine has a kind of

earthly intuitive power, as she is the only character who seems to be aware that the

world will in fact end, as another planet, Melancholia, is headed directly for it.

Numerous signs of her clairvoyance are presented throughout the film, most notably,

her ability to guess how many beans wedding guests placed in a jar. Through both of

these examples, it could be argued that von Trier is asserting a kind of epistemic

privilege to mentally ill individuals. Justine states dully to her scared sister Charlotte

186
that “The world is evil. We don’t have to grieve for it” and “Life is only on earth and

not for long,” in direct contradiction to Charlotte’s scientist husband who, along with

the world’s leading scientists, is convinced that earth is not in the trajectory of

Melancholia. She and Justine both seem to have some hidden knowledge of the inner

workings of the universe that arise through their traumatic, psychological conditions.

As I accused cultural studies and queer theory of fetishizing the revolutionary

power of marginalized minority individuals, I think it is important to address the

similarities and differences here. Von trier has claimed that these films arose out of

his own depression, and, furthermore, it is the female characters in the film with

whom he identified (Zolkos, 2011, p. 4). It certainly doesn’t seem that the

exploitation of the mentally ill, nor that of women- for that matter, was the intention

of the director. Von Trier is clearly articulating a pessimism, which I share and have

defended throughout this work as useful to undermining the compulsion that empire

utilizes and arises from. Identifying and developing strategy from positions that

undermine human life and compulsion should not be read as a defense of the

victimization of or the exploitation of individuals who are suffering from mental

illness, nor the mental hardships that neoliberalism produces. Instead, what I think it

could be argued that von Trier’s film’s exhibit is a concern with the social and

psychological condition of human beings, and his rendering of ahistorical violence

and trauma certainly offers useful opportunities to explore this. What von Trier is

doing is something that I have done with similar readings of pessimism and

ahistorical violence to specifically imagine how the Left could challenge the

187
technologies of neoliberalism that exploit, appropriate, and commit violence against

human and non-human bodies. By offering meditations on the problem in ontology,

political theory, and media theory, what I believe I have offered are the tools to

develop a new lens and a set of strategies for Leftist resistance.

A New Lens

My initial claims were simple: cultural studies remains unprepared to address

matters of identity and politics in the age of postfordism, largely because of a reliance

on postmodern theories and strategies. These claims arise from and echo the

sentiments of theorists like Bruno Latour, Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean, Alexander

Galloway and others, whose work represents a broad variety of disciplines and

concerns. By engaging political theory, ontology, and media theory, I have not only

hoped to develop strategies of resistance for the present, but have also begun to

collect important theoretical work and critique of neoliberal power and postfordist

subjectivity to form a new lens for cultural studies and identity scholars to address

matters of neoliberal appropriation. I have selected the areas of ontology, political

theory, and media theory as my focus precisely because of the important work

emerging out of these disciplines and the contributions that could be made to the

question of identity and power in the age of neoliberalism. By reassessing and

opening inquiry into the nature of power through investigation of the roles of

technology, human being, and governance in the state of postfordism, what I believe I

have presented are not simply new angles to address the question of identity and

188
power as they currently sit, but tools to develop a lens that can address the formations

of human identity as they emerge as postfordist through neoliberal desubjectivation.

It is not enough to have multiple disciplinary tools at our disposal but to recognize

how our postfordist condition- mediation through a new kind of technological

appropriation and ensnarement in a different kind of politics- requires a

multidisciplinary approach to map, assess, and intervene in matters of identity and

politics. It has been my intent to begin such an approach by addressing technology,

identity, and governance in relation to empire and postfordist being.

