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Title: Identity In Crisis Author: baedan Date: summer 2012 Language: en Topics: crisis, critique, identity, queer, pornography, austerity, reproduction Source: authors’ manuscript, baedan — journal of queer nihilism, issue 1
The following lecture was presented at an anarchist conference held in
Milwaukee in May of 2011. In the wake of the defeated anti-austerity
struggle months earlier in Wisconsin, the Crisis Conference was
organized as a space for anarchists to theorize intervention into the
unfolding crisis and the nascent resistance to austerity.
While economists, politicians and technocrats of all varieties endlessly
speak of this or that detail of the crisis, they remain caught up in
diagnosing what they perceive as a periodic crisis of the capitalist
mode of production. What goes unspoken is that all the various crises of
production, consumption and accumulation are simply minor breakdowns
within a systematic process that confronts us as the domination of our
very lives. This latter is itself a great crisis, one born from the
moment we were dispossessed of our ways of being and accumulated as
workers, and which in our view constitutes the fundamental crisis of
alienation and production within industrial civilization.
The same process which removes us from the world and makes us into
workers also renders us irrelevant as workers. Through generations of
violence, our ancestors were destroyed as living beings and recreated as
a pool of labor-power. The products of the labor of each successive
generation form the structures that affirm capital and render future
labor-power redundant. And thus, the so-called industrial reserve army
becomes a lazarus layer of surplus population, irrelevant to yet
hopelessly reliant on the means of production for survival.
To put this yet another way, the current crisis cannot be viewed as a
result of the actions of a class of greedy bankers, unscrupulous lenders
or even a result of the concentration of fortune in the hands of a
ruling class. Rather, we have to view our current situation as the
inevitable outcome of alienated labor — the process by which our
activity and ability to reproduce ourselves is taken from us and used to
dominate our lives. All of the energy that is routed into production
that is not our own congeals to form a system of apparatuses that become
the only — and increasingly alienated — means by which reproduction is
possible, alienating us from any possibilities to live outside the
capitalist system. The continued existence of the capitalist mode of
production is contingent upon the reproduction of the alienated self.
While the analysis of reproduction by Marx (and by many Marxists)
focuses on this as taking place in the sphere outside of work where the
various activities necessary to sustain the workforce’s lifeforce are
carried out, we will argue that the relative disappearance of labor from
the industrial sphere coincides with the appearance of work’s logic in
every aspect of life. The reproduction of the self, then, becomes a
primary productive operation rather than a mere secondary support to the
productive process.
We’ll quote Marx in writing:
“Proletarian” must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing
other than “wage-labourer,” the man who produces and valorises
“capital,” and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes
superfluous to the need for valorisation.
The primacy of this throwing-on-the-street exposes the fundamental
crisis of subjectivity under capital: the collapse of the worker’s
identity. It is from this position — that of the street — that we will
begin our analysis.
Though we are continually further removed from the means to provide for
ourselves, we cannot view this situation as simply a crisis of this
particular mode of production, when it is the very crisis of living
within class society. Our irrelevance in the process of production and
the misery of self-reproduction is not an abstraction, but a reality
that haunts and animates our daily experience.
In Wisconsin’s anti-austerity struggle of early 2011, we can witness a
particularly apparent aspect of the process of expulsion and
immiseration that has been unfolding across the globe for decades.
Politicians are quite honest when they claim that the system can no
longer afford to care for the growing surplus populations without the
means to care for themselves. Union contracts are dissolved so as to
more easily cast out irrelevant or unnecessary workers. Funding for
services, education, housing, food, and health are devastated. Teachers
vote for their own pay cuts in order to preserve a dying system. Union
bureaucrats offer to concede every possible aspect of their
constituencies’ livelihoods in a desperate attempt to cling to their own
positions in the bureaucracy. “Representatives” flee their positions
because they can do nothing else.
Policing is expanded and prison terms are dramatically lengthened in
order to quarantine surplus populations. At all levels, the state is
reduced to and exposed as its primary function — the management and
discipline of the growing population of bodies who are entirely
unnecessary to the continuation of the economy. In order to prevent the
chaotic revolt of these bodies, more diffuse and sinister forms of
policing are deployed. Through a whole series of mystifications,
police-logics are internalized within the protest body. The ideals of
democracy, non-violence, and civil disobedience serve to re-route
popular rage as a desperate plea for the continuation of a system that
first exploits us and then, when we are no longer necessary, leaves us
to die.
To this deeper crisis, there is no reformist or progressive answer.
Progress itself has only meant an intensification of the alienation and
the division of labor at the heart of the fundamental crisis of class
society. A renewal of the workers’ movement would be meaningless for
those who might never be able to even be traditional workers — a status
quickly becoming the norm. An expansion of the welfare state can only
act as a band-aid fix, a ploy for social peace. Even if the solutions
offered by the Left were tenable, they’d be entirely undesirable all the
same. When protesters say “this is what democracy looks like” they are
entirely correct — this situation is exactly what democracy looks like:
a shit sandwich, without the bread. For those who constitute the
ever-growing and intrinsic outside to the economy, there is no
integrated operation or mode of protest that can save us. Our choices
are obvious — austerity and the continued immiseration of our daily
lives, or the immediate destruction of the means of production and the
class society they produce.
