The Queer Ontology of Digital Method

Author(s): Benjamin Haber

Source: Women's Studies Quarterly , FALL/WINTER 2016, Vol. 44, No. 3/4, QUEER
METHODS (FALL/WINTER 2016), pp. 150-169
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

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The Queer Ontology of Digital Method

Benjamin Haber

Abstract: This article looks at the possibilities of a generative queer en-

gagement with emergent digital and calculative technologies. While most
queer writing on methodology has involved discursive and deconstruc-
tive interventions into qualitative methods - rejecting the quantitative
outright as always already deterministic - I complicate the qualitative/
quantitative distinction and advocate for new experimentation with digi-
tal networks of everyday practice. In addition, by highlighting uncomfort-
able resonances between queerly indeterminate epistemologies and the
postnormative and nonrepresentational sociocorporal modulations of
both "knowing capitalism" and the biodigital sciences, I suggest a reflexive
réévaluation of the politics of queer method and a realignment of critical
attention.

For many in the field, the idea of queer method will always sound hope-
lessly discordant - an awkward codification of a deliberately unstable and
ontologically interdisciplinary discourse. If academic method describes a
procedure, a codification of disciplinarily grounded rules, then we might
imagine that queer thought would thrive mostly through provocation and
deconstruction, not the building of a new canon. Indeed, to the limited
extent queer method has been articulated, it has typically been to bring
queer theory to method - subjecting the epistemological assumptions
of fieldwork and textual analysis to critical scrutiny. While this tendency
to mobilize queerness as a critical verb preserves maximum theoretical
malleability while usefully complicating the assumptions of academic
systemization, there is a limit to the political efficacy of queering existing

©2016
WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 44: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 201 6) by Benjamin Haber.
All rights reserved.

150

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 151

methodologies. Of course there will never be a queer method, but the

time has come to shift: from queering methods to experimentally using
methods to more widely distribute queer politics, sociality, and sensibility.
My focus here is encouraging queer digital experimentation in the
practices of the everyday by appropriating, hacking, and even construct-
ing networks of social, corporeal, and environmental sensors. While I'm
not arguing that the built architectures of sensing and tracking data -
networked, embodied devices like the Fitbit, ambient environmental
sensors like Nest, or the oedipally named, versatile sensors of Mother by
Sen.se - are queer, the increasingly pervasive underlying technology pro-
vides possibilities for distributing a queer politics of ontological intercon-
nection and indeterminacy. This sense of possibility, however, rests on an
uncomfortable resonance between data capitalism and queer ontology
that requires a critically engaged and reflexive methodology.
Reaching into the beyond of biopolitics (Clough and Willse 2011),
I look at capitalism and digital media after "the normal." As queer theo-
rists continue to debate the value of critical orientations to normativity
(Wiegman and Wilson 2015; Halberstam 2015), I explore the emergent
postnormative, where the modulation and capitalization of bodies and
populations rests less on broad cultural and technical averaging. In sug-
gesting this realignment of queer attention, I do not discount the strik-
ing persistence of wildly inequitable distributions of violence and death
through the calcified norms of sexual, racial, classed, and otherwise corpo-
really marked social violence. Rather, I hope to galvanize queer critical ca-
pacity toward new forms of sociocorporeal modulation and classification
and encourage experimentation with those quantitative and digital meth-
ods typically dismissed or ignored by queer theorists. By foregrounding
queer experimentation with digital methods, I look to balance an oppo-
sitional epistemology with the more active development of "transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities" (Haraway 1990,
154). How might we create new open-ended circuits using emergent tech-
nologies to proliferate forms of relationality and bring queer notions of
ontological indeterminacy and interconnection into consciousness?
While the notion of using digitally processed quantitative data to pro-
mote a queer indeterminacy might sound counterintuitive to some, it is a
strategy that reflects the intensified biopolitical modulation that defines
our age. While submitting "our" data to networks gives us free (Facebook)
or subsidized (23andMe1) products, we rarely have access to these pref-