One of the major gaps I see this work fulfilling is the disconnection between

political theory and the work of identity scholars. I have already noted Galloway’s

claim about the disfunction in cultural studies between political theorists like Slavoj

Žižek and identity theorists like Jack Halberstam who are content to write the other

off as looking for the problem (power) in the wrong place, but we could afford to

think about it one last time. In short, it is not valuable to address the matter as micro-

identity based- or macro- politically based, but as postfordist and emerging through

the technological mediation of the two. Surely Slavoj Žižek is wrong in his piece

“The Sexual is Political” when he reduces LGBT identity to a product of liberal

multiculturalism, but I fail to see how queer responses such as the one from Che

Gossett (2016), which posits a reimagining of a transvestite street action group from

the 1970’s, could offer much to challenge neoliberal networks of power in their

present formation. Neoliberal technologies make possible an effective kind of politics

in which a new comprehensive view of ontology/power/media becomes necessary to

189
address identity and being. For that reason, works like those of Galloway, Dean,

Raley, etc. from media theory become invaluable resources in the project of piecing

together a comprehensive map and in developing tools for the purpose of challenging

and resisting neoliberal power and appropriation, bringing together the important

contributions of cultural theorists in both identity studies, and political theory.

I believe my contributions can be broken down into three theoretical

advancements- “whatever violence,” the need for nihilism as a political ontology, and

the formation of neoliberal appropriation or neoliberal annihilation as the key to

understanding how information technologies produce, secure, and expand the

neoliberal horizon, while also squelching current political threats and unrest. What I

think these three contributions produce is a single model of political critique aimed at

addressing and challenging the ways that neoliberalism reduces bodies to

postfordism. My biggest critique of cultural studies, and queer theory, which I’ve

chosen as a case study, is that methods have not existed which put enough focus on

technologies of appropriation, and the power, scope, and mechanisms of information

capital in general. This is not surprising as identity is not a category that lends itself to

thinking about data, code, and network flows. However, I think this can be done and I

think that I’ve begun to shed some light on how to do so and why that’s important by

drawing from a number of related works in other disciplines. My contribution should

not be read, necessarily, against these disciplines, but in contribution to how

difference emerges as a singular postfordist subjectivity through the networks of

empire, offering how we can intervene, disturb, and challenge them. This is a work

190
that is first and foremost for autonomy and against the violence of neoliberalism. A

gap shouldn’t exist between theory in technology and broader political concerns, but

must emerge through understanding their collaborative mechanisms and effects in the

production of postfordist subjectivity for the purposes of sustaining and building

empire. This has been the thesis throughout this work.

A New Politics

What I think my work can offer that is missing in queer theory and cultural

studies is the foothold or certainty to create a political resistance. Postmodern critique

has destabilized academia and ethics, leaving us inactive or stuck in methods of

protest that no longer produce results. What I have tried to use theory to do is to think

about ontology, power, and the media we all engage on a daily basis, to view the

problem and possibilities of resistance in a tangible way. I have engaged work from a

variety of theorists in a way that I think expands and elaborates on the material

possibilities in their work, even when those were difficult to deduce or when they

were suffering from academic grandiosity, or, in short- unconcerned with results. I

have tried to deduce tangible methods of resistance; I have argued that these methods

should be more important than the theory we create to explain them, and that we have

a responsibility to see that such effects are what come from the work we engage in.

This is sadly not something with the priority one might imagine.

More importantly than imagining new lenses and models of political critique,

I hope this work offers new strategies and new ideas about protest, tactics, and

191
resistance. It has been a central tenant of this work that cultural studies disciplines

such as queer theory ought to be more concerned with effects, or lack of effects, in

the real world. Academia, far from producing revolution or social change, often does

little more than produce more information capital, as Jstor and other sites of academic

literature simply accumulate and preserve a hierarchy of information. The previously

mentioned case against Aaron Swartz is strong evidence of the contribution and

privilege of academic writing to the position of information capital. Publishing and

self/university advancement are capitalist goals; academia is simply part of a larger

system of data appropriation.