We will quote at length a communique that circulated during an earlier
struggle against this system of universal and deepening austerity,
“Communique from an Absent Future” by Research and Destroy. This
communique elaborated a theory of the crisis with regard to the
university system in the state of California. It is relevant to our
discussion because it poses the crisis in terms of a crisis of
subjectivity:
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria
following September 11^(th), public speech is nothing but a series of
lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they
never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen —
without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves — we were
rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among
friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations
and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities.
Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the
flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness
from place to place.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a
condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what
it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and
consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the
frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of
lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class
in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma
factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical
circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory
tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has
been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for… what? —
drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into
databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long
ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A
university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.
We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we
work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of
students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of
employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after
graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We
work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has
already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt
rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century —
80–100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume — a figure
inversely proportional to state funding for education — rose by nearly
800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the
privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we
learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without
being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest.
Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures
of today’s humanities majors.
If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste
our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches
us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else
that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its
purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s
relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the
demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there
is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and
consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings
that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the
respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer
satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot?
Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring
knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystrokes? Who needs
memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be
serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.
The collapse of the global economy is here and now.
The disintegration of the guiding narratives of futurity and social
expectation marks a real crisis in our own reproduction as subjects. One
was told that on the trajectory of the locomotive of life would be
suburban homes on mortgage, white picket fences, marriage, 1.5 children,
comfortable unionized jobs, two automobiles, a big television. One was
told to view his family, his home, his very life as the future product
of his own “hard work.” But none of this will exist for us. For many of
us, it never did and we would never have desired it. And yet, the period
marked by the industrial revolution of daily life and the real
subsumption of daily activity through machines (dishwashers,
automobiles, microwave ovens) has come to an end. Forget the suburbs.
This is a crisis of the individual atomized reproduction of the
capitalist family unit. People are being forced out of their homes and
their union jobs in droves. What is a family, even? The regime of
hostile privatism is in crisis. We are seeing all its hallmarks
disappear as the ideology of whiteness is thrown into crisis. The middle
class, and with it, middle class subjectivity are disappearing from the
face of the earth.
The construction of the middle class had as its foundation the home
mortgage. Home ownership on mortgage effects several things at once: a
shift from working-class identity to middle-class identity, a change in
the alignment of actual class interests (insofar as one’s interests come
to involve the value of one’s home), and the weight of life-long debt
(necessitating more and more work in order to pay it off). Additional
markers of middle-class position were a stable career and ownership of
small amounts of stocks. The collapse of the housing market, the loss of
any reality of stable employment in all but a few sectors, and the
collapse in the stock market (severely cutting into the financial basis
for retirement in 401K plans, etc.) all add up to the massive looting of
the middle class. This process cannot, however, be simply described as
widespread proletarianization, nor does it signal the inevitable
collapse of the capitalist system. On the contrary, the current crisis
is a crucial battle in the struggle between the potential for insurgency
on one hand, and the potential for another restructuring of class
society on the other.
The crisis of whiteness bears with it a set of unique opportunities, but
also a set of crippling limitations. The limits: Those who are
recovering from middle class delusions can be seen en masse concerning
themselves with what brand of tape to use so as not to hurt the walls of
the capitol building, or thanking the armed police officers about to
arrest them, or believing that the police and the union leadership is on
their side, or having a whole range of absurd ideas that the problems
they face can be fixed by a recall election. Never mind a whole
mythology of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. Some rather
large pushes, activists, if you wish to become dangerous.
The opportunity: Those for whom any event was always experienced as
something that happened to other people are beginning to see themselves
as the people they read about in the news: unemployed, homeless. Those
for whom history was thought to have ended have found themselves the
victims (and agents) of its ceaseless progression (and potentially its
explosion). Divorced from a past, from any means to reproduce
themselves, from any of the fictions promised to them as children,
people are beginning to call into question all the assumptions and
narratives upon which our social order is based. Those who months ago
could never have seen themselves occupying buildings or sabotaging their
workplaces have begun to find new ways to act together. To a certain
degree, people are positioned to see that their own survival will be
predicated on their own self-activity to destroy the conditions that
have shaped their abysmal future.
The collapse of traditional subject positions begets the emergence of
new class positions of exclusion: on the one hand total abjection and
unwaged labor and on the other a diffusion of technologies-of-the-self
constituting a global petite bourgeoisie. More realistically there will
be a complete indistinction and oscillation between these positions. The
grim reality is that each individual will have to bring
continually-innovated and newly-commodified aspects of her existence to
sell on the market, or else starve.
