"The Human Element" --On Dave Grohl's Sound City and Capturing Music

I often tell myself that one of the reasons I am glad I have a band and play music is that its something that is, in some ways, "outside" the university. It is my one activity that has little to do with my academic mind. When I play music by myself or with others, I'm not thinking about ontology or the construction of facts -- I'm 'thinking' in a completely different way. Recently, my friend Blake told me that by playing music early in my life, parts of my brain are actually designated for playing music. This may be why I can get hammered and still manage to play pretty well (unless you ask me to solo). I begin with this point because I have been afraid to incorporate 'music' (except for a paper on noise that needs a lot of development)  into my academic world-- that is, on this blog. Sure, I've posted music videos and other things on the blog to break up the monotony of print, but I think the thing I fear is that my academic work is so entrenched in the "nonhuman turn" toward critical animal studies, posthumanism, speculative realism, technology, etc. that I fear deconstructing and dissecting the life out of that remainder that's always there in playing music. In his new documentary Sound City, Grohl calls this "the human element."

But is it really the human element?

Sound City, Grohl says, started out as trying to tell a story about a sound board: the Neve console. This sound board was located in Sound City, a shitty looking studio in CA where a lot of great records were made (Neil Young, Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, etc.). Despite this reference to "the human element," we see that it is actually the nonhuman elements that are the condition for the possibility of catching this "human element." The board, combined with the room (which "no one designed") happened to produce an amazing drum sound. For anyone who has never recorded music, drum sound is probably one of the hardest things to capture on an album (live, mic-ed drums that is). In fact, I find that when I listen to a local band's record compared to, say, Tool's Lateralus, one of the main ways you can tell that the band is semi-professional or at the very least producing the album themselves is the drum sound. Drums on an album need to sound full, round, and, on a rock album, BIG. However, it is the technology -- the room and the board -- that is posited in the film as the reason for the good drum sound. The 'human element" is continuously linked to the capturing capacities of the technology.

Grohl and co. are careful, however, to point out that the technology is not to be relied on-- one still needs good songs and good musicians who practice. Indeed, this point emerges through the latter half of the film which discusses the debate between analog tape and digital tools. The way musicians talk about analog is that it is "no frills" directly onto tape. You "had" to practice and to do multiple takes -- you couldn't simply "fix" something. One of the musicians remarks that he heard a younger musician once say "you don't really even have to practice anymore--you can just put it into the machine and cut it up."

It's not that you cannot cut tape. You actually have to cut tape in order to bond different takes and such. However, the musicians make a good point for lifetime musicians like me: you really can't just rely on the technology whether it's a guitar, pro tools, weird effects. A good song, a good cut, a good album is not just the technology, but the way in which the technology interacts with 'the human'. In some ways, digital tools can be used to master the music (pun intended) rather than to capture the music happening in the room. There is an element of chance, an 'event' feel that happens when you record live -- on tape or digital.

Big Shoals' debut album has been recorded entirely "digitally," but we played the underlying tracks "live" in the studio. Lance had previously tried to record without a full band, and it didn't sound "right." It was good, but there was something missing. On this album, we've "captured" rather than mastered the music. It's a true collaboration between us, our instruments, Ryan our sound engineer, pro-tools, and the rooms in which we are recording. I'm not going to lie -- we've had to "punch in" a few notes when we missed it, but the overall feel of live playing still lingers in the mix because we were playing the damn thing live. We also did multiple "takes" of certain solos and parts. Lance would play several takes of a lick and there would be something in the take that set it apart from every other take -- an event captured.

Much of the music demonstrated and played in the documentary Sound City was recorded "live" in the studio. Rage Against the Machine tells how their debut album was recorded "like a concert" where they invited friends in to watch them play. They said they got over half the album done in one night. And if you've listened to this album -- there's something there, something captured. 

As more and more artists -- particularly pop artists -- rely on technology in order to master their already-written and composed songs, we lose what Roland Barthes once called "the grain of the voice" (although it's not just the voice, but any note on any instrument -- perhaps its timbre). We also lose the "event" character of music. It's not that everything in an album has to be done all at once, but the collaboration is distributed across not only people, time, and space, but I imagine certain musicians divvying out their music like an assembly line. We call this music "mass produced" because it all "sounds the same." Obviously, in the western scale, there are only 12 'notes' so I am not saying that musicians are playing the same chord progressions. I mean that there is no sense of a "capturing." The voice captured is probably weak, uninspired, and a little out of tune that needs doctoring until we can no longer hear the vocal chords. Instead of working to get that note 'right', to capture a moment on tape or in bits and bytes, the note is played and then after the fact reintegrated into the song.

Am I merely being nostalgic? No. I do not long for the days of analog tape as if somehow that was always better. However, I am suggesting that there is a difference between the capturing of an event (even just one note) and being a "master and possessor" of notes and timbres. I'm suggesting that if we lose that element of chance produced through the collaboration of the human and nonhuman, then I believe we begin to colonize music -- to make it more human in the most Humanist of ways. To be a posthumanist musician actually means letting the nonhuman become actors (or actants) themselves rather than wielding them as 'tools'. This is why even though people like Brian Eno use primarily digital tools to make music, one could see him as a "posthumanist musician" because he introduces chance into his compositions -- a combination of skill and chance makes a music event.

"Pro-tools." It's in the name. It's a professional tool -- we wield it like a weapon or a diamond cutter -- carving out the excess in the name of perfection.

In Sound City, the exception to the rule of analog vs. digital is NIN -- Trent Reznor. Reznor, according to Grohl, "uses technology as an instrument, not as a crutch. He doesn't need it." Technology as an instrument rather than a tool. "Instrument" not in the sense of "instrumental" but instrument in the sense of a musical instrument. A musical instrument is not a tool that a musician uses. A musical instrument is a collaboration between the human and nonhuman. Things happen when you play a musical instrument that you might not have expected. I'm not simply talking about "jamming" here, but I mean the way we play an instrument. In the moment of putting your fingers to strings or keys, even if it's a song you've played a million times before, maybe you hit a chord harder than usual or do a little run that comes out of nowhere. It's not "magic" but its a collaboration between the environment, the instrument, and you. It's a subtle difference but its the difference that makes a difference between a musician and someone playing music. "Musicians" know that each performance is a unique event in which they become musicians by participating in every performance as one actant among many.

I'm far from the first academic to think theoretically about musical environments. Thomas Rickert's book Ambient Rhetoric shows how Brian Eno is a potent illustration of what he means by 'ambient rhetoric'. Rickert writes,

"In this process, not only do the boundaries between music and environment blur and blend, but the locus of creation is dispersed ti include the environment, which thus grants an active role to the technological apparatus as an element within the whole material surroundings" (Rickert 110).

This is definitely in part what I am trying to get with my reflections on Sound City. However, in Sound City, as opposed to the example of Eno,  the other really determinate actants are not only nonhuman instruments, technologies, and spaces, but other musicians. When you play (and record) with other musicians, songs emerge in their performance/recording.

In another article by Thomas Rickert and Michael Salvo, "The distrubted Gesampkunsterwerk: Sound, worlding, and new media culture," the authors discuss "Garageband" --the mac's pre-installed music software. I have used garageband myself when I owned a mac and I do find it to be a powerful tool for making one's own music. Rickert and Salvo argue that Garageband helps enable what they call "worlding."