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152 Benjamin Haber

erences, traces, or bodily processes. Therefore, while this networked data

gets used by corporate entities to serve us ads or design our drugs, we are
blocked from reimagining its social utility except in highly circumscribed
conditions.2

In part, I'm advocating for queer theory to take a hard look at the quan-
titative methodologies of what Nigel Thrift calls "knowing capitalism," the
increasingly big business of studying and modulating the everyday (2005).
Notably, the first stop of capitalisms "micro-sociological turn" (Thrift
2012, 148) is sex and relationality. Social connection is an almost unfath-
omably massive enterprise, and companies like Facebook, Twitter - and a
million upstarts - have a voracious appetite for difference. Its worth bald-
ly stating: these are sociological companies with a narrowly instrumen-
tal focus involved in not just knowing but actively modulating social life.
And as I have argued elsewhere, companies like Facebook have monetized
queer notions of sociality: the mutability of identity through the event and
over time, the centrality of nonfamilial community in the understanding
of the self, the celebration of recognition and visibility as core strategies of
political engagement, and the interest in the nontextual, performative, and
ephemeral (Haber 2016). Robert Payne has similarly suggested a queer
modality of network culture that promotes a "multiplication and com-
plication of intimate relations, the promiscuous commingling of self and
other, self with self, user with interface, public with private, individual with
social, and leisure with labor" (2014, 2).
While these are infrastructures that many are already familiar with,
more intriguing and concerning for me are still-emergent computational
systems that attempt to build on the randomness-inflected development
of life itself - circuitry that strives toward the complexity and plasticity of
neural systems in the brain. There are even suggestions that biodigital sys-
tems will increasingly try to harness the "realm of extension and thought at
the inanimate level" (Parisi 2012, 45), to try, in other words, to monetize
the indeterminacy and potentiality at the heart of all matter. In short, while
I am arguing that queer theorists should take advantage of the indetermi-
nate potential of digital networks, we must also sharpen our critical voices,
as capitalism is increasingly able to profit through an alignment with queer
ontologies of sociality, embodiment, and materiality.
Queer method must be a witness to violence, and it must be performa-
tively involved in the creation of new worlds. Knowing capitalism - much
like the genealogy of queer indeterminacy I draw from - is increasingly

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 153

concerned with the above and below of consciousness, the strange and
monstrous assemblages that bypass our phenomenological experience of
Cartesian boundaries. I draw connections between queer writing about
materiality and biological systems with technoscientific investments also
inspired by the indeterminacy of life and matter. I also look to blur and
break down boundaries between queer and feminist theory, a split that has
been hopelessly overdetermined. This is not to say that queer theory and
feminist theory are the same, or that they always get along, but that there
have been important crosscurrents of continuity in rejecting a determined
body, subject, and form of relationality.
I then highlight recent theoretical engagement with the work of Alfred
North Whitehead by media scholar Mark Hansen, as perhaps offering a
vision of this queer methodological potential, and I end with a discussion
of the politics of queer method. With the ascendancy of a conservative
LGBT agenda, including the nationalization of gender-neutral marriage
law and impending changes to military rules allowing trans-identified
folks to serve openly (Cooper 2016; Schaefer et al. 2016), queer ideas
and queer politics have never been more needed, and methodological in-
vention is key here as well. While corporate-owned social networks are
solidifying their hold on the distribution of ideas, we are asked to believe
assurances from Facebook s social scientists that the movement of media

across their proprietary networks has more to do with "individual choice"

than algorithmic predestination (Bakshy, Messing, and Adamie 2015). An
active experimentation with the forms and formulas of digital media, espe-
cially as it increasingly colonizes the depths of the body, is perhaps the key
challenge of queer politics in the twenty-first century.

Social Science after the Internet

The Internet has proliferated opportunities to think and feel sociality and
embodiment: faster and faster we are called to bodies, sexuality, relation-
ships, and identity on multiple platforms, at all hours. With their new
product, called "Boost," dating platform OkCupid promises "a full day of
activity in 15 minutes" and claims that with "extra momentum in our al-
gorithms, well show you to more people, faster." Meanwhile, numerous
third-party apps and artful machines (Roet 2015) exist to automate the
instantly iconic right swipe on Tinder, an app whose effectiveness increas-
es with every friend added and interest liked on Facebook.