The new middle class is a class divorced from the promise of steady
employment, of stable home-ownership, burdened with ever-increasing debt
and the ever-increasing necessity (since nothing can be taken for
granted any longer) for self-upgrades in order to have a chance at
continued employment. A middle class for whom the self becomes a
zero-capital enterprise, a class of individuals who are at once utterly
proletarianized (dispossessed, thrown into the street) and yet the
pettiest of the bourgeoisie, managing their own beings as little
businesses. This new disposition replaces the structural role of the
older forms of middle-class subjectivity (namely, the suppression of
class struggle through the bonding of workers’ survival to the survival
of capitalism, and the intensification of the necessity of work through
enormous quantities of debt) by positioning the individual in conflict
with himself. Class war becomes something that is waged internally
between one’s proletarian interests and one’s “better interests,”
between self-management and unmanageability, between the refusal of
work, the scarcity of work, and the impetus to work more and more… The
struggle in Wisconsin saw slogans such as “save the middle class” —
which meant to save its structural form — but what the current struggles
are effecting (because of their positive character) is a restructuring
of capitalism toward the global, virtual middle class. We can give the
name real subsumption to the process by which a world created and
operated through our muscles becomes a world operated through energy in
the form of fuel. Real subsumption marks the ability of dead labor to
dominate the living. When we say dead labor, we mean a vast array of
machines and apparatuses, produced by the living activity of humans that
is taken from them and comes to mediate their relationship to their own
survival. This is the ultimate achievement of capital: total alienation.
The shift to privatized and commodified homes (made possible by the
increasing centrality of machinery in our daily lives) marked the onset
of what can be called the real subsumption of life under capital.
While the real subsumption of life under capital is taken for granted by
many, we believe with the advent of a whole new set of machines and
apparatuses, that we are now experiencing what could be called the real
subsumption of subjectivity. By this we mean the colonization and
economization of what it means to be alive at all — the totality of our
features, looks, interests, relationships, dispositions, inclinations,
sexuality, gender, tastes, body parts, physique, etc.
We can follow Foucault in his exploration of what he called
technologies-of-the-self. It seems natural that after twenty-five years
of inquiry into the production and disciplining of subjectivities
(madness, deviancy, criminality, sexuality) Foucault would turn to the
study of the ways in which people can deploy power to shape themselves.
He named technologies of the self as the ability of individuals to
effect, by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number
of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways
of being so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain
state of perfection or immortality. Through this analysis, we can begin
to see the emergence of a situation wherein each individual body can
become the capitalist — the entrepreneur — of itself and the very
possibility of its life. For each entrepreneur of the self, the
(supposed) entirety of his “being” constitutes his own private property,
his own capital, his own profit-logic. This entrepreneurial subjectivity
reveals the dreadful reality that we all have the opportunity to become
whatever we can make of ourselves, and then to bring the product to
market.
Just as what we would roughly identify as formal subsumption is made
possible by the production of certain machines at the business level
(mining equipment, transportation infrastructure, factories) and real
subsumption is enabled by the production of specific machines at the
domestic level (household appliances, personal transportation), the
phase of real real subsumption is effected by the deployment of an
entirely new set of machinery at the personal level — this time, the
vast network of hardware and software that comprises the world of
information technology.
Put another way, through the process of total subsumption, individuals
have been deconstructed and concurrently reconstructed as a crossing of
apparatuses and technologies of the self. It is now impossible to speak
of an individual as being a body bound by flesh: instead, we have the
intersection of Facebook profiles, smart phones, bank accounts, e-mail
addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, tagged pictures,
health and criminal records, gym memberships, DNA profiles, finger
prints, lists detailing our tastes music/books/films, model portfolios,
mug shots, fetish chat rooms, online hook-ups, typefaces, degrees,
screen names, avatars, tablets, Twitter feeds, Grindr, Flickr,
Socializr, Tumblr, iSnitch applications, GPS coordinates, risk
statistics, drivers licenses, surveillance footage, blog entries, friend
networks and whatever might turn up through the Google search of a name.
In the same way we are alienated from a life outside the machinery in
which dead labor congeals, we are equally alienated from conceiving of
our bodies or being called by our names outside of the innumerable
apparatuses that conceive, identify, name, measure and track us as data
points. The domination of machines over our lives is nearing perfection.
These apparatuses alienate us from our communication, relation,
befriending, seduction. What’s more, they now comprise the totality and
the process by which we identify, name and constitute our (current and
potential) selves and relationships. The individual is dead. Atomization
proliferates forever.