"Worlding, then, carries this double sense: It is the aesthetic realm that a visual musical work invites us to both enter and immerse ourselves, and it is the constellation of production pathways and inputs--people, communities, technologies, and networks--that are simultaneously evoked with each aesthetic world." (Rickert and Salvo 313).

The authors point out that in addition to recording traditional instruments, the program comes with preloaded beats and sounds etc. for people to (re)mix. Thus, Garageband makes everyone a (potential) composer. Garageband itself, much like the "digital tools" that Grohl refers to when speaking of Reznor, becomes an instrument: "software is no longer limited to combining or transforming pre-existing content; rather, it produces content itself no differently than a musical instrument" (Rickert and Salvo 315).

In the future, Rickert and Salvo speculate that the interface of these digital tools will become more affectively pleasing like a musical instrument. They argue that this will mean that "sound" will become more important in composing. "Sound" is different than 'music' in some ways, but inseparable from music as well. We just spent quite a lot of time talking about "drum sound" and how important it is to capture that feel.

One question is whether or not these digital tools allow one to make new sounds, or simply remix premade, poorly composed 'stock' sounds. We already hear a kind of levelling of sound happening in the production of recent pop music. Perhaps Rickert and Salvo are right that it is through these DIY tools that new sounds will be produced -- new soundworlds for songs to exist within.

But also, we do need to ask whether or not the sound, the song, the soundworld, the environment is poorly or well composed. Rickert and Salvo, although they use the example of some of the greatest musicians of the second half of the 20th century (Hendrix, Yes, The Flaming Lips), are more interested in the potential for garageband and other tools to allow nonmusicians to make music--or at least to make sound. These sounds and songs will also enter into the digital network where musicians can receive feedback (such as reverbnation or bandcamp -- Byron Hawk has spoken of music networks in his article "Curating Ecologies, Circulating Musics: From the Public Sphere to Sphere Politics in Dobrin's edited collection Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media.).

These points are apart from a concern that underlies this entire post and myself as a musician: good music. Now, everyone says that music taste is "subjective," but I think that even within the recent theoretical millieu of academia, we have abandoned such separations of 'subject/object'. Of course I want people to make their own music (after all, it's what i'm doing) but I just hope that democratization and public "prosumerism" does not mean levelling.

And again, I don't think it does. While there's going to be a lot of shit produced, a lot more great music can now be accessed easily through Spotify, Pandora, Bandcamp, ReverbNation, etc.

The trick now is to figure out how to get people to realize they have access to great music. It's usually even free! Yet when I ask my students, for example, what they listen to, the majority of it is not local or semi-local or stuff they found via Pandora but anything that happens to play on the radio or at the club.

I'm starting to sound cranky -- and I am.

Maybe this whole post is simply an elaborate academic ruse to privilege a certain type of music making over others. Maybe this entire time my real target is all the heartless (*sigh* such a cliche, outdated metaphor) pop music and corporate rock that leaves nothing to chance and simply leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe all that shit about Miley Cyrus's 'twerking' scandal with no one saying anything about the fact that she didn't sing well (and Thicke was even worse) just got to me--particularly after watching such a labor of love as Grohl's documentary, Sound City. Maybe I'm tired of people taking shitty songs and turning them into hits through spending an enormous amount of time on their production. I'm not trying to be a pretentious dick. I'm far from advocating that an older technology is far superior and more true to authentic music making. Nor am I trying to say that all popular music is bad. Shit, who knows, maybe I am saying that despite myself. Regardless, there's some DIY music that's bad too.

See. This is what I'm talking about. I can't extricate my involvement in music from any academic reflection. This is not what I'd call a 'sober' analysis of the issue. But hey, it's just my blog.

I'll end with this:

"The human element" turns out to be the element of surprise at one's own collaboration and participation in a musical event composed of other musicians, technology, instruments, and dingy rooms that just happen to make drums sound fucking badass.

Reflections on Wolfe's Before the Law

I am in the process of composing a review for Cary Wolfe's Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. In my first crack at a review, I tried to stick as close as possible to the text, tracing the main argument through the entire book, and carefully crafting my language to condense the argument of each section while staying under the 2000 word limit.

 I'm not sure how that turned out yet -- but it seems like it hardly reads like a review. The theoretical background required to understand the arguments are daunting. Wolfe both critiques and preserves moves and arguments from prominent theorists in the same section. He vacillates between abstract theory to concrete examples that illustrate how the theoretical lens makes visible aspects of the political previously ignored through politics grounded in the concept of sovereignty or humanist 'rights' discourse.

In this blogpost, I'm going to do the complete opposite of my first try at the review. I am going to contextualize the text as a whole within my own recent readings in ANT, Object Oriented Ontology, and New Materialist philosophy. I want to show how Wolfe's methods and arguments differ and correspond to these other theoretical paradigms.

Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy may be the furthest from Wolfe's own project. Harman's philosophy, at least as elucidated in Guerilla Metaphysics, departs from particular phenomenological figures: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Alphonso Lingis. For the most part, it seems that Harman picks out passages from these thinkers that deal with objects in a quasi-mystical way; indeed, it seems that Harman is less concerned with their major arguments (particularly his treatment of Levinas, so concerned with ethics as first philosophy) than tracing thinkers who use the same rhetoric he wishes to preserve in his own philosophy. No doubt, these passages are beautiful, but one cannot help thinking that Harman does not take seriously the legitimate critiques of phenomenology, particularly those of Jacques Derrida, which he dismisses as an instance of tortured self-reflexivity. Furthermore, even Harman's use of Heidegger rarely addresses the fact that Heidegger's work is oriented toward the meaning of Being itself (late Heidegger) and the meaning of Being for Dasein (Being and Time). Harman's uses of Heidegger Heidegger make almost no reference to temporality, Being-towards-death, or even Dasein. I would argue that Harman's appropriation of Heidegger ignores Heidegger's desire to move beyond thinking of Being in terms of the "present-at-hand," as it preserves the idea of 'substance'.  

Harman quite unashamably develops a metaphysical system of relation based on autonomous 'withdrawn' substance.Harman uses the concept of "withdrawness" in order t avoids accusations of a return to naive metaphysics. While Harman's articulation of a grand metaphysical system of relations is impressive, it says little about the crucial distinctions among these entities. Because Harman does not believe the physical world should be left for scientific investiation (an epistemological endeavor) he posits a general metaphysical account of the world's constitution. But where does this ontological/metaphysical description get us if it cannot make meaningful distinctions among objects? Is this not still left to epistemological and empirical inquiry? Harman admits that the human relation to everything else is surely "more complex" than other relations among objects, but not different in kind. How is our relation more complex? What is the difference between a rock, a deer, and a human being? 

Harman's metaphysics, and his rhetorical decision to use "lists"  random objects that fascinate him (usually objects in the natural world or objects not specific to our contemporary time), flattens rather than thickens and multiplies kinds of relation. Even as Harman says that we should populate our texts with objects and things, he does little (if anything) to articulate the object's concrete specificity apart from naming it in a list with other objects. Objects are not considered in terms of their meaning but, Harman argues, should be considered because they are part of the world. Harman's metaphysics, then, is framed as an autonomous realm from ethics or politics; for Harman, we need to articulate a foundational metaphysical system first and only then can we consider and decide on these other issues. If I'm not mistaken, Harman has argued that metaphysics do not necessarily imply a particular political or ethical stance. Even if we accept that, it still might be worthwhile to 'speculate' on how his metaphysical position can be used to support and even justify particular political or ethical orientations. 