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154 Benjamin Haber

Not immune to the data and dollars queerly proliferating across radio
waves and optical fibers, increasing segments of the academy have been
pulled into the orbit of the new digital economy, including my disciplinary
home of sociology. While some have suggested that the breathless atten-
tion and capital flowing to the technologies of data collection and pro-
cessing represent a serious challenge to quantitative sociological methods
(Savage and Burrows 2007), my colleagues and I have argued that big
data also represents the "coming out" of a sociological unconscious that
has long desired the speed of social engineering without representation
(Clough et al. 2015). Largely unable to match the intensity of capitals
digital methods, however, sociology has responded by doubling down on
positivism, empiricism, and representation (Clough 2010; Clough et al.
2015), hoping that this rigorous scientism will hold back the methodolog-
ical and epistemological promiscuity of data capitalism.
While sociology either rejects the analysis of data capitalism as unsci-
entific or struggles to catch up through attempts at data mining and web
scraping, the "datalogical turn" (Clough et al. 2015) highlights both the
fundamental weaknesses of sociological orientations to the data logis-
tics and the usefulness of queer epistemologies in confronting this turn.
For example, with inferential statistics, achieving a representative sample
to generalize about a larger population requires a certain level of survey
participation. This is an increasingly challenging task as response rates de-
cline, requiring ever more complicated statistical techniques to compen-
sate (Savage and Burrows 2007, 890). Contrast this with the always-on
data of environmental sensors and transactional sales data, or the freely
given labor of creating minable media for Facebook or Instagram. As the
production of data points becomes increasingly compulsory in order to
enjoy the benefits of citizenship and commerce, systematic sampling be-
comes unnecessary to make claims about a population.
Because descriptive statistics require knowledge of the entire popula-
tion, they tend to conform to state and national boundaries and rely heav-
ily on snapshot demographic information collected infrequently, usually
census information updated every ten years. For Bruno Latour and his col-
leagues, the disjuncture between the relative simplicity of social scientific
methods of data collection and the complexity of social life has necessitat-
ed theoretical shortcuts - like the division between micro and macro or
individual and structure - that have become fundamental to most socio-

logical work. With the rise of digital data collection, however, these short-

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 155

cuts are no longer as necessary; we can now trace and visualize exactly how
sociality aggregates into form (Latour et al. 2012). While Latour and his
collaborators are enthusiastic about this challenge to sociological ortho-
doxy the politics of this flattening are murky at best.
We can see this with the way that location "is increasingly an important
proxy for all manner of sociological information; indeed to the extent that
there is no need for other social measures" (Savage and Burrows 2007,
892). If location alone can productively serve as a social proxy for charac-
teristics like race and class, imagine both the power and the erasure that
can occur in combining location with purchasing data and social media
information - blackness can be policed, managed, and jailed without ever
calling it race. However, if data can flatten, queerness can tease apart. The
queer epistemological troubling of predictable demographic populations
(showing, for example, how race or sexuality can be constituted in an
event), and the feminist legacy of complicating the ways that demographic
characteristics are always already bound up with each other,3 allows for
political and nuanced reads of location without the erasure of tracing or
the slow vagueness of sociological notions of structure.
The datalogical turn, however, troubles an even more fundamental part
of the sociological project: the finding of durable and predictable social
patterns. While sociology has long had a complicated relationship with
the idea of the social fact, claim-making about patterned sociality based
on past data remains at the heart of most quantitative sociological inqui-
ry. The goal of more process-oriented data systems is typically more fu-
turai, not telling us what has been the case but both showing and engaging
with social change. Facebook is far more interested in how people will be
using the Internet than how they have been using it, and it uses algorithmic
tweaks to preempt or prehend the social reality to come rather than pre-
dict social conditions based on slices of an already outdated social life that
has been artificially frozen.
In addition, the nonrepresentational sociality of data capitalism, which
is to say a sociality that does not always flow through the figure of a human
subject, should offer new opportunities for queer theorists who have long
bristled at the rather singular way that sociality is conceived in sociology -
as the conscious reflections of individual humans taken collectively. The
incredible queerness of the human body, reaching across time and space
and networked with nonhuman organisms, is brutally oversimplified in
the still-too-often-mobilized dichotomy of determinism and construe-