The combination of an ever-increasing lazarus layer of surplus
population, the vast diffusion of technologies of the self, and the real
real subsumption of life and subjectivity under capital coincide to
produce a new economic-social terrain wherein every aspect of what could
be called an individual has been fully integrated into their
quantifiable market value. The collapse of traditional subject positions
is managed through the proliferation of a new positions: app designers,
graphic designers, cyber sex workers, queer theorists, feminist
publishers, social network engineers, trend hunters, eBay sellers,
social justice activists, performance artists, porn directors, spammers,
party promoters, award winning baristas. We are forced to continually
define ourselves, to enact countless operations upon ourselves so as to
produce ourselves anew each day as someone worth taking to market — our
basic survival depends on the ceaseless deployment of increasingly
discreet technologies of the self. Everything is for sale: our sex
appeal, our fetishes, our tattoos, our radicalism, our fashion sense,
our queerness, our androgyny, our fitness, our fluidity, our
abnormality, our sociability. Facebook and Twitter function as the new
resume. We are caught in the unending necessity to be continually
educating, training, exploring, perfecting, and fine-tuning ourselves.
Our continual self-invention is both economic imperative and economic
engine.
Let us quote at length from the essay “Preliminary Notes on Modes of
Reproduction” by ‘gender mutiny,’ published in the journal Pink and
Black Attack:
You can hear it on the street and in the workplace, in the college
classroom and the executive boardroom, at the latest radical convergence
and at the beach, at dance parties and in underground venues: the logic
of duality is sooo last millennium.
We are living in a postmodern world, and you are a postmodern girl.
Which is to say, you are not really a girl as such.
Postmodernity is a social order that takes places as social disorder; it
is the form of the destabilization of formerly stable forms.
Destabilization could be said to begin by attacking binary structure but
it immediately, incessantly, and necessarily goes on to destabilize
whatever structure; postmodernity is thus characterized by its
destabilizing force and not by whatever modernist strictures linger
about. The traces of modernity are merely modern, which is to say
old-fashioned; the paradoxical need to go beyond the modern is what
characterizes the frenzy of post-modern activity. The form of structure
today is a post-structural modality akin to the Situationist dream of
fluid architecture — a modal and mobile form of structure whose engine
is a strong distaste for anything static.
Primary in postmodernity’s (de-/re-)structuring is a shift in sexual
differentiation — the very structure which constituted the means by
which life was understood to be created. The destabilization of binary
oppositional sexes constitutes a crisis in the family and in the
reproduction of life, but this crisis is not one that must spell the end
of reproduction. A host of techniques of biotechnology, cyberproduction,
and social work are emerging to enable ‘queer’ reproductive
possibilities and to overcome the limits of the human womb which too
easily ceases to function.
An analysis of postmodern sexual reproductive technologies falls short,
however, of recognizing the way in which the central questions of
reproduction have been displaced from the act of baby-making to the
production of selves, just as the centering of baby-making in
procreationist thought usurped the former importance of the question of
God’s creation of the cosmos.
The primary mode of reproduction in a post-dialectical world is the
reproduction of the individual. We call this mode of reproduction
‘re-creationism.’
Postmodern singularities are not created by God or their parents, but
constructed through pluralistic processes that are increasingly
‘artificial,’ ‘social,’ and at the same time — paradoxically —
self-realized. These processes are the processes of identification.
The ontological maxims of re-creationism are neither “God made me” nor
“my parents gave birth to me” but “I made myself, therefore I am,” “I am
made and remade through everything,” “I am what I eat,” “I am not me
without my phone,” “I am a self-made man,” &c. One’s creator is either
oneself or everything outside of oneself; it is both simultaneously. The
fault for one’s existence can no longer be put upon a specific creator
(no longer can one rant at God “why did you create me?” or hate one’s
parents for bringing oneself into the world); it is only oneself who is
to blame while at the same time everything is to blame.
The pluralistic reproductive process cannot suffer limits. Its
reproduction is always an ontological operation, a veritable explosion
of reproductive modality that cannot be analyzed in forms of
‘trinarism,’ ‘quaternism,’ &c. These do not exist. Once binary
reproduction has been destabilized, this destabilization reproduces
itself and the rhyzomal ‘towers’ from a network — a multiplicitous
(post-)structuralism rather than a balanced structure.
The idea now is to produce more towers, unique and individuated,
decentralized, matrixial, marching across the landscape at an
ever-increasing rate. The hegemony of the Twin Towers has fallen only to
give way to a whole metropolis of skyscrapers — a psychogeographical
skyline, a horizon of possibilities and futures....
The postmodern worker is the self-made and self-managed worker. Stable
long-term employment — unionized, salaried career opportunities with
their attendant job security, benefits and pensions — is disappearing
while part-time, short-term, piecemeal, casual, waged and self-employed
work take its place. The proletarian must take on a certain flexibility;
he must continually ‘upgrade himself ’ through continual education and
training. Meanwhile, labor becomes more efficient and the market becomes
less prone to rewarding non-work. Re-creationism is thus both an
economic imperative acting upon labor and an imperative — a drive — in
the interests of the economy.