Levi Bryant's Onticology (or OOO) fares a bit better in relation to Wolfe's work, since he recognizes that each object is an autonomous system with its own structured relation to its environment. Like Wolfe, he draws on Luhmann's systems theory. However, as Wolfe's points out in a footnote to Before the Law, Bryant still remains tied to Harman's theories of relations and objects on an ontological level (with the addition of the realm of the 'virtual' drawn from Deleuze).  That is, Bryant agrees with Harman that each new relation creates a 'new object' so that objects are nestled inside other objects. Bryant and Bogost have both maintained that ontological problems are often mistaken for epistemological ones, a position I do not think Wolfe shares.  In a blog post on What is Posthumanism?, Bryant writes that the weakness of Wolfe's book, citing Harman, is that

  Wolfe still seems to think these issues in epistemological terms. Rather than seeing selective relations entertained towards other objects as a general ontological feature ofeach and every object or as a fundamental feature of the world itself, Wolfe seems to adopt the pessimistic thesis that this marks the impossibility of our knowledge.

For Wolfe, this does not just mark the impossibility of a complete knowledge (which Wolfe addresses in Before the Law as the God's Eye View) but also assures that no matter what entities we choose to consider as possessing what he calls, drawing on Heidegger, a "self-contestatory" relationship, that we will have been wrong in our decision. Does this relegate knowledge of how other beings 'see' to scientific inquiry? To a certain extent, yes, but I do not think Bryant would necessarily disagree with this delegation.. Indeed, is not scientific inquiry (or at the very least, empirical inquiry) the mode of 'second-order observation' (how something observes rather than how we observe it) occurs? If we do not rely on such empirical inquiry, then our method results in anthropomorphization. Sure, we do this anyway, but without the check of empirical inquiry into a system's observational systems, then perhaps we go too far in assuming that ALL objects function as autopoietic, closed systems. 

Wolfe argues against the ontologizing of relations in a footnote to Before the Law. Even though Wolfe agrees with Bryant's ethico political position, in the following passage, he argues "we do not need the either/or-ism of 'literally different agents': 

"when we relate to something, we literally become a different entity," that "an entity that enters into a relational network with a hammer or a computer has different powers and capacities than an entity that does not exist in these relations and is, therefore, by this logic, a different agent." (Bryant qtd. in Wolfe n131)

Wolfe responds: 

"we can simply say that we are and are not the same agents depending on the context, Bryant's 'pre-hammer' entity does not vanish when the hammer is picked up (and if he did, he, naturalistically speaking, couldn't pick up the hammer in the first place). We are (to put it in Derrida-ese) constituted by differance pre- and post- hammer" 

In other words, Wolfe does not see much benefit to following Harman's ontological distinction of separate objects. . 

For Wolfe, distinctions between system and environment, as for Luhmann, are functional distinctions. These functional decisions are based, in some cases, on  our current state of knowledge.  I think that for Wolfe, these new forms for ontology go too far in considering any and every object as worthy of speculative inquiry. We have pressing political and ethical questions that call for pragmatic action, informed by empirical inquiry, and even though, as he puts it, we will always have been wrong in our choice, we must make one conditioned action at a time. 

This is not to say that Wolfe exclusively privileges the living or even carbon based life forms. He writes, 

"The relevant question, which I cannot explore in detail here, would be the mode of embodiment in relation to recursive developmental change that allows not just requisite plasticity in the organism's individual ontogeny, but also, and therefore, its ability to thereby enter into an essentially prosthetic relation to the external technicities of code, semiosis, archive, and so on--regardless of whether the organism is made of 'flesh and blood' or silicon and silicone" 

We have to seriously ask whether it is worth thinking about the relations between a banana peel and the floor, given that the banana peel (at least so far as we know) cannot enter into a prosthetic relation as the condition for the possibility of having its relations matter to it. This is why the speculative realism of Harman and to a certain extent, Bryant, goes too far in its kind of object fetishism. Bryant even speaks of "abstractions" as "objects" that act in the world and Bogost even asks if we have an ethical responsibility to these "ideas." Ideas and abstractions are 'embodied' in particular material instances, as Bryant has argued, but do ideas matter to ideas? Do ideas mean to each other? Are ideas and abstractions really "whos" that can relate to other whats? I have my doubts. 

And Bryant recognizes, in a way that Harman never even begins to address, that entities have different capabilities. Relying on Maturana and Varela's distinction of allopoietic and autopoietic entities in Democracy of Objects, he writes, 

"where allopoetic systems often appear to have a greater degree of elasticity with respect to their qualities, autopoietic systems seem to have a greater degree of elasticity with respect to distinctions or what we might refer to as 'channels'" (173)

 Bryant's term, "channels" refers to an autopoietic system's ability to make new distinctions "thereby enhancing their capacity to be irritated or perturbed by other objects" and this is what we mean when we say that certain autopoietic entities have different degrees of 'freedom' (the freedom to develop different distinctions) (173). 

Bryant thus addresses a major problem I have with Harman: his offhanded description of relations between human and other objects as "more complex." In Bryant's terms, then, we might say that Wolfe is much more interested in investigating autopoietic systems than allopoietic systems -- at least in terms of biopolitical choices. 

The key distinction for Wolfe, however, drawing on Stiegler, is that the nonhuman animal (or the nonhuman entity) must be able to have a prosthetic relation that constitutes it as a 'who' in the first place. 

I find the following passage in Before the Law as making a similar point as Bryant, referring to evidence of 'neuroplasticity' of certain animals:

"their individual ontogenies are quite rigid and subject to a very limited set of variations. Thus, their individual ontogenies are of little importance in explaining their behavior. For creatures of sufficient neurophysiological plasticity, however, it is a different story, one in which the correspondingly high degree of individual variation in individual ontogenies give rise to more complex social and communicational behaviors necessary to coordinate them" (70). 

He expands on this in a later passage, 

"the animal behaviors and forms of communication we have been discussing are 'already-there', forming an exteriority, an 'elsewhere', that enables some animals more than others to 'differentiate' and 'individuate' their extistence--and thus to be 'thrown'-- in a manner only possible on the basis of a complex interplay of the 'who' and the 'what', the individual's 'embodied enaction' (to use Maturana and Varela's phrase) and exteriority of the material and semiotic technicities that interact with and rewire it, leading to highly variable ontogenies, complex forms of social interaction, individual personalities, and so on" (76). 

I think this relation -- the individuation of 'whos' is what Wolfe will compare later to Dasein later in the text, but not Dasein as understood by the Heidegger of Being and Time, but the 'limited' Dasein given to the 'animal' in Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: "having a world in the mode of not having" (79). 

Bryant agrees that each entity has its own 'world' as it appears to it and this is why it is necessary to use second-order observation. But for Wolfe it is crucial to distinguish between having a world in the mode of not having and simply that any entity (or even abstraction) always has a limited way of seeing the world.  That is, because of pressing political and ethical issues, Wolfe is most concerned with the nonhuman animal just as much as the 'human' as  'thrown' Dasein. This is because the world matters and means to a Dasein -- the Dasein cares for its own individuated being and is constituted as a 'who' by relation to a prosthetic what. The block of wood outside is not a 'who' because, so far as we know, it does not have sufficient neuroplasticity to make new distinctions, which would eventually result in a collective memory shared among the community of wood-beings. 