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156 Benjamin Haber

tionism. The same data that makes visible the complex entanglements that
make up a human can be mobilized to sell products and services and to
police and brutalize marginalized bodies. It is critical that queer theorists
do not leave this landscape to those who wish to exceed the capacities of
subjectivity in order to exploit the acute vulnerabilities of networked life.
In short, queer theory's interdisciplinary origins, longstanding skep-
ticism of Cartesian empiricism, and political orientation toward the
indeterminate will allow it to play an important role in the unfolding meth-
odological battles of social science meets big business (Burrows and Sav-
age 2014; boyd and Crawford 201 1). But for this to happen, queer theory
must seriously engage with quantitative systems of worldly awareness -
and not only through critical resistance. I want to begin to imagine what
queer method might look like beyond a discursive tool kit to complicate
the friendliest of qualitative methods - a queer method that takes on the
violence, exclusion, and homogenization of calculative infrastructures in
the closed systems of data capitalism but is reflexive enough to recognize
some of its values embedded in them as well.

In part, the lack of queer engagement with quantitative modes of anal-

ysis stems from the gradual movement of critical queer voices from the
disciplinary social sciences to the small but growing world of interdisci-
plinary gender and sexuality studies. In The Reorder of Things , Roderick
Ferguson frames the creation of ethnic and women's studies departments
as in part "power's attempts to archive previously excluded subjects and
epistemes" (2012, 33). Ferguson suggests that the institutionalization
of sexuality in interdisciplinary fields is wrapped up with "contemporary
globalization's ingestion of forms of difference" (223) and has encouraged
"subtle and silent transformations" (226) in both the forms of knowledge
and the subjects producing that knowledge. In other words, the academy
has been metabolizing the ruptural potential of social movements through
institutionalization long before Facebook developed a taste for difference.
This institutionalization has of course had positive effects, codifying
supportive spaces for historically marginalized scholars and scholarship.
But it has also at least partially neutralized the challenge that queer epis-
temology poses to the disciplines specifically and the university system
as a whole. Ferguson suggests that the permanence and formality that
institutionality brings can lead to a focused isolation from other modes
of difference and a generalized domestication, and we can also see this in
terms of method. Freed from having to engage with the demands of being

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 157

a state science (i.e., empiricism, instrumentalization, replicability), queer

theorists have largely dismissed or ignored the quantitative.

What Is Queer about Queer Method Now?

Perhaps the only book-length, comprehensive look at what it would mean

to talk about queer method in the social sciences is Kath Browne and Cath-
erine J. Nash s Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories
and Social Science Research (2010). Notably, quantitative method is largely
absent from this collection, appearing only in the last chapter. This is not
surprising - to the limited extent to which "queer method" has been more
fully developed as a critical practice, it has almost exclusively focused on
qualitative methods, particularly challenging the taken-for-granted modes
of representing bodies and subjects in the social sciences. As Browne and
Nash note in the introduction, there has long been a presumption that the
quantitative is simply incompatible with queer epistemology:

Given how queer approaches undermine the once stable sexual (and
gendered) subject now conceived as fluid, blurred, and contingent, the
prevalence of qualitative methods in queer scholarship is perhaps un-
surprising (Gamson 2003, Plummer 2005). Arguably, it is illogical to
"count" subjects once one has argued that a "countable subject" does
not exist - the methodological problematic we described at the begin-
ning of this chapter and one haunting qualitative as well as quantitative
approaches. (2010, ll)