What I think my readings of algorithmic literacy, “whatever violence,” and

pessimism can contribute to Leftist politics are methods of resistance, which first, and

most importantly, reject neoliberal appropriation, and offer the possibilities to disrupt,

challenge, and resist empire and postfordist subjectivity. What this necessarily

produces are gaps where new ways of being can emerge in the world. I had chosen

The Invisible Committee’s notion of “the commune” to address the ways that I think

pessimism, art, and violence can come together in generative, creative ways-

producing new relations and ways to interact with one another. This could be read as

the central place where this dissertation comes together with theory, forming a central

notion or thesis in resistance; a new blueprint for the Left, emerging from the

possibilities of rebellion that arise from pessimism- whether they be through direct

violence, the misuse of algorithmic technologies, or simply emerging from finding

one’s “whatever”. In this way, I certainly do not feel I have created a work of

192
unnecessary gloom or contributed to a kind of impotence in the face of the massive

technology of empire that many have been accused of for engaging enthusiastically

glim projects that aim to assess the reach of neoliberal technologies. In contrast, I

think this work has been one of sincerity in which I have favored an uprising of the

oppressed, above any kind of academic purity or theoretical commitment. For

instance, I have engaged a number of “conflicting” theories, committing numerous

academic faux paus, e.g. mixing Lacanian and Deleuzean methods in chapter 2, to try

to offer the problems that neoliberal capital presents, as well as possible solutions, in

useful material ways. This work has been one of invention, for the purposes of

revolution, and I have engaged method to do so, rather than engaging revolution or

minority identity to make theory, which I have argued is a problem and a serious trap

that offers evidence of the ways that academia is structured to serve the goals of

neoliberalism through information technologies.

What I have offered are Leftist strategies and tactics that consider the specific

reach of neoliberal power and technologies, thus offering possibilities for their

resistance. Identity politics and the postmodern strategies of resistance hold no weight

against a system that is already postmodern and ahistorical. Neoliberalism produces a

decentralized, deconstructed, and postfordist configuration of flows of information

and resources. As such, identity and difference do not appear in contrast as

transgression, but as possibilities of data, emerging precisely in larger strategies of

empiric multiculturalism. The new blueprint for the Left must too be ahistorical and

anonymous, arising from a collective rage, which we refuse to name or give context

193
to, offering the possibility to disturb the production of postfordist subjectivitiy. What

could be more queer than to shatter every boundary and to emerge as nondescript

singularity? There is a sincerity that is missing in preserving the identity politics of

old that ignores the collective rage that emerges faceless and without reason or

restraint. This insincerity is easy target for appropriation and for Liberal reform. The

Left need abandon politics, which far from being subversive, manifests as liberal

democracy, through the specious narrative of victimhood (Dean, 2009, p. 5).

Ambiguity is the enemy. We need a moment to embrace our anger- it doesn’t require

a name.

It is my hope that those on the Left will begin to enact methods of neoliberal

resistance, realizing the ways in which the Liberal Democratic strategies of

multiculturalism and identity politics already exclude a vast number of people who

rightly refuse to become postfordist. There is enormous power in the certainty of

anti-capital resistance, and a sincerity in a rage towards our own injustice and

alienation that we have a responsibility to foster and to not allow to become

appropriated by larger strategies of Liberalism which amount to nothing more, in

effect, than the appropriation of capital, realized as cooptation and meaningless

reform.

There are a number of ways which this work could be taken up in scholarship,

exploring the relationships between identity and the appropriating functions of

neoliberal technologies, and I hope cultural studies and disciplines like queer theory

194
engage in such pursuits. However, I think our highest demand, as individuals

committed to resistance and autonomy, ought to be towards building a Left that

engages a new revolutionary struggle that realizes the pitfalls of our current Liberal

Multicultural methods and utilizes tactics and strategies that disturb and challenge

empire and postfordist subjectivity. An academia that engages identity and social

change as just another topic of study is really not worth our time at all, and we’d do

better to remember what made us want to engage these matters in the first place.

There is little sincerity in ambiguity, and the struggle of oppressed people is hardly

complex or complicated in its bitter, stinging reality, despite the thousands of pages

which exploit and water down the suffering and deaths of so many through self-

aggrandizing and gratuitous uses of theory. This work resists such academic

interpellation; it is a political manifesto- a new blueprint for Left- and a call to action.

Neoliberal annihilation is upon us, and its resistance demands our attention and

commitment.

195
 References

Ahmed, S. (2004). “Queer Feelings”. In Hall, D. E., Jagose, A., Bebell, A., & Potter,
S. (Eds.). (2013). The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

Althusser, L. (2014). On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological

State Apparatuses. NY: Verso.