Indeed, Wolfe seems to make the argument that this position may even be more 'posthumanist' than Bryant's, who (at least in a blogpost) restricts the conditions of value to the existence of the human. Bryant writes, 

"No case could here be made [. . .] that there's something of intrinsic value in nonhumans such as animals or planets. Rather, we would be committed to the thesis that there are only relative values of some sort of another. . .the planet, for example, would only take on value-predicates in relation to humans. Were humans to not exist, the planet would neither be valueless or valuable, it would just be." (Bryant, qtd. in Wolfe 84). 

In contrast to Bryant, Wolfe maintains that we need to leave open the possibility that the 'to whom' it matters might not be a human being; he leaves open the possibility that "the addressee of value--and indeed of immunitary protection--is permanently open to 'whoever it might be'" (84). 

One thing is for sure, though: Wolfe emphasizes that there must be a qualitative difference (not just a difference in 'degree' as if there was a 'biologistic continuum') among "the chimpanzee in biomedical research, the flea on her skin, and the cage she lives in--and a difference that matters more (one might even say, in Derridean tones, 'infinitely' more) to the chimpanzee than to the flea or the cage?" (83). 

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Of course, we might ask, why should we have an ethical and political obligation to those beings that we learn 'have a world' in the sense of Dasein, but not to other nonhuman objects or ideas? I think this returns us to the basic question posed by Bentham: not can they reason ,but can they suffer? Although 'suffering' is  an insufficient criteria as we are not quite sure of its extra-human meaning--it is already an anthropomophism-- it seems as though that being a 'who' to which the world matters is a condition for 'suffering'. A block of wood, so far as we know, does not suffer,  nor does a cage: it just 'is'. It seems like Wolfe may suggest that an originary technicity may be a necessary condition for something to 'suffer' in the sense of Bentham. 

Still, we are left with the question: what is to be done? That is, if we cannot simply extend "rights" to various animals, then how do we enact our choice through law? Do we need to think law in terms of 'immunitary protection'? According to Wolfe, we cannot depend on outmoded terms of political sovereignty. 

And just who is this "we" that decides? I t think Wolfe is aware of the problem of assuming a 'we', but his pragmatic bent means that 'we' as human beings who are reading this book, who are helping to shape and enforce laws, must choose. We must choose to want to know rather than not want to know about the animal Holocaust taking place in service of globalization -- the mass 'letting die' so that we might live. We must choose to want to know that our consumption of meat may endanger the ecological sustainability of the planet. We must choose, we must decide, we must act conditionally -- and we must do this satisfied that we should never be content with a 'good conscience': no matter who we choose for "immunitary protection" we will have been wrong. We must act on our incomplete knowledge and hope that we will come to know and make ever more subtle distinctions, thickening and multiplying the lines rather than flattening relations through an all-encompassing metaphysical ontology. 

Wolfe writes, 

"This very act of immunitary selection and protection on the basis of the capacity to 'respond'--a capacity itself based on a constitutively prosthetic relation to technicity--can never be juridical, however, because is is always already traced with the automaticity and mechanicity of a reaction. It is a 'line', to use Derrida's formulation, that is always already 'multiple' and nonlinear, always folded and in motion, always under erasure" (103). 

The benefits of thinking in a biopolitical frame is that "it puts us in a position to articulate the disjunctive and uneven quality of our own political moment, constituted as it is by new forces and new actors not very legible by the political vocabulary of sovereignty we have inherited" (104). 

Biopolitical thinking is to think the apparatus or dispotif (the institutional practices!) that subject both humans and nonhumans. We no longer just think about the ethics of eating "animals" (as if they were a unified category) but of what Wolfe provisionally calls "flesh." 

One of the best examples Wolfe gives to illustrate the complexity of Biopolitical thought is the problem of 'synthetic meat', which, now that I think about it, challenges my idea that the notion of 'suffering' is sufficient to decide (to draw a line, make a cut) of who counts and who does not. Wolfe argues that synthetic meat according to someone like Peter Singer, would be perfectly ethical, since (presumably) no animals had to suffer in order for it to be made. Leaving aside the fact that most synthetic meat production requires serum derived from other killed animals in order to grow (and issue explored in The Tissue Culture and Art Project's artworks), Wolfe argues that from a biopolitical standpoint, the issue is not so clear: 

"From this vantage, synthetic meat might not even appear to be an 'animal' issue per se, and would be seen as utterly continous with the technologies and dispotifs that are exercising a more and more finely tuned control over life and 'making live' at the most capillary levels of social existence. Indeed, it would seem continuous with the practices of domestication, manipulation, and control of life that characterize factory farms" (96-97). 

Because it even further distances us from the animals we kill, leaving it to industrial production, some groups are against the production of synthetic meat. 

Thus, it is not only that we need to choose which animals might fall under the criteria of Dasein, but the institutional practices that fundamentally change our relationship to the nonhuman world. 

Embodying Technesis: Part 1

Chapter 3: From Metaphor to Embodiment: Resisting Technesis

Systems Theory

In a response to a review of the book Embodying Technesis, Mark Hansen agrees that he may have given short shrift to systems theory. His discussion of systems theory, which he sees as a “positivation” of the deconstructive moment takes its departure from William Paulsen’s book that explicitly attempts to show how systems theory can help us to understand literature; from this example, Hansen argues that systems theory is still committed to a “relative exteriority” that ultimately leaves materiality out of the distinction of system and environment. The problem is that Hansen chooses one specific application of systems theory that is committed to explaining how it functions within literature (the domain of representation). Hansen argues that “commitment to representationalism” and the collapsing of literary and techno-scientific systems is the major problem he has with cultural studies’ appropriation of poststructualist theory (and some of the poststructuralist theory itself).

Hansen argues that systems theory actually isolates the system from environment, but Cary Wolfe’s reading of Luhmann argues that it is only through the closure of the system that the system can connect to the environment. He writes,

This self-referential closure, however, does not indicate solipsism, idealism, or isolation but is instead crucial to understanding a fundamental principle of what I call ‘openness from closure’ [. . .] in the self-referential mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system (Wolfe 15).

Furthermore, the system that makes a distinction is not limited to human beings, but every system that can “make distinctions.” For instance, a cell makes a distinction between what is and what is not itself – creating an outside environment that is not the system. In contrast to the systems theory approach, Hansen, appears to argue that complexity arises autonomously from systems. He writes, “technology also functions as a key agent in the macroevolution, or complexification of the material world. Whereas technologies are always results of culturally determined processes, they are also privileged vehicles of the natural process of material complexification” (56). For Hansen, then, the rule is that technology is increasing material complexification and that this complexity is “negantropic.” In other words, it seems to me that for Hansen there is a “natural” negentropic force of technology that complexifies our world, a force having little to do with a “relative” exteriority. So even if Hansen maintains that this movement is “non-teleological” there still seems to be a telos: the elimination of entropy.

The question is – who is “positivizing” the deconstructive moment? Does Wolfe “positivize” Derrida when he claims,

Derrida and Luhmann converge on the same point from opposite directions; while Derrida emphasizes the final undecidability of any signifying instance, Luhmann stresses that even so systems must decide, they must selectively process the differences between information and utterance if they are to achieve adaptive resonance with their environment. Thus underneath this apparent divergence is a shared emphasis—against ‘relativism’ and ‘anything goes’ reflexivity—on the determinate specificity of the signifying or communicative instance that must be negotiated, which is precisely why in Limited Inc. Derrida rejects the term ‘indeterminacy’ because it occludes an understanding of the determinate oscillation between possibilities (for examples, of meaning, but also of acts). (23)

I would argue that, no, he does not. Indeed, it is important to see that Hansen is the one using thermodynamic theories of entropy/negentropy in service of his ontological claim of material complexification that results in negentropic force. Luhmann’s distinctions go further than the second-order cybernetic theories Hansen depends on that simply distinguish between information/noise (another distinction critiqued by Hansen).