Meanwhile, re-creationism provides the only market-expansion
opportunities that late-capitalism has available to itself. No longer
able to reach new geographic demographic markets through traditional
expansion, capitalism today must create new markets out of nothing or
else expand into extra-dimensionality. New markets now require new
subcultural-forms and identity-forms. The tendency of market expansion
in late-capitalism is towards there being a market for each individual
and ever-new markets as individuals re-create their identities, bodies,
and desires. Static forms can only impede this expansion; thus, a
certain self-hatred must be made to drive old forms into undesirability,
and a taste for the new, hip and abnormal must be cultured.
Identities must be produced — produced as commodities and for
commodities. Identification, that is, the process of re-creationism, is
what produces these identities. Inherent in this production is a certain
form of anti-identification that opposes itself to stable, essential,
static and, ultimately, old-fashioned identity-forms in order to compel
the production and marketing of new ones.
Each new identity is a new tower to which consumers can flock to escape
the passé nature of the old ones. Eventually — that is, soon and very
soon — there will have to be a tower for each person (“You know, there
could be as many genders as there are people…”), in fact many more, and
the scale of such production far surpasses the limits of the old
workplaces. The Fordist production line can make multiple, identical
products, but today each new identity must have the air of the unique.
The ‘creative’ labor of identity production is thus displaced from the
old workplaces. By social imperative and desire, the individual is put
to work, unpaid, to create new identities ‘for himself.’ (Reproductive
work — whether baby-making, class struggle, or Facebook — is always
unpaid.)
The postmodern Spectacle is a collection of images that must
increasingly be produced uniquely by and for each individual (the ghost
of reproduction must not linger on the screen), but it must also enable
a certain form of ‘social interaction.’ An apparatus of Spectacle
production that is socially networked affords its producer/consumer a
profile and newsfeed unique to him but also the ability to ‘connect’
with his ‘real’ friends. Reality, in the end, is the product.
In an effort to isolate a strategic horizon and to avoid certain dead
ends, we will consider the proposals of radical queer theorist Micha
Cardenas in her recent book Trans Desire. Throughout the book, Micha
offers her experience with a radical porn collective as an example of
what she believes to be a subversive praxis of biopolitical resistance
through porn production. She begins:
This paper will work with a process ontology, a concept of material
reality that is constantly in the movement of becoming, in the churning
flux of the chiasmic unity, a reality unbound in its material richness,
where scales of observation can be wildly traversed in time and space,
where everything is multiplicity and it is only the limited view of our
current perceptions that creates the occasional appearance of wholeness
and stillness.
Her “churning flux of chiasmic unity” is nothing new to us. There is
already a name for this “reality unbound in its material richness”:
capitalism. The image of re-creationism we elaborated in the third point
of our second contention could very succinctly be described as throwing
of bodies into this churning flux as bodies “constantly in the movement
of becoming.” We read “becoming” as a continuous series of technologies
of the self, a constant stream of status updates, an endless fine-tuning
and rewriting of one’s identity to be more perfectly compatible with the
needs of the market. Cardenas begins with the sinister postmodern
operation of valorizing the meaninglessness of life under capital. If
this is our framework, we are doomed from the start.
Under the heading “Creating a Queer Porn Commons” Cardenas goes on to
describe her work with Sharing is Sexy (SIS):
I will examine the Sharing is Sexy collective as an example of porn
production as radical political gesture… I would like to discuss a
collaborative project which I am participating in, Sharing is Sexy
(SIS), as a material example [of a] collective project that aims at
creating queer porn that is licensed under a Creative Commons, By
Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike license. The process of
creating and distributing porn is used to create radical queer community
and to facilitate new conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. SIS
uses non-commercial license to facilitate a porn making praxis, to be
able to invite someone to experiment with the expression of their sexual
desires and to know that no one is making money off of it (or very
little money at best, in the case of bandwidth). SIS does not want porn
corporations to use their content and resell it with massive
infrastructures, which SIS would consider commercial use.
There is a failure of understanding here in the belief that the absence
of an immediate exchange of money qualifies something as non-commercial
or anti-capitalist. The simple fact that one is not paid for one’s labor
is not enough to disqualify it from being labor. A great deal of labor,
perhaps even the majority, is unwaged. An wide array of unpaid work has
been subsumed so as to still produce a great deal of value. One isn’t
paid to update their Facebook profile. No licensing in existence can
truly exempt something from the market. Where she says “distribution to
create radical queer community” we can read “investment in the creation
of new radical queer markets.” These techniques of self-production can
be as queer or as radical as possible, this will only cement their
position as the avant-garde of capital.
She goes on:
I am interested in an experimental, materialist, affective approach to
epistemology or meaning. I am approaching SIS as a concrete exploration
of the possibilities of porn production, as a form of biopolitical
resistance, and as an attempt to apply open source methodologies to
cultural production with my own body and emotions.