While Browne and Nash acknowledge that the queer challenges to rep-
resentation are as applicable to qualitative methods as quantitative ones,
there is clearly something about numbers and counting that poses partic-
ular challenges to queer epistemology. In part, this stems from queer the-
ory's origins in the humanities and the humanist sensibilities of many of
those writing from this framework. There is also considerable dread for
many in the academy over the larger shift to quantitative methodologies,
especially in disciplines like English literature that have until recently been
somewhat sheltered from creeping quantification. But the issues that the
authors of Queer Methods and Methodologies bring up - questioning the
linearity of ethnographic narrative, interrogating the stable identity of both
writer and research subject and complicating the relationship between the
two, and insisting on a relational and political orientation to fieldwork,

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158 Benjamin Haber

among other insightful critiques - are just as necessary for quantifica-

tion, if not more. Indeed, Browne s essay, the only one about quantitative
method, suggests many different ways that quantification can be queered,
noting the qualitative narration that frames quantitative method by high-
lighting the contingent and relational ways that questions are constructed
and results are interpreted (2010, 235; also see Clough 1992). But this
queer treatment of quantitative method is rare, and the comfort queer the-
orists have felt with the qualitative (troubled but redeemable) also needs
interrogating.
Indeed, qualitative and quantitative work has more in common than
those who reject the determinism of quantitative methods would like to
believe. In sociology, despite a more critical reputation, the qualitative
portraiture of ethnography has frequently worked in concert with sta-
tistical methods to support neoliberal intervention and disinvestment
(Clough 2010). While qualitative work is generally seen as capturing the
kind of nuance and thick description that quantitative work can gloss over,
knowing capitalism finds ways to quantitatively collect and process the
ephemeral and atmospheric, that very "thickness" that ethnography seeks
to portray (Clough et al. 2015; Haber 2016). And in parallel to the key role
of qualitative narrative in collecting and analyzing quantitative research,
qualitative phenomena like images, video, conversation, movement, and
emotion are subjected to increasingly sophisticated real-time computa-
tional analysis.
One real difference, however, is that while qualitative analysis now rou-
tinely nods toward an understanding of the impossibility of the detached
observer, most quantitative work in the social sciences still has the sheen of
noninterventionist, objective, empirical truth. And here too we find com-
mon ground between queer epistemology and the calculative technologies
of knowing capitalism: both reject observation without influence. Many of
the writers in Queer Methods and Methodologies reflect on the ways that
queer research is always already social modulation and therefore political
action (Boellstorff 2010, 178; Nash 2010). In contrast to qualitative social
scientific work, where acknowledgement of the entanglement between
researcher and research is often pro forma or bashful, queer theorists' ex-
plicitly political orientation to research should oblige them to get involved
in the tight feedback loops between understanding and influencing, loops
that increasingly get completed prior to any conscious awareness of the
human. The Fitbit, for example, interprets GPS data and heart rate as a

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 159

proxy for a variety of fitness information and feeds that information to the
user as biometrie incitement and risk coding. While queers must reject
and critically interrogate the "liberal eugenics of lifestyle programming"
(Puar 2012a, 153), the possibilities of politically driven feedback loops of
quantitative sensing and response have barely been explored.
Since the publication of Queer Methods and Methodologies , there has
been new recognition that queer encounters with quantification do not
have to stop with rethinking the questions and interpretations, the before
and after of data. It is time for queer theorists to see data as more than a
problem of representation and to engage with the relational possibilities
of quantification beyond deterministic categorization. This engagement is
long overdue given the increasing resonance between the queer politics
of ontological indeterminacy and emergent techno-scientific understand-
ings of embodiment and materiality.

Ontology after the Normal

Responding in part to the limitations of a discursive politics built upon the

implicit corporal malleability of social constructionism, queer and fem-
inist theorists have been articulating a weirder and less determined un-
derstanding of embodiment for some time. As heralded through a variety
of turns and critical réévaluations (see, for example, Clough and Halley
2007; Coole and Frost 2010; Mortimer- Sandilands and Erickson 2010),
these more complicated ontologies understand a body as more distribut-
ed, less human, and dynamically undone through strange temporalities
encompassing food, plastic, and distant relatives (Landecker 201 1). Both
drawing from and intervening in the natural sciences, this new attention
to matter and embodiment has produced exciting new interventions in
fields like physics (Barad 2007), biology (Wilson 2010; 2015), and neu-
roscience (Pitts-Taylor 2016). While fruitful, moving queerness from its
discursive and deconstructive roots to a more generative and ecological
ontology has provided the politics of queer indeterminacy with some un-
comfortable mirrors.