Indeed, I think that it is important to note that Hansen’s more recent essay, “Media Theory” uses systems-theoretical terms to describe the media’s function in connect system and environment:

The medium, we might say, is implicated in living as essentially technical, in what I elsewhere call ‘technical life’; it is the operation of mediation—and perhaps also the support for the always concrete mediation—between a living being and the environment. In this sense, the medium perhaps names the very transduction between the organism and the environment that constitutes life as essentially technical; thus it is nothing less than a medium for the exteriorization of the living, and correlatively, for the selective actualization of the environment, a demarcation of a world, of an existential domain, from the unmarked environment as such” (300, italics mine).

Taking this quotation as a departure point and translating it into the language I used a minute ago, we might say that the medium (which is basically any exteriorizing medium – language, but, moreover, writing (Derrida) or communication (Luhmann)) helps to make a distinction, actualizing a different relation between system and environment.

Furthermore, I think we should read Hansen’s argument about “medium” as corresponding to the position he ascribes to Derrida in what Hansen calls Derrida’s ‘machine reduction of technology’: “Functionally, technology is limited to the role of material support for the ‘possibilities of the trace’; like writing in the restricted sense, it is merely the means by which differance exteriorizes and expresses itself” (84).Replace “differance” with the “exteriorization of the living” as a selective actualization of the environment and I think you will see why his position corresponds with Derrida’s, except that Derrida uses the “machine” metaphor and Hansen calls this “medium” (which is also what systems theory would call it if we remember Gumbrecht’s quote).

Hansen argues that Derrida and others who put technology into discourse, reducing technology to a text-machine, is “a defense against the threat posed by the radical material alterity of technology: by safely situating technology as the ‘other’ within thought, as the machinery of language integral to thought’s genesis, technesis neutralizes a more formidable ‘other’ that threatens the wholesale dissolution of the much cherished closure of representation” (87). Here, I would argue that the idea that human ‘thought’ or ‘writing’ as communication is integral to ourselves, to any human being – that we are always already “inhuman” would be much more terrifying. Thus, I think Hansen in a sense is defending against this position, which he partially amends in his essay “Media Theory.” Following Bernard Stiegler, Hansen argues that the break of the human from everything is else is also the invention of technics (299).  However, Hansen still maintains that, a bit contrary to his Lyotardian position in Embodying Technesis, that “no matter how cognitively sophisticated these technologies become, they operate only through their coupling with the human” (302). In this way, technology is not an “autonomous,” radically exterior force; rather, technology is only “quasi-autonomous”

Metalepsis

The key rhetorical move by which the poststructuralists reduce technology is metalepsis. Hansen defines the term as

a rhetorical figure describing the metonymical substitution of one (figurative) word for another or several others. Most often involving extreme compression and an ensuing obfuscation of the literal sense of the statement, metalepsis also, in certain cases, designates an inversion or conflation of cause and effect (91).

Thus, Hansen argues that metalepsis designates “the triumph of having so stationed technology, in one’s own work, that particular aspects of technology seem to be not preconditions of one’s description, but rather to be caused by one’s own production” (Hansen 92, original italics).

One of the issues with Hansen’s use of the text-machine is that he is reducing the text to an ideal form rather than a material artifact/medium that is one way “writing” happens. He is confusing “text” and “writing” with language, particularly language as representation: “As long as technology is made to derive from language, the postructuralist and constructivist idioms can confidently maintains their enabling conflation of technology’s robust materiality with the relative materiality that it possesses within the theater of representation” (93).

Greek ontology and the Machine Reduction

I hate to sound snotty, but if Derrida has reduced the machine to a textual metaphor, then Hansen has reduced the supplement to only one of its significations. Hansen quotes Aristotle on the meaning of techne, which contains two specific forms of mimesis: that which “carries to its end what physis is incapable of effecting” and the usual sense of “imitation” (Lacou-Labarthe qtd. in Hansen 95). Hansen argues that Derrida’s description of the supplement “could well be a gloss on Aristotle’s passage: “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It is thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function” (Derrida qtd. in Hansen 95). Then Hansen moves on to say that in this form, the supplement, “retains a basic fidelity to Aristotelian techne” (95).

First, we must contextualize the passage that Hansen tears out of Derrida. The passage stems from the section From/Of Blindness to the Supplement, a section that discusses the function of the supplement in the text of Rousseau. Derrida says many times surrounding this passage quoted from Hansen that he is speaking about the supplement “in the text of Rousseau” (although, it might be worth pointing out that in “Typewriter Ribbon,” Derrida says that in de Man, the text of Rousseau becomes “exemplary of the text in general”)  It is extremely important to the rest of his argument to read what Hansen did not quote. Directly before the passage, Derrida writes,“For the concept of the supplement—which here determines that of the representative image—harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange and as necessary” (144).

So, we already know that Hansen has not quoted the second signification. But even before we get there, directly after the passage Hansen quotes, Derrida writes, “This kind of supplementarity determines in a certain way all the conceptual oppositions which Rousseau inscribes the notion of Nature to the extent that it should be self-sufficient” (145). This part is quoted to show that the type of supplement is articulated within the context of the text of Rousseau specifically regarding nature. But let’s see what the other signification is:

substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy” (145). More importantly, the next paragraph states, “this second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first [. . .] But their common function is shown in this: whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it” (145).

Although I am not quite sure what this means, the question is whether or not Hansen can really claim that Derrida’s notion of the supplement is a “gloss” on Aristotle’s concept of “techne” if he erases the context of the passage (Rousseau) and the second signification of the supplement. I think we may find that Derrida does not recuperate the supplement into the domain of thought, as Hansen claims.

Luck and the automatic (pgs 98-101) (some notes and Questions)

Chance:

Luck—“restricted domain of events, those capable of choosing” (humans)

Automatic—“to animals other than man, objects” etc.

The Difference:

1.)    luck ‘former’ “are for something in a sense that could be determined by their agent (i.e. according to the category of thought), while the latter are for something in a sense that cannot be so determined, that remains-in itself-indeterminate.

2.)    The final cause of an automatic event is external and thus can only make sense if understood by an intentional agent.

Hansen points out that Aristotle does not hold to the radical exteriority of the automatic and assimilates it into the domain of the mind. The automatic is “para physin in the sense that it cannot be tied down to a purpose immediately graspable by and attributable to an agent of thought or to nature. Its efficiency derives from something purely contingent and external in the subject it qualifies” (100). If we look back to Derrida’s description of the supplement, we see that is much more akin to “the automatic” than to Aristotle’s restricted definition of techne.

Chapter 4: Questioning the Machine Basis of Technology: Heidegger on Techne

In Rutsky’s book, he interprets high-tech as technology that reveals in the mode of poesis; For Heidegger and for Rutsky, poesis, as a revealing that brings-forth, puts us in a positive, “science-fictional” relationship with the future. Rutsky writes at the end of his book,

“These ‘other’ futures cannot be represented through rational analysis and predictions; they can only be imagined through a science-fictional process, an imaginative, aesthetic process that is similar to the bringing-forth that Heidegger saw in the Greek techne” (158).

While Rutsky sees this shift as promising and productive, following Heidegger’s lead, Hansen reads Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” as another symptom of technesis, arguing that “Heidegger’s reduction of technology thus functions to insure the domestication of modern technology within the frame of poiesis” (104).