Améry, J. (1999). On suicide. S.l.: Indiana Univ. Press.

Andrejvic, M. (2000). “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the
Exploitation of Self Disclosure”. In Marris, P. (Ed.). (2000). Media studies: A
reader (3rd Ed.). New York, NY: New York University Press.

Asher, J., & Yorkey, B. (Writers). (2017, March 31). 13 Reasons Why [Television
series]. California: Netflix.

Barad, K. (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How

Matter Comes to Matter”. In Deborah Orr (ed.), Belief, Bodies, and Being:
Feminist Reflections on Embodiment. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
(2006)

Baudrillard, J. (2009). The Gulf War did not take place. Sydney: Power Publications.

Becker, E. (2011). The Denial of Death. London: Souvenir Press.

Behrent, M. C. (2013). Foucault and Technology. History and Technology, 29(1), 54-
104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2013.780351

Benetar, D. (2006). Better Never to Have Been. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke

University Press.

Bernard-Donals, M. (2011). “The Call of the Sacred and the Language of

Deterritorialization”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 41(5), 397-415.
doi:10.1080/02773945.2011.595760

Bersani, L. (1995). Homos. Harvard University Press.

Bersani, L. (2010). Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays. The University of
Chicago Press.

196
Blas, Z. (2012). Queer Darkess. Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network, (8), 127-
133. Retrieved November 20, 2017, from
http://networkcultures.org/_uploads/tod/TOD%238_DEPLETION_DESIGN.p
df

Blomkamp, N. (Director). (2015). Chappie [Motion picture on DVD]. United States:

Colombia Pictures.

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bogost, I. (2008). “The Rhetoric of Video Games” (K. Salen, Ed.). The Ecology of
Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Retrieved June 19, 2017.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media
and Learning. Cambridge, MA

Bornstein, K. (1995). Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. Vintage
Books.

Boyle, D. (Director). (2002). 28 days later [Video file].

Braidotti, R. (2014). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brooks, M. (2014). World War Z. Baltimore: Cemetery Dance Publications.

Brown, J. J. (2014). “The Machine That Therefore I Am”. Philosophy & Rhetoric,
47(4), 494-514. doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.4.0494

Burke, K. (1935). Permanence and change: an anatomy of purpose. New York: New
Republic.

Butler, J. (1993,2011). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex".

London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2015). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York:
Routledge.

Butler, J., & Athanasiou, A. (2014). Dispossession: the performative in the political.
Malden, MA: Polity.

Cameron, J. (Director). (1984). The Terminator [Motion picture on DVD]. United

States: Orion Pictures.

197
Campaign, H. R. (n.d.). Glossary of Terms. Retrieved June 19, 2017, from
http://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-terms

Carmichael, S., & Hamilton, C. V. (1967). Black Power - The Politics of Liberation
in America. Vintage Books.

Carmichael, S. (2015) “Black power”. In D. G. Cooper (Ed), The Dialectics of

Liberation (pp 150-74). New York City: Verso.

Carvalho, C. S. (2008). Logic(s) of subjection. Butler’s symptomatic reading of Hegel

and Lacan on the symbolic. Revista Filosofica de Coimbra, 17(N. * 34), 509
-522. Retrieved August 26, 2017, from
http://www.uc.pt/fluc/dfci/publicacoes/logics_of_subjection

Caserio, R. L., Edelman, L., Halberstam, J., Munoz, J. E., & Dean, T. (2006). The
Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory. PMLA,121(3), May 2006, 819-828.
Retrieved November 20, 2017, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486357

Casey, P. (Director), Carter, S., Martin, B., Maher, B., Vermont, D., Oschack, B.,
Kelly, C., B. (Writers), & B. (Producer). (2017, June 2). Season 15 Ep 17
[Television series episode]. In Real Time with Bill Maher. HBO.

Chavez, K. R. (2010). “Spatializing Gender Performativity: Ecstasy and Possibilities

for Livable Life in the Tragic Case of Victoria Arellano”. Women's Studies in
Communication, 33(1), 1-15. Retrieved from

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07491401003669729

Chbosky, S., Trutletaub, J., Steinberg, J. E., & Schaer, J. (Writers). (2006, September
20). Jericho [Television series]. CBS.