It is unclear what is meant here by ‘biopolitical resistance.’ Porn is
clearly a biopolitical terrain: a zone of the deployment of power that
works to construct human subjectivity and sexuality. Where Micha goes
astray is in only conceiving of power a top-down operation, as purely
normative. The sexual practices portrayed in her porn, however radical
they may be, are just as constructed and constructing as the dominant
practices found in any other porn. If we are to read this as
“biopolitical resistance” then we are naming as resistance what is
simply the status quo functioning of pornography: to produce and
discipline the sexual desires of its viewers. Changing the imagery does
not change these productive forms of control. Beyond this, the
application of open-source methodologies to cultural production is
simply descriptive of cultural production as it already functions.
Social media is the perfect example of the way in which our bodies and
our emotions are put in the service of production thorough “open source
methodologies.”
She continues:
With respect to oppression of subaltern identities, non-oppressive porn
that does not ‘contain’ oppression is not enough. SIS strives to make
anti-oppression porn that challenges the institutions of oppression
along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Similarly with
capitalism, I still harbor hope of making anti-capitalist porn that
challenges the existence of capitalism.
Micha’s ambitions become increasingly dubious as we go on. No such
cultural production, however “anti-oppressive” its content, can escape
the fundamentally oppressive structure of the institution. It is still
reliant on mediated production, distribution and consumption of
sexuality. It is disseminated through material channels of dead labor
based on real exploitation. A strong argument can be made that any
gesture to integrate or assimilate marginalized groups into structurally
flawed forms only acts to legitimate the form itself. We remain
alienated regardless of the flavor of the now vindicated alienation.
Secondly, to even evaluate the form in a vacuum, one must question what
it means to be anti-oppressive in nature, especially when
“anti-oppression” has become just another label to increase the value of
any commodity: people still pay thousands to attend anti-oppression
classes and academics use the trendiest brand of identity politics to
sell books and fill rosters. The consumption of anti-oppressive porn is
in no way intrinsically anti-capitalist. In fact, it is merely
pioneering the way for pornographers to market a new brand of sexual
commodities to the most discerning ethical consumers. One needn’t search
too hard on Google to realize that this is already the situation.
In the section “Building Queer Network Subjectivities, Community as
Resistance to Biopower,” she goes on:
We are facilitating a process of building new genders and sexualities by
making porn more accessible because the viewer can know that the images
were not made under exploitative conditions, the images are free and
they are licensed to be shared. Creating a dynamic of sharing is
important to us in order to facilitate dialogue and processes of
feedback or exchange and allowing new shapings of desire to come out of
those feedback processes…
The activity of SIS can be seen on numerous levels as an act of
biopolitical resistance: it challenges commodification of expressions of
queer desire, allows the collective members to explore their own
desires, and facilitates community offline and online through dialogue
and the sharing of content, building a queer porn commons. SIS not only
provides the conditions of possibility for the creation of new
subjectivities that challenge gender and sexual norms for its
participants but it also acts as biopolitical information vectors,
spreading embodied resistant desires. Radical queer media, distributed
on the net or passed hand to hand in zines, but also with live events
like burlesque shows, can act as lines of flight, potentials of
inoperativity, spreading from the individual act of creative world
building with one’s body or one’s community to other people and other
places. These radical transmissions virtualize techniques of
biopolitical resistance in the minds of the viewers, individuation in
new assemblages and deterritorializing queer resistance to biopower…
With pornography, this function of the imagined subject in the fantasy
can operate like the mirror stage, where the subject imagines themselves
one way and gradually becomes that.… A challenge for Radical porn, which
often presents a viewer with a new conception of what is possible, would
be to understand how to enable a viewer to identify with the person
portrayed in the work.…
This porn is more authentic, and therefore more erotic because it is
easy to relate to because these are real people, normal people, people
like you.
There is nothing about the production of new genders and sexualities
that resists capitalism; to the contrary, this production is fertile
terrain for new economic growth, as we have already established. But
this delusion may bear with it a certain kind of truth — or, to be more
precise, a misconception of a truth. It makes sense here to speak of
transsexuality, because this particularly self-conscious process of
producing new genders operates as a microcosm of the whole social
production of new subjectivities of which we are speaking.
Transsexuality bears a totally negative aspect that relentlessly
destroys capitalist subjectivities, yet this negativity is bound within
a productive process that continually produces new capitalist
subjectivities.
It is revealing that the emphasis of Sharing is Sexy is in the act of
sharing itself. It is crucial for us to continually bring our analysis
back to this point as sharing marks the real limitation of this
strategy, but also of an entire set of ideas that believe that sharing
is the revolution, is communization, or is the end of the commodity
relationship. There is a criticism of this line of thought within
theories of communization that articulates a bright line between sharing
and communization as the totally negative material undoing of capitalist
society and its corresponding forms. From the text “Reflections around
Call”:
In Call the term communization is systematically understood as ‘making
common.’ in the previous quotation for instance the ‘acts of
communization’ are described as ‘making common such-and-such space,
such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge.’ That which is to put in
common is use, as when it is said that to communize a space is to
liberate its use…. In the same logic, if communization is ‘making
common,’ then communism is systematically assimilated with sharing. The
theme of sharing is omnipresent in Call…
The point is not that sharing and communism have nothing to do with
another, but we have trouble understanding how they can be synonymous.