Hansen first reads technology as an ontic supplement that contributes to our “fallenness” and “inauthentic” existence in idle chat and curiosity. The argument is that basically, technology infiltrates the purity of language: “What cybernetic technologies do is present the being of language as mere words cut off from their connection with a [. . .] ‘context of involvements’. In this sense, what Heidegger says of the typewriter is all the more true of the computer” (109).

Hansen argues that Heidegger only considers technologies which “can be thematized in explicit terms” because these are the only ones that can have a direct impact on our lives. He argues that there are two mediated practices which are left out of this category:

1.       Experiences in which there is no breakdown and hence no motivation to cross from the practical to the theoretical domain.

2.       Experience in which technology’s impulse (because it is molecular and diffuse) isi n pricinpel not recuperable through thematization.

I think we need to explore particularly what number 1 could possibly be referring to in terms of concrete technologies that Hansen seems to be referring to here.

In terms of “Question Concerning Technology,” it seems like Hansen comes to the opposite conclusion of Rutsky; namely, that far from the mode of poiesis being able to engage with high-tech, it actually cannot extend to the question of high-tech: “Whereas poiesis could coherently be applied to the forms of production known to the Greeks (“handcraft manufacture,” “artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery,” and physis) it simply cannot be extended to cover the category of modern production” (115). Instead, Hansen argues that “as long as it comprises a mode of poiesis or the revealing of Being, modern technology, in other words, can distinguished solely through its negativity—the way it obscures the meaning of Being” (118).

Given what we said about Rutsky’s tracing of the development of technologies back to an artisan, a producer – that such an origin of production is rare these days (see I, Pencil) I think we would be more apt to agree with Hansen’s critique rather than Rutsky’s affirmation of the Heideggerian poiesis.

Chapter 5: The Mechanics of Deconstruction: Derrida on De Man, or Poststructuralism in the Age of Cultural Studies

Hansen claims that Derrida effectively preserves the priority of Heideggerian poiesis, claiming that “privileging the trace as the withdrawl of truth, Derrida retains the very same priority of ontology for which Levinas rebukes Heidegger” (124). And again, on the next page: “by taking the being of what is and making it thoroughly dependent on the metaphysics of the text (and thus on the operation of techne), Derrida simply effaces the very category of radical exteriority and, along with it, all traces of materiality outside the space governed by textuality” (125).

“The functional analogy linking text with machine begins to function ontologically—and hence reductively—from the moment when deconstruction generalizes its claims to technology as such, rather than restricting them to technology in its textual form” (128).

“matter” is reduced to playing “the purely abstract role of that which resists idealization” (129)

We should recall Hansen’s understanding of the supplement, as it is crucial to his argument in this chapter on Derrida as well. Hansen writes, “technology simply supplements thought ith a material basis without which it could not function” and also, on the opposite page, “technology is made wholly coequivalent with the supplement and thus loses its truly radical force as a material obstacle to the onto-phenomenological movement of thought, a threat to thinking itself” (133). I have a hard time thinking how technology isn’t a threat to thinking itself while at the same time being the enabling condition for thought. It’s a threat to the purity of thought or to thought without any mediation – ideal thought.

De Man and Derrida’s ‘materiality’ of the text

Hansen argues that Derrida “ignores de Man’s introduction of the ‘material’—a category, I suggest, holds the relation of radical exteriority with respect to phenomenological thought or consciousness [Erinnerung]” (read pgs 138-`139 for a general summary of Hansen’s argument)

In Psyche: Inventions of the Other 1 Derrida is adamant that de Man’s notion of textual “materiality” is not matter. I will quote a few passages from the essay,  “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (within such limits),” which we would do well to read closely:

The materiality in question—is not a thing; it is not something (sensible or intelligible); it is not even the matter of a body [. . .] this nothing therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance. It resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial and organic totality. This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, it seems to me, matter, but materiality [. . .] I would say that it is a materiality without matter (350)

This force of resistance without material substance derives from the dissociative and inorganic, disorganizing, disarticulating, and even disseminal power that de Man attributes to the letter “ (351)

First of all, the inscription of a textual event—and this will later be one of the traits of the materiality of matter—is a machine like deconstruction of the body proper. This is why I said, using a formulation that is not de Man’s, that materiality becomes a very useful generic name for all that resists appropriation (353).

The materiality of this event as a textual event is what is or makes itself independent of any subject or any desire (357).

On the one hand, we can read these statements as Hansen would – as a reduction of robust materiality into the relative exteriority of the text. However, might we also consider that these passages mean that the world is not a text in the sense that everything is “textualized” (turned into and object for literary hermeneutics). Indeed, in these above formulations, the textual event/world is not appropriable, which means that is not something that is simply “given to thinking.” Or at least, it cannot be subsumed and appropriated by the thinking subject.  Let us now look at how Derrida defines the text in his work:

In his essay “But beyond. . .,” Derrida writes that the text is,

always a field of forces: heterogeneous, differential, open, and so on . . .[Deconstructive readings and writings] are not simply analyses of discourses, such as, for example, the one you propose. They are also effective or active (as one says) interventions, in particular political and institutional interventions that transform contexts without limiting themselves to theoretical or constative utterances even though they must produce such utterances (168).

So the text is metaphorically described as a machine in some essays, but it is also described in other ways. Perhaps we can take this as a sign that Derrida finds the machinic metaphor convenient to describe the disarticulation of the text, but does not restrict technology (in the more “robust material” sense to an object (a text) for thinking. Furthermore, it’s not as though Derrida is unaware of the actual effects of material technology on someone, for instance, being filmed (see my last blog post on Echographies of Television).

Ch. 6: Psyche and Metaphor: Derrida’s Freud

“Through his proposed generalization, technology remains, in its essence, a means of archivation, of information storage; only now, in the postFreudian era, it finds itself spread over global dimensions. Stripped of all hints of autonomy, of a proper materiality, technology—as the materialization of the world’s resemblance to memory—is made to fit within a teleological history of the psyche and its ontogenetic production of thought and memory. Integrated into the textually given play of the world, technology comprises nothing more than a support for the Being-in-the-world of the psyche.” (147)

The question here is whether or not there is something wrong with conceiving of technology as forms of memory; specifically, exteriorizations of memory, as Stiegler puts it, tertiary retentions. In Katherine Hayles essay “Tech-TOC,” she argues that Stiegler’s privileging of tertiary retentions is problematic:

the biological capacity for memory (which can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation to carry the past into the present) is exteriorized, creating the possibility, through technics, for a person to experience through complex temporality something that never was experienced as a first-hand event, a possibility that Stiegler calls tertiary retention. This example, which Stiegler develops at length and to which he gives theoretical priority, should not cause us to lose sight of the more general proposition: that all technics imply, instantiate, and evolve through complex temporalities[JR1] . 

It seems that in Hansen’s “Media Theory,” he is following Stiegler, arguing that there is an “essential correlation of storage with life” (301). Even though he seems to follow Stiegler, Hansen seems less concerned with tertiary retention and more with secondary retention. Hansen writes,

As Stiegler has shown, the contemporary culture industries strive to exercise and maintain a stranglehold on cultural memory (secondary memory) by offering pre-programmed, media artifactual memory objects (tertiary memories) that, because of their seduction and their ubiquity work to erode the role of personal consciousness and to displace lived experience as the basis for secondary memory (304). 