Chun, W. H. (2008). Control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber
optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Church0fScientology. (2008, January 21). Message to Scientology [YouTube Video].

Coleman, G. (2014). Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of

Anonymous. Verso.

Collins, P.H. Comment of Hekman’s “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint

Theory Revisisted”: Where’s the Power? In Harding, S. G. (Ed.). (2004). The
feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political controversies.
New York: Routledge.

198
Cram, E. (2012). “Angie was Our Sister:” Witnessing the Trans-Formation of Disgust
in the Citizenry of Photography. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 98(4), 411 -
438. doi:10.1080/00335630.2012.714899

Cuarón, A. (Director). (2006). Children of Men [Video file].

Davis, D. D. (2010). Inessential solidarity: rhetoric and foreigner relations.

Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Days N Daze. (2013). Flea Bitten Drifters [Recorded by Jesse, Whitney, & Marissa].
On The Oogle Deathmachine. Days N Daze. Retrieved November 10, 2017,
from https://daysndaze.bandcamp.com/album/the-oogle-deathmachine.

Dean, J. (n.d.). “Žižek against Democracy." Law, Culture, and the Humanities 1.154
(2005): 154-77

Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Durham & London:
Duke University Press.

Dean, J. (2011). Blog theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of drive.
Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deleuze, G. (2000). “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. In Marris, P. (Ed.).

(2000). Mediastudies: A reader (3rd Ed.). New York, NY: New York
University Press.

Dews, P. (2012). Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity. In Žižek, S.

(Ed.). (2012). Mapping ideology. New York, NY: Verso.

Dixon, B. A. (2015, August 06). “Where's the #BlackLivesMatter Critique of the

Black Misleadership Class, or Obama or Hillary?” Retrieved August 04,
2017, from https://www.blackagendareport.com/wheres-the-blacklivesmatter
-critique-of-black-political-class

Eagleton, T. (2012). “Ideology and Its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism”. In Žižek, S.

(Ed.). (2012). Mapping ideology. New York, NY: Verso.

Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University
Press.

Elliott, P. (2015, December 20). “2015 Made History for LGBT Rights. Why 2016
Won't Match It”. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from
http://time.com/4143685/lgbt-rights-2016/

199
Esmail, S. (Writer). (2015, June 24). Mr. Robot [Television series]. New York, NY:
USA Network.

Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: toward a queer of color critique.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Ferro, S., & Kaufman, A. C. (2016, September 14). “How Corporate America
Became A Major LGBT Ally”. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/corporateamericalgbtally_us_570e5c22
e4b08a2d32b8840b

Fincher, D. (Director). (1999). Fight club [Motion picture on DVD]. United States:
20th Century Fox.

Finn, E. (2017). What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York, NY:
Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1990). An Introduction (Vol. 1, The History of Sexuality). New York,

NY: Vintage Books.

Freud, S. (2013). On Civilization and its Discontents. Rough Draft Printing.

Freud, S. (2015). Beyond the pleasure principle. Mineola, NY: Dover Publication,
Inc.

Galloway, A. (2006). Protocol vs Institutionalization. In W. Chun & T. Keenan

(Eds.), New Media Old Media: A History in Theory Reader (pp. 187-198).
Routledge.

Galloway, A. R. (2013)a. The interface effect. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Galloway, A. R. (2013)b. “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post

-Fordism”. Critical Inquiry, 39(2), 347-366. doi: 10.1086/668529

Galloway, A., & Thacker, E. (2007). The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. University
of Minnesota Press.

Garland, A. (Director). (2014). Ex-Machina [Motion picture on DVD]. United States:

Universal Pictures.

200
Gelderloos, P. (2012, August 02). “How Nonviolence Protects the State”. Retrieved
July 31, 2017, from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos
-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state

Gimple, S. M. (Writer). (2010). The Walking Dead [Television series]. Georgia:

AMC, FOX.