Sharing already exists in capitalism: social institutions as important
as the family function on the basis of sharing, and even in countries
where capitalism is the oldest and where familial relation reduces
itself to its simplest expression (the parent-child relation), capital,
even economically, would not survive without this form of social sharing
We will follow this criticism. Sharing may very well be sexy, but
despite Micha Cardenas’ (or Food Not Bombs’ or the lending library’s)
insistence to the contrary, it has nothing to do with the undoing class
society. Sharing is desirable, and even beneficial, but capitalism will
allow for almost an unlimited vision of sharing so long as the
structural reproduction of the commodity relation is not challenged.
Let us take this criticism further, by locating the Self alongside the
state, the commodity, the family, and gender as a fundamental form of
capital and consequentially a terrain in which to do battle, and a limit
to be destroyed. From here on, we cannot allow ourselves to be limited
to a vision of unlimited sharing between coherent Selves. Such
maintenance of the atomized forms, regardless of what is held between,
is just a reshaping of misery. Rather, it is necessary to immediately
engage in the sabotage of the Self, the strike against subjectivity.
What separates me from you, what forms me and constitutes my entirety
must be put into question and undone. Beyond the obvious need to destroy
my gender, my race, my class position there is the more vital need to
struggle against my image, my technologies of the self, my singular
debility.
In thinking about what it means to struggle against identities and
predicates, we can look to the idea of the swerve articulated by the
group Theorie Communiste. The swerve, a reference to the way flowing
water hits a rock and is necessarily split into two streams, is perhaps
the best way to describe how in the course of a struggle, any subject
must reach and experience its own subjectivity as a limit, as an
objective constraint, and to struggle against it. Through struggle, one
must reach the point at which it becomes impossible to both continue to
struggle and to maintain one’s self.
For the proletariat, to act as a class is currently, on the one hand, to
have no other horizon than capital and the categories of its
reproduction, and on the other, for the same reason, it is to be in
contradiction with, and to put into question, its own reproduction as a
class. This conflict, this swerve in the action of the proletariat, is
the content of class struggle and what is at stake in it. From daily
struggles to revolution, there can only be a rupture. But this rupture
is prefigured in the daily course of the class struggle each time that
class belonging appears, within these struggles, as an external
constraint which is objectified in capital, in the very course of the
proletariat’s activity as a class…
The proletariat’s action as a class is characterised by a swerve within
itself through practices that externalise their own existence as class
practices as a constraint which is objectified in the reproduction of
capital. It is no longer possible to do anything more as a worker, while
remaining a worker. This confrontation of the proletariat with its own
constitution as a class is now the content of the class struggle and
what is at stake in it is the putting into question by the proletariat
of its own existence as a class and of all classes.
Currently, the revolution is predicated on the supersession of a
constitutive contradiction of the class struggle: for the proletariat,
being a class is the obstacle that its struggle as a class must get
beyond, abolish. Class unity can no longer be formed on the basis of
wage labor and the struggle over immediate demands as a prerequisite for
its revolutionary activity. The unity of the proletariat can now only be
the activity in which it abolishes itself by abolishing everything that
divides it.
While we certainly reject any deterministic or scientific approach to
explaining how a revolution ‘must’ happen, the theories of anti-state
‘communizers’ are interesting specifically because they reject the core
tenets of Marxism: workers’ identity, the role of the Party, class
unity, valorization of the means of production, the dictatorship of the
proletariat, formalism, even the workers’ movement itself.
Any practice that aims to elaborate the swerve within the set of
struggles that will emerge through the course of the current crisis must
begin with a study and understanding of the subject positions being put
into question by the crisis itself. The desire is for struggles to reach
the point that there is a swerve against the positions that the
participants are desperately attempting to cling to. Those occupying
buildings, refusing to leave their foreclosed homes, sabotaging their
places of work, defying their predicates, disobeying the regime of
whiteness, violently rejecting middle class complacency, must all
inevitably come up against the brutal truth that each social role marks
a real limits to their activity, and that the possibility of
supersession of these limits is found within their activity itself.
In the same way, those who champion the collapse of the old subjects
while proposing the formation of new ones must be confronted at all
costs. To struggle for a new fluid identity must be seen as the bearing
the limitation of all struggle for identity, as being merely the
management of the decomposition of capital so as to restructure and
preserve it. For us there can be no affirmative or positive subject,
only an undoing of the material foundations of subjectivity.