The priority of secondary memory for Hansen is because, continuing his project in Embodying Technesis, he wants to still focus on lived experience. According to Hansen, digital technologies

empower personal secondary memory to reassert some control over the production of presencings [. . .] because they allow personal lived consciousness control over the flux of the media artifact that is its surrogate temporal object, they allow consciousness to live time (at least to some extent) according to its own rhythms. In sum, digital technologies restore some sense of agency that personal lived consciousness has (apparently) lost (304).

Hansen wants to create a “politics of presencing” to…supplement?... Stiegler and Derrida’s “politics of memory,” that both refer to in Echographies of Television.

My next blog post will address the Hansen’s last chapter of Embodying Technesis and the distinction Benjamin makes of different kinds of experience/memory and Stiegler’s reading of tertiary and secondary retentions. Is it plausible to see Stiegler’s tertiary retentions as “voluntary memory”? If so, how would this different from Hansen’s current project of a politics of presencing?

Becoming Crustacean: South Park and Posthumanism?

In his essay in Posthuman Bodies, Eric White argues that crabs within the film Attack of the Crab Monsters, "threaten the intelligibility of gender," since the crabs are as "indifferent to the gender of their victims as becoming they are unperturbed to find, after having feasted on numerous bodies, that they will henceforth be creatures endowed with multiple personalities instead of a unitary self" (248). Thus,  'becoming crustacean' is an incorporation of the human mind into the crab where it lives on in a different embodiment; the minds incorporated and assimilated into the crab are able to live in a different way and one of them is particularly exhilarated to find himself in an embodiment that, according to White, "lifts the censorship of the body habitually imposed by the repressive superego" (249). There are benefits, in other words, to becoming-crab.

Such a reading of a 'human' embodiment of crabs immediately called to my mind the South Park episode, "South Park is Gay," which is a bit of an ironic title, considering that all of south park does not turn gay (only the men and boys; in fact, it is interesting to note that barely any young girls are featured in the episode, if at all) and, furthermore, they do not turn 'gay' but metrosexual because of the popularization of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." While we may simply dismiss the criticism of Queer Eye as Trey and Matt's person despising of the show (and we may end up there by the end of the analysis), it could also be argued that the problem is the way the town reacts to the show, imitating its essentialist, stereotypical gay behavior.

Indeed, it could be argued that Matt and Trey are not bashing gay people by any means, but the appropriation of a particular strain of gay culture-- male gay culture, lesbians are not mentioned whatsoever in this episode, or, I believe, in the show -- in order to promote a kind of consumerist ethic and a stereotypical image of the gay male as addicted consumer. One could argue that metrosexuality, when taken to its extreme, is the image of innocent, joyful, consumerism without having to deal with marginalization for 'deviant' sexual acts. Both the adults and children perform their metrosexual identity by shopping at malls, using skin products, 'makeovers', flambyoant clothes (of which they constantly comment on), gestures, slight lisps, and pet names, such as "dollface."

In addition to the representations of the men as rampant consumers, they also embody the competitive attitude of capitalism. Rather than competing for who is the most "masculine," the kids now compete to determine who is more 'gay'; rather than discriminate and beat up 'gays' (or people who 'act' or 'perform' a particular constructed homosexual identity), they beat up non-gays. Thus, aside from their performance of identity through their appearance and some minor behavior changes, they remain associated with competition generally associated with male identity (although this is not necessarily true). When Kyle decides that he does not want to go along with the new 'fad' of metrosexualism, saying that he didn't feel "comfortable," his friends abandon him, kids tell him to take is "non-flaming ass" elsewhere, and proceed to beat the hell out of him. Arriving home, Kyle is confronted with this father, who, initially confused at his friends' behaviors, conforms to it just as we expect him to be furious at Kyle's beating. Instead of focusing on the problem that his son has been beaten for being 'different' (which used to be the 'norm'), Gerald focuses on the horror of his external appearance, declaring that he can use all sorts of beauty products to hide his beaten, marked state as an outsider to the dominant 'gayness' (metro-ness) of south park's males.

I keep wavering between the terms 'gay' and 'metro' because the episode constantly puts into question the issue of performance of gender. At school, the men have all began to perform the stereotypical 'queer' identity. Mr. Garrison, the boys' teacher and a gay man -- a very gay man, as he is frequently seen with "Mr. Slave," his sex slave -- recognizes that all the boys are "acting gay." At first, he chastises the children for claiming an identity they couldn't possibly understand, to which one student says he's a "catamite" and Eric, attempting to counter this even though he clearly has no idea what a catamine is (a young boy kept for sex by an older man), he responds "I'm half bi," a designation that makes no sense.  When Mr. Garrison says "Eric, you're not half bi," Eric proves the point of Mr. Garrison, who understands (at least we assume) gay at this point as constituting homosexual acts, by saying "I"m a quarter bi--my grandfather was half-bi so that makes me a quarter bi." Not only does this little tidbit reveal Cartman's ignorance, but it also refers to the attempt of biologists to root gayness in a "gay gene" that people might inherit gayness from parents.

But although in the above scene we assume that Mr. Garrison implies that the children couldn't possibly be having gay sex, and thus making them 'gay', he reveals his own reliance on performance/appearance when he arrives at a bar filled with the newly metrosexual men, saying to Mr. Slave, "Look at that! Our cup runneth over." However, he does test the waters by asking about the men's clothes. When the answer in a typically "gay" fashion, Garrison asks quite directly if they want to "come back to his place and pound Mr. Slave's ass." The men say no, claiming they are "straight" Garrison is confused, and finally yells "Why won't anyone pound Mr. Slaves ass!" First, we should note that Garrison assumes that any gay person will immediately have sex with a sex slave. But perhaps more importantly, we find that Garrison too associates gayness with outward and visible performance rather than sexual acts -- or at least, that the performance implies the desire for homosexual acts: "Those pants and those shoes say you pound butt" -- and "your shoes say you take in the butt."

On the one hand, we can critique Garrison for his assumptions about performance and sexual preference, but on the other hand, the only reason the men are performing gay identity is because they realize that its 'totally cool'; it is only 'totally cool' because of the popularization of Queer Eye, which puts forth a particular gay identity that serves to perpetuate the gay as consumer (and again, only male gays). One of the men say that Garrison is merely "one of us now," indicating that queer is the new square. Garrison is furious and says "We've spent our whole lives trying not to be one of you, you can't do that to us!"

Mr. Garrison, despondent, and mimicking the boys' usual behavior, confides in chef, asking him what black people did when white people appropriated their culture. Chef says that black people just tried to remain one step ahead via the modification of language. Chef recites the transformation of "in the house" all the way to "flippity floppity floop" because white people started saying it. Is this comparison appropriate? Either way, Garrison (perhaps unintentionally) shows his unawareness of other appropriations of culture when, as he leaves, he says to Mr. Slave they have to get back to their "flippity floppity floop."

Both Mr. Garrison and Kyle have been so deeply affected by this transformation of culture and their subsequent ostracization (Kyle) or assumed assimilation (Mr. Garrison) that they decide the only way to solve the problem is to go to its source: the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy people. Its ultimately the entertainment industry's fault that these men have taken on this identity and by 'legitimizing it' robbed it of all its meaning outside of a surface representation of 'gayness'. Furthermore, by legitimizing it,  instead of deconstructing the opposition, they have re-inscribed a binary opposition, simply privileging the other term.