Glenn, C. L., & Cunningham, L. J. (2007, October 08). “The Power of Black Magic:
The Magical Negro and White Salvation in Film”. Retrieved June 19, 2017,
from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0021934707307831

Glock, A. (2015, August 07). “Miley Cyrus Is Just Trying to Save the World”.
Retrieved June19, 2017, from
http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/a15323/miley-cyrus-september-2015/

Gossett, C. (n.d.). Žižek's Trans/gender Trouble. Retrieved January 24, 2018, from
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/Žižeks-transgender-trouble/#!

Green, J., & Pettypiece, S. (2016, December 05). “Wal-Mart joining corporate surge
to protect LGBT employees”. Retrieved June 19, 2017, from
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-corporate-equality-index-lgbt-
employees20161205-story.html

Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural

bodies. New York: New York University Press.

Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hall, D. E. (2005). Queer theories. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Herman, E. L. (2015). “Tranarchism: transgender embodiment and destabilization of

the state”. Contemporary Justice Review, 18(1), 76-92.
doi:10.1080/10282580.2015.1008946

Holmes, S. (2014). Rhetorical Allegorithms in Bitcoin. Enculturation: a journal of

rhetoric, writing, and culture. Retrieved from
http://enculturation.net/rhetoricalallegorithms

Hughes, A., & Hughes, A. (Directors). (2010). The Book of Eli [Motion picture on
DVD].United States: Alcon Entertainment.

201
Humphrey, T. (Writer). (2017, October 01). Wisdom of the Crowd [Television series].
CBS.

Invisible Committee. (2007). The Coming Insurrection. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.

Invisible Committee. (2014). To Our Friends. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jameson, F. (2012). “Postmodernism and the Market”. In Žižek, S. (Ed.).

(2012). Mapping ideology. New York, NY: Verso.

Kessel, J. M., & Mozur, P. (2017, September 18). How Facebook Is Changing Your
Internet. The New York Times. Retrieved October 9, 2017, from
https://www.nytimes.com/video/technology/100000005082185/how
-facebook-is- changing-your-internet.html

Kittler, F. A. (2006). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ.

Press.

Krips, H. (n.d.). "Politics of Overconformity: Bartleby Meets Žižek." Communication

and Critical/Cultural Studies 9.3 (2012) Print.

Lacan, J. (2015). On the Names-of-the-Father (B. Fink, Trans.). John Wiley & Sons.

Latour, B. (2004). “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern”. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225-248. doi:10.1086/421123

Lazzarato, M. (2014). Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of

Subjectivity. MIT Press.

Lee, F. (2017, July 10). Kin Aesthetics // Excommunicate Me from the Church of
Social Justice. Retrieved August 25, 2017, from
http://www.catalystwedco.com/blog/2017/7/10/kin-aesthetics
-excommunicate-me-from-the-church-of-social-justice

Ligotti, T. (2011). The conspiracy against the human race: a contrivance of horror.
New York: Hippocampus Press.

Lipari, L. (2012). “Rhetoric's Other: Levinas, Listening, and the Ethical

Response”. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 45(3), 227-245.
doi:10.5325/philrhet.45.3.0227

Longo, L. (2017, January 01). “Transgender People Face Astounding Inequality,

Study Shows”. Retrieved June 19, 2017, from
202
 http://www.care2.com/causes/transgender-people-face-astounding-inequality
-study-shows.html

MacDougall, R. (Director). (1959). The World, the Flesh, and the Devil [Motion
picture]. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

[Recorded by Macklemore, R. Lewis, & M. Lambert]. (2012). Same Love [MP3].

Ryan Lewis.

Manovich, L. (2010). The language of new media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Marcuse, M. (2015). “Liberation from the Affluent Society”. In D. G. Cooper

(Ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation (pp. 139-151). New York, NY: Verso.

McCarthy, C. (2006). The Road. US: Knopf.

McGregor, J. (2016, April 05). “Analysis | Corporate America's embrace of gay rights
has reached a stunning tipping point”. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/onleadership/wp/2016/04/05/corpora
teamericas-embrace-of-gay-rights-has-reached-a-stunning-tipping
point/?utm_term=.b525799c3d5e

McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press.