Some proposals:
expropriation of resources from financial institutions but also the
unraveling of those institutions’ ability to accurately identify
individuals by linking with any degree of certainty an individual and
his official identity — name, SSN, account number);
hooliganism and went on to “troll society” (launching attacks from the
cover of internet anonymity through practices of trolling, slander,
leaking of huge quantities of confidential information including
personal accounts data, massive online piracy networks for software,
music, films, porn, books, etc, — not to mention IRL piracy in Somalia
or anywhere — DDOS assaults on various institutions and organizations,
especially agents in information control and management, attacks and
creation of counter-repressive technology networks in solidarity with
North African rebels experiencing severe government repression of
internet communication);
most extremist conclusions in order to undermine any logical basis that
its circulation still retains (and outright attacking its priests);
that make it possible for us to live in refusal of the apparatuses that
produce us as workers or any other subject.
What these practices have in common is twofold: the sabotage of the
systems of identification (by which we mean the technological networks
by which an individual can be identified by financial, governmental, and
social institutions as being his unique self — i.e. his social security
number; as possessing certain attributes; and/or as belonging to a
group, class, society, etc.), and some level of secrecy or anonymity on
the part of the saboteurs. These latter practices (Anonymous, wearing
literal or figurative masks, mobbing, secret societies, and so on)
demonstrate that individuals necessarily take on, or emerge as, new
forms of negative-being while assaulting systems of identification.
Negative-being bears no relation to the forms of liberal, reductionist,
being-in-common-at-the-lowest-common-denominator type of group mentality
that is promoted by slogans about sharing, consensus, direct-democracy,
equality, nor to the hip performance-art-style production of new
subjectivities, but rather enacts in-itself the negation of the subject
(the refusal of obedience, of attribution, and of identification) and
thus of the very foundation of liberal society.
If we can return to Micha for just a moment:
This leads to my critique of sabotage as an important political
strategy. Sabotage assumes a single world, assumes that the worker
spends most of his days in the factory making machines or in the cubicle
writing software, and therefore his best chance of resistance is in
sabotage. Our strategy with SIS values subversion over sabotage,
focusing on reuse of the garbage of capitalism for our own purposes of
world building. In our heterotopic world and multi-faceted identities,
it makes sense for us to bring home the cameras we use at work for
photographing products and use them to produce queer anti-capitalist
porn.
Micha is correct in her recognition that the old workers struggles are
doomed. Where she is dead wrong is in her conclusions drawn from this.
This society is re-constituted in every moment of every day. All the
normative gestures carried out by society’s members reproduce the social
relationship of capital, and the not-so-normative gestures have their
niche markets too. All of us — and especially the hip and radical among
us — are positioned as workers in a social factory with no outside that
is busily churning out new subjectivities and methods of tracking,
identifying, categorizing, and managing them, and whose machinery is
ripe for sabotage. Subversion can only offer us a surface level
restructuring, a re-arrangement of elements that has never been in any
way related to the possibility of destroying capitalism. No, we need to
recognize that sabotage remains our invariant task. We are speaking here
of a sabotage of the technology and social networks that assign,
monitor, classify, and designate subjectivity.
To return to the figure of pornography: The dead labor of thousands of
boys not unlike myself, extracted from them in the form of the capture
of their image and the spectacle of their sexuality is put into service.
I am structured, formed, constituted by the unending reproduction of
these specters. I, like an innumerable population of bodies, am captured
by these images and animated by them. If it would have ever been
possible to separate my own desire from the desires of the apparatuses
that shape me, it isn’t any longer. Through a miserable range of
techniques of the self, I am re-created like Adam in the image of the
God commodity, the dead labor taken from bodies for the cost of a wage.
Through the successful application of these techniques, my self also
becomes a marketable commodity. My sex, my hips, my tattoos, my
particular skill set is alienated from me as an image, taken,
multiplied, deployed through an almost endless network of apparatuses
(tablets, computers, iPhones, network cables, servers, wifi, memories,
bodies, fantasies) so that my dead labor may infinitely haunt bodies in
the way all of ours are haunted.
There is no subversive practice that can undo this haunting of the
living by the dead. For the ceaseless reproduction and exploitation of
my image, and all images that are put into the service of the commodity
relationship to be halted in even the slightest way would require the
total sabotage and destruction of every apparatus that acts toward this
reproduction. We cannot orient ourselves towards the subversion of the
cyborg network that enchants us as commodities. We have to take it all
down.
We will end with an anecdote. With the vast depletion of disposable
income and the advancement of new technical forms, Borders has been the
first major bookstore chain to need to close their doors. Walking
through their stores before the massive closures, one found shelves
entirely empty of books, genre signs hanging in disarray, security
apparatuses unplugged and hoping to be bought. Even if one had wanted to
purchase an item, it would have been utterly impossible since no
employees could be found — they were all too busy smoking cigarettes and
gossiping. In this moment of crisis, of restructuring, of re-creation we
cannot be caught in the traps of glorifying either the dying forms, or
the emergent new ones. We are not for the book as physical or electronic
commodity. We don’t care about Borders any more than we will care about
whatever capitalist enterprise will replace it. Rather, we need to
discover the truth hidden in plain site. One need only to look to the
banners hanging above the doors of each closing Borders location to
read, in bold-face text:
Final Days
Everything Must Go