The scientific uptake of a postnormal biological ontology has led to

a productive réévaluation in feminist and queer social theory of the in-
herent political value of indeterminacy. The increasing body of research
highlighting the strong, temporally strange "epi" (i.e., socioenvironmen-
tal) influence on genetics (Landecker 201 1) has both usefully complicat-

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160 Benjamin Haber

ed deterministic ideas about genetic inheritance (Lock 2005) and lead to

troubling suggestions of state management of pregnant bodies (Bateson
2001, 932-33). While the notion of the body as an autopoietic system
guarding against the harmful outside world is increasingly superseded by
a queerer, more flexible looping process of body formation in action, the
politics of this move are unsettled as well (Maturana and Varela 1980).
Victoria Pitts-Taylor, for example, has explored how plastic notions of the
brain can be smoothly resonant with a "neoliberal logic of self-care and
responsibility" (2010, 639), while Catherine Malabou looks at the trauma
of war and the ways that brain plasticity and an ontological openness can
be radically destructive to subjects (2012). While scientists are just begin-
ning to recognize the vital role of nonhuman cells in regulating the body,
once speculative moves to queer the notion of the subject beyond the
human, bounded body, or even the organism (Clough 2012) are becom-
ing increasingly widespread. This opens up possibilities for new alliances
and deeper connections as well as new ground for military and biomedical
intervention and modulation (Cooper 2008).
The interest in indeterminacy in the life sciences finds increasing paral-
lels in the computer sciences. More precisely, the biodigital is converging
in ways that render the distinction less meaningful as the body s capacity
is leveraged, for example, by creating rewritable digital data storage in live
cells (Bonnet, Subsoontorn, and Endy 2012). There is also the growing
field of machine learning; notable in particular are "neural" systems of par-
allel algorithms, inspired by the stochastic and plastic human brain, which
learn how to perform tasks like scanning "800 million people to find a sin-
gle face in 5 seconds" (Hemsoth 2015).
More speculative are the moves to harness indeterminacy at the small-
est scales of matter. Nanotechnologies involve computational bioengi-
neering of materials "before they become qualified in a specific form or
function" (Parisi 2012, 38). For Parisi, this is the extension of affect, that
realm of precognitive capacity, away from life and the organism in order to
see an indeterminate potential at the heart of all matter. Parisi writes of the
futurai potential of "programmable matter" designed to operate in a specu-
lative environment of emergent relations and unknown equations (40).
This is an indeterminacy with vast potential for instrumentalized capital-
ization - a paradoxical indeterminacy where "nano-ergonomic control
indeed leaves nothing to approximation and yet its precise design remains
infinitely open," such that nanotech is "almost designed to remain exact

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 161

but uncertain" (46). This vision is of capitalism well beyond the normal, a
new kind of postprobabilistic modulation where "if control is investing in
chaos, it is because it is working to grasp the randomness" (37).
While the technoscientific uptake of ontological indeterminacy re-
quires an ongoing interrogation of the queer political project, it also sug-
gests a unique opportunity for both biopolitical critique and, essentially,
queer experimentation. As the tracking and sensing technologies of the
everyday rearticulate embodiment and environment, queerness can more
forcefully articulate a vision of indeterminacy that whisks away from capi-
talization and is bent toward thoughtful interconnection and the perverse
proliferation of pleasures and expressions.