McRuer, R. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence”. In Hall,

D. E., Jagose, A., Bebell, A., & Potter, S. (Eds.). (2013). The Routledge queer
studies reader. London: Routledge.

Michelstaedter, C., Valentino, R. S., Blum, C. S., & Depew, D. J. (2004). Persuasion
& rhetoric. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Miller, G. (Director). (2015). Mad Max: fury road [Motion picture on DVD]. Roma:
Warner home video.

Mooney, J. (2015, June 15). “OITNB's Ruby Rose Schools Us on Gender Fluidity”.
Retrieved June 19, 2017, from http://www.elle.com/culture/movies
-tv/a28865/ruby-rose-oitnb/

Morris, C. E. (2015). “Contexts Critic, Invisible Traditions, and Queering Rhetorical

History”. Quarterly Journal of Speech,101(1), 225-243.
doi:10.1080/00335630.2015.995926

203
Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of
politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nadir, L. (2012, July 23). Poetry, Immigration and the FBI: The Transborder
Immigrant Tool. Retrieved from hyperallergic.com

Narayan, U. “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern

Feminist”. In Harding, S. G. (Ed.). (2004). The feminist standpoint theory
reader: intellectual and political controversies. New York: Routledge.

Nyong'o, T. (2008). Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)?
Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s. Radical History Review,
2008(100), winter 2008, 103-119. doi:https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545
-2007-024

O'Hara, M. E. (2015, December 11). “Miley Cyrus just came out as genderqueer”.
Retrieved June 19, 2017, from https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/miley
-cyrus-genderqueer-foundation/

Payne, A. (Director). (2017). Downsizing. United States: Paramount. Retrieved

November 20, 2017.

Perry, S. (2014). Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Death.
Charleston, WV: Nine-Banded Books.

Pizzolatto, N. (Writer). (2014, January 12). True Detective [Television series]. HBO.

Pizzolatto, N. (Writer). (2014, January 12). S01e01 [Television series episode]. In

True Detective. HBO.

Proffitt, J. M., Ekbia, H. R., & McDowell, S. D. (2015). Introduction to the Special
Forum on Monetization of User-Generated Content—Marx Revisited. The
Information Society, 31(1), 1-4.

Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. NC:

Duke University Press.

Raley, R. (2009). Tactical media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rand, E. J. (2008). “An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer,
Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency”. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 94(3), 297
-319. doi:10.1080/00335630802210377

204
Reeves, J. (2013). Temptation and Its Discontents: Digital Rhetoric, Flow, and the
Possible. Rhetoric Review, 32(3), 314-330.
doi:10.1080/07350198.2013.797878

Rodriguez, J. M. (2003). Queer latinidad: identity practices, discursive spaces. New

York and London: New York University Press.

Rorty, R. (2012). “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View”. In

S. Žižek (Ed.), Mapping Ideology (pp. 247-257). New York, NY: Verso.

Sagal, B. (Director). (1971). The Omega Man [Motion picture]. United States:
Warner Bros.

Salamon, G. (2010). Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality.

Columbia University Press.

Samuels, R. (2002). “Žižek's Rhetorical Matrix: The Symptomatic Enjoyment of

Postmodern Academic Writing”. JAC,22(2), 327-354. Retrieved from
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866489

Scott, R. (Director). (2015). The Martian [Motion picture on DVD]. United States:
20th Century Fox.

Sedgwick, E. K. (2008). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press.

Shaviro, S. (2013). “Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of

Real Subsumption”. Retrieved May & June, 2017, from
http://www.eflux.com/journal/46/60070/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-
inefficiency-in-times-of-real-subsumption/

Sheean, M., & Ward, M. (2016). Ancestor. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, Inc.

Sloop, J. M. (2004). Disciplining gender rhetorics of sex identity in contemporary

U.S. culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Smith, N. M. (2015, September 25). “Gay rights activists give their verdict on
Stonewall: 'This film is no credit to the history it purports to portray'”.
Retrieved August 04, 2017, from
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/25/stonewall-film-gay-rights
-activists-give-their-verdict

Spade, D. (2015). Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, &
the Limits of Law. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
205
Stanton, A. (Director). (2008). Wall-E [Motion picture on DVD]. United States:
Disney.