Queerness and Digital Method

In recent years a number of artists and academics have begun to direct

queer energy toward the digital. In "Queer OS," Kara Keeling shares my
sense of the political stakes and the important role of queer thought in
interrogating digital technologies:

Queer OS names a way of thinking and acting with, about, through,

among, and at times even in spite of new media technologies and other
phenomena of mediation. It insists upon forging and facilitating un-
common, irrational, imaginative, and/ or unpredictable relationships
between and among what currently are perceptible as living beings and
the environment in the interest of creating value (s) that facilitate just
relations. (2014, 154)

Perhaps the most critical task of this new spirit of inquiry and creation
will be a look at the technical structures and materiality of digital systems.
While most queer digital work has focused on social and cultural trans-
formations experienced by the users of these products, new research is
showing the value of queer thought in the creation of technical systems.
To highlight just one example of the digital queer experimental move, we
could look to Zach Blas, an artist and academic whose work includes the
creation of transCoder, an open API built upon queer slang to create what
he calls a "queer programming anti-language" (2013). However, while this
kind of work is increasingly common in the arts, engagement with the dig-
ital in queer academia has been limited.

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162 Benjamin Haber

The work of queer digital method involves both invention and the
critical interrogation and reframing of overdetermined technical histo-
ries. In his fascinating portrait of five key figures that have shaped mod-
ern computing, Jacob Gaboury suggests that "queerness is itself inherent
within computational logic" (2013). While all the men Gaboury profiles
are queer, he is careful to define the queerness in computation not around
LGBT identification but rather "as a process of self-shattering rather than
self-fashioning" (2013). It is this self-shattering, or perhaps more specif-
ically a redistribution of the self, that lies at the heart of my vision for a
queer method.
I'm particularly drawn to Mark Hansen s reframing of human agency
through a "radical environmental perspective," which is to say an agency
that is "internally differentiated, dispersed across various scales and oper-
ational divisions, and implicated in and immanent to a total, multi-scalar
cosmology" (2015, 2). In other words, by using Alfred North Whiteheads
process philosophy, Hansen frames the entanglement of human agency
with complex digital networks of data as an opportunity to intensify the
human experience of "worldly sensibility" (5). Hansen seeks to decenter
the human agent not by marginalizing consciousness but by enhancing it
through a reengagement with the rich, distributed context from which it
arises - to "complexify the human by multiplying its connections" (16-
17,23).
Importantly, our consciousness is already embedded in this mesh - the
televisions "hopes for a continuous body-machine attachment" through
"mechanizing the autoaffective circuit" has quickly found its expression
in the smartphone (Clough 2000, 70). But the sensory and tracking
data of the smartphone is inaccessible, trapped in "highly specific, closed-
loop circuits between the past behavior of consumers and their probable
future activity" (Hansen 2015, 70). For example, the indeterminate po-
tential of Facebook for open-ended queer modulation is instead instru-
mentalized in the form of advertisements and the maintenance of eyeball
engagement.
For Hansen, the key political task is wrenching the open potential of
media away from this instrumentalization. What this "liberation of the
surplus of sensibility'" (2015, 70) might accomplish is queerly vague for
Hansen - '"humanistic' in some very broad and general sense ... a height-
ened intensity of human experience or some other enhancement of human
life" (70). A redistribution of human sensibility into the world seems to

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 163

suggest something like a politicized environmental consciousness/ but

more open access to media outside the priorities of capital and the state
has intriguing queer potential.
For Hansen it is performance that allows for a new kind of subject -
humans get repositioned as epistemologically central in an ontology in
which they are constituted as marginal only through a performative, re-
lational practice that frames digital media through the aesthetic (2015,
260). The aesthetic is the place where we can access a sensibility beyond
the phenomenological, where the instrumental can be overloaded with af-
fective relationality. That Hansen ends with the performative seems fitting
for queer theory,5 where performativity has long been central as epistemol-
ogy. Rather than a politics that rests on the deconstructive possibilities of
performance, Hansens performativity feeds messy queer entanglements
into consciousness and continually makes a new subject through the on-
tological becoming of the world.
This is why the indeterminacy at the heart of the bleeding edge of
capitalism needs not only critique but methodological co-optation. The
unfathomable amount of data that visualizes an incredible diversity of
relational forms and ontological interconnections across weird tempo-
ralities needs to be performatively engaged by an experimental queer
methodology.