Streitfeld, D. (2017, October 12). Tech Giants, Once Seen as Saviors, Are Now
Viewed as Threats. The New York Times. Retrieved October 16, 2017, from
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/tech-giants-threats.html

Stryker, S. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix:

Performing Transgender Rage”. In Stryker, S., & Whittle, S. (Eds.).
(2006). Transgender studies reader (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Routledge.

Thacker, E. (2011). In the Dust of this Planet. Winchester, UK: O Books.

Tiqqun. (2010)a. The Theory of Bloom. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-bloom-theory

Tiqqun. (2010)b. Introduction to Civil War (A. R. Galloway & J. E. Smith, Eds.). Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Tyldum, M. (Director). (2016). Passengers [Motion picture on DVD]. United States:

Colombia Pictures.

U.S.Cong. (2017). The Net Neutrality Debate: Access to Broadband Networks (A. A.
Gilroy, Author) [Cong. Rept.]. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research
Service.

Vasudevan, A. (2017). The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting. Verso.

Vaughn, S., & Luna, J. (2013). Alex Ada. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, Inc.

Vincent, S., & Brackley, J. (Writers). (2015, June 14). Humans [Television series].
AMC.

Von Trier, L. (Director). (2009). Antichrist[Motion picture on DVD]. Denmark:

Zentropa Entertainment.

Von Trier, L. (Director). (2011). Melancholia[Motion picture on DVD]. Denmark:

Zentropa Entertainment.

Von Trier, L. (Director). (2013). Nymphomaniac: Vol. I[Motion picture on DVD].

Denmark: Zentropa Entertainment.

206
Von Trier, L. (Director). (2013). Nymphomaniac: Vol. II[Motion picture on DVD].
Denmark: Zentropa Entertainment.

Vozick-Levinson, S. (2015, November 02). “Against Me!'s Laura Jane Grace Talks
'Gender Is Over' Jersey”. Retrieved June 19, 2017, from
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/against-me-s-laura-jane-grace-talks
-gender-is-over-jersey-giveaway-20151102

Wachowski, L., & Wachowski, L. (Directors). (1999). The Matrix[Motion picture on

Blu Ray]. United States: Warner Bros.

Wark, M. (2004). A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Weiler, M. (1993). “Ideology, Rhetoric and Argument”. Retrieved June 19, 2017,
from
https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/2466

West, I. (2008). “Debbie Mayne's Trans/scripts: Performative Repertoires in Law and

Everyday Life”. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 5(3), 245-263.
Retrieved from
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14791420802206841?journalCo
de=rccc20

Westbrook, Laurel, and Kristen Schilt. "Doing Gender, Determining Gender." Gender
& Society 28.1 (2014): 32-57. Web.

Whitaker, Brian. Unspeakable love: gay and lesbian life in the Middle East. London:
Saqi, 2006. Print.

White, C. (2015). We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data. Brooklin:
Melville House.

Wittig, M. (1992). The straight mind and other essays. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Zapffe, P. W. (2017). “The Last Messiah” (G. R. Tangenes, Trans.). Philosophy Now,
(120). Retrieved June & July, from
https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah.

Žižek, S. (2008)a. Enjoy your symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Vol.
26). London: Routledge.

Žižek, S. (2008)b. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York, NY: Picador.

207
Žižek, S. (2011). Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the
(Mis)Use of a Notion. Verso.

Žižek, S. (2012). “The Spectre of Ideology”. In Žižek, S. (Ed.). (2012). Mapping

ideology. New York, NY: Verso.

Žižek, S. (2015). Absolute recoil: towards a new foundation of dialectical

materialism. London: Verso.

Žižek, S. (2016, August 01). The Sexual Is Political. Retrieved January 24, 2018,
from http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-sexual-is-political/

Zolkos, M. (2011). Violent Affects: Nature and the Feminine in Lars von Trier's
Antichrist. Parrhesia,(13), 2011th ser., 177-189. Retrieved November 20,
2017.

208