The Politics of Queer Method

Revisiting Donna Haraway s strikingly prescient celebration of the cyborg

reminds us that queer imaginations of the digital must simultaneous-
ly hold the new forms of violence and death that concomitantly emerge
with new social possibilities. And there is no doubt that quantification has
long been and largely continues to be used to kill, corral, and brutalize al-
ready marginalized populations, with brown and black bodies in particular
frequently marked as data for the criminal justice system.6 Quantitative
sociology has a long history of serving as a state science, using statistical
empiricism to survey populations and "bring their practices in line with
mass production and mass consumption' (Clough 2010, 630). Now data
capitalism has largely replaced the social sciences as the central instrument
of state violence and modulation, an outsourcing of labor to corporations
that - unlike public universities - have the added benefit of not requiring
ongoing state subsidy.7 What is more, the technocratic affect of knowing

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164 Benjamin Haber

capitalism naturalizes the inequitable distribution of violence and possi-

bility as neutral and inevitable.
However, even in critique, queer theory needs a more nuanced un-
derstanding of calculation that moves beyond warnings about surveil-
lance and control to consider data as a productive force in the ongoing
development of subjects and populations. While the qualitative methods
that queer theorists have been the most comfortable with begin with our
phenomenological experience, privileging spatially discrete bodies and
subjects with temporal continuity, emergent forms of quantitative digi-
tal method highlight embodiment and sociality in process. All methods,
those understood as quantitative and those called qualitative, can be used
to categorize and determine, to make and unmake populations, and to de-
termine life chances. But in dismissing quantification we miss new possi-
bilities for both articulating and cultivating queer circuits of connection
and sensation.

Of course, much violence and exclusion flows through representa-

tional frames and gets articulated through categories presumed by many
to be both obvious and immutable. So, of course, we must continue as
queer theorists to highlight and critique the intersectional violence that
works through identity and identification. However, digital technologies
also lodge an incipient race, class, sexuality, gender, ability, and capaci-
ty in more complicated bodies, assemblages of flesh and silicone. These
networks of difference and exclusion need articulation of their becoming
before they've been brought into consciousness, where "the bodily and
affective remain immanent, not passed into knowledge " (Chung 2011, 279;
emphasis in original).
In his study of cell phone use in India, Amit Rai has focused on raced
and gendered intensities, not on the order of discourse and signification
(2012; 2015). Rai highlights the "everyday practice of 'jugaaď or frugal
innovation" of Indian cell phone users (2015, 968), the kind of creative in-
tervention into emergent networks that I have called for as queer method.
For Rai, white supremacy has partially refracted into "new and yet gene-
alogically continuous and topologically plastic strategies" (2012, 68) and
thus needs to be confronted with "new experimental practices of racial
becoming" (73).
Queer politics needs new strategies to encounter the distributed vio-
lence, networked prior to cognitive awareness, that still leaves marks on
the body and unjusdy distributes life chances across populations. My hope

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 The Queer Ontology of Digital Method 165

is that these strategies comingle with the brilliant potentiality of queer dig-
ital invention, a generative encountering of the world in its horrible, beau-
tiful becoming.

Benjamin Haber is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and
a digital fellow at the Center for the Humanities. His dissertation, "The Queer Allure
of Data: Digital Capacities of the Social Body," is a cultural and material exploration
of emergent infrastructures of social and corporeal data through a queer theoretical
framework.

Notes

1. 23andMes signature products price has decreased 90 percent in five years,

and is now sold at a loss, because "the real value is in its data" (Herper 2013).
2. For more on the conditions under which academics are allowed access to

corporate data sets, see my review of Uncharted (Haber 2015).

3. See Puar 20 1 2b for more on the productive interface between intersectional-
ity and assemblage theory.
4. "Environmental" for me includes those "other" human bodies that constitute

a rather central position within the networks that comprise our subjecthood
and corporeality. Though, curiously, the bodies of other humans are largely
absent in Hansens book.

5. It is worth noting that Hansen at no point characterizes his work as queer.

6. Examples are too numerous to list, but consider the use of Facebook by the
police (Kelly 2012).
7. At least not directly through budget and appropriations. In addition to tax
breaks, the largest digital companies receive infrastructural support tailored
to their specific needs. For a striking example of this at Amazon, see Kang
2016.

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