Interestingly enough, competition remains between Garrison and Kyle as much as the gay men who face off at the mall. While Stan maintains that Randy is "better dressed" than Clyde's father and they begin to argue about "who is better dressed," Garrison and Kyle argue over who came up with the idea of killing the Queer Eye people first and thus who has been "oppressed" more. Tre and Matt are great at taking these arguments to their extreme to show their ridiculousness, but unfortunately, rather than following the advice of Mr. Slave who suggests to them, "Don't you see how ridiculous this all is!", both Garrison and Kyle take this to indicate that they can simply kill them together. Similarly, back at the mall, when the wives all the men are sick and tired of their obsession with their looks (rather than with them), they tell the men they don't like them acting gay. In typical south park fashion, rather than acknowledging how ridiculous such arguments are and how much pragmatic sense it would make to return to their former relations with their wives, they call their wives "metrophobes" and declare that they need a Metro Pride parade to raise awareness of their discrimination (mostly coming from their wives). Thus, south park parodies our tendency to resolve conflicts between groups by finding a common enemy (Queer Eye, Metrophobes) rather than recognizing the entire situation as absurd and ridiculous. The Metro pride parade has such appropriated chants as "we're here, we're not queer, but we're close, get used to it,"  and "out of the malls and into the streets" which have lost any power from their appropriation of privileged white males. It's not "out of the closet" and into the street--but the malls.  Its not the fact that they won't declare some sort of fixed identity that is the problem with "metrosexualism", but maintaining their privilege as the dominant, normative, and "non-queer" group ('we're close' -- but still MEN--we would never fuck other men. . .), reinforced by violence and stigmatism. Their 'metro pride parade' is a bunch of white men and boys confirming that they can be whoever they want for however long they want (so long as the fad lasts) and that you need to accept us because we are white male and dominant.

Mr. Garrison marvel at how the "Queer Eye" people could do this "to their own kind," their own "people," marking himself as part of a community. Garrison says, "You're selling out your own kind. Us gays have created a culture that is uniquely ours. If we keep trying to make straight people into us, we're going to have no identity left." To his surprise, the Queer Eye cast don't buy it, and Garrison concludes that they must not be 'gay at all'. The cast's voices lose the lisp, drop an octave, and they lock Garrison and Kyle in the room. Its not just that they aren't gay -- but -- they are

CRAB PEOPLE, who have been banished by men to the earth's crust.

At this point, most of the audience is reveling in the absurdity and, at least on first viewing, I remember distinctly laughing through repetitions of the phrase "what. . .the. . .fuck. . ." Crab people are "small and weak" and so they decide that if you can't beat man change man. And it is here that we get to the moment where performance of queerness, posthumanism, and Attack of the Crab Monsters meet.

The episode in some sense is a reverse of the crab incorporating/assimilating/differently-embodying the human personality; rather, in the episode, the crab becomes-human by donning skin-suits of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." But rather than called a 'monster,' as in the film discussed by White, the crabs in the episode are deliberately referred to as "crab people" and, indeed, repeat this mantra to the sound of a tympani ad nauseum.

 In a sense then, the crab people are not drastically other than man; in the one deviation from the relentless repetition of "crab people," the voiceover singing the song says "tastes like crab, talk like people." Does the taste of the crab make it distinctly other than human and what does it say about the crab's otherness that they can put on a skin-suit and transform themselves into "gay men"? Is South park suggesting that all gay men are really crab people?

To the last question, the answer is an emphatic no, since we know that the Queer Eye guys are not 'gay' at all. Indeed, given their plan to overthrow the world by "changing" man, they also seem to all be male crabs. In this sense, the crab people do not challenge gender identity at all -- it is a mere appearance of becoming-crustacean.

The appearance of becoming-crustacean is literalized when Kyle asks what if they refuse to go along with the plan? The crab people, rather than saying they will kill him (which, they can't do, since they are so weak), say they will turn them into CRAB PEOPLE.

Paralleling the form of the gay montage of the first "makeover" the other boys give Kyle, the crab people do the exact same thing to Kyle again, except that he is given  a "crabpeople" suit rather than designer clothes, antennas instead of hats or hairdos, and red paint (?) instead of facials. The song that plays during the initial montage is interwoven with the "crabpeople" mantra.  Thus, the crab people believe that by changing the outward appearance of Kyle and Garrison, they can make them into crabpeople just as they 'changed' man by turning them 'metrosexual'.

But whereas we can perform a socially recognizable identity (like 'gay' or 'straight') we are less able to perform, merely by the transformation of our outward appearance, the identity of crabpeople; or, if we are, then crabpeople are not very different from the human males they seek to change. They aren't crabs, they aren't people, but they are more like "people" than crabs, at least as portrayed in the south park episode.

Furthermore, the crab people, in their (male?) assumption that the race will become helpless without men, forget that there are still millions of pissed off women. In the end, the women burst in, claiming that they turned their husbands to "whiny little wussies' and proceed to beat the shit out of them, killing them. They claim "we didn't have a choice" because they couldn't stand their men. They realize that it is their husbands "manliness" that they were attracted to in the first place and conclude, incidentally like Garrison and Kyle, that the only way to get them back was to "kill the queer eye guys." On the one hand, this act re-inscribes a normative hetro-sexuality, where men don't want to act gay or 'feminine' because then their wives would cease to be attracted to them. This is a problematic resolution from the perspective of a 'queer' reading of South Park. On the other hand, we could read the act of killing the queer eye guys as reversing the role of men and women, where women take up the responsibility to act on their own behalf. But tt is hard to not read this murder (is it murder? Are crab people 'people'? Are they killable? are they sacrificable? Are they representative of capitalism's appropriation of gay culture for profit?) as a return to the norm and a somewhat conservative response to some of the important questions raised by the satire in this episode. Violence against those who perpetuate a difference, an ambiguous space that straddles the line between gay and straight, the wussy, the dandy, the metrosexual, is the only way to stop the world from being taken over by crab people. In essence, men need to be men because that's what women are attracted to.

Yet it is worthwhile to note that the episode, nor does the series in general, argue that we should destroy gay people in order to protect the world and reinscribe hetero-normative order. As I hope I showed in my earlier analysis, violence against someone 'different' (even if, in the case of Kyle, he is basically heterosexual) is critiqued through a satirical lens. The most charitable reading would be that the show reveals that to be 'metrosexual' is an attempt at "normalizing" and "legitimating" gay culture and that this essentially deprives it of any meaning or difference. Furthermore, it allows for white, males to pretend they occupy a minority and subversive position. As Randy says, to the typical sad-sap music, "Crazy, different, outcasts, call us what you want, but us metros are real people just like you." This is when they decide to have a "metrosexual pride parade," -- as if their really needed to be a "metrosexual" awareness, as if 'metrosexuality' actually constituted an oppressed and disenfranchised position. But this is clearly not the case; this particular form of metrosexualism is, as I have already pointed out above, characterized by shopping and beauty products. This is not a minority position.

South Park ultimately affirms that identity is quite malleable and that appearance changes behavior, which in turn, changes the relations among people. In this sense, we're always already posthuman because identity becomes an outward performance of signifiers that we recognize as being constitutive of that identity.  I think South Park is critiquing the ease in which white, heterosexual males are able to appropriate and 'own' any identity they want as if they were playing dress up like a bunch of kids. The ease of moving from one stereotypical minority to the next (while maintaining their autonomy as white males) is exemplified in the last few moments of the episode.

Again, in typical south park fashion, rather than concluding that perpetuating fads of 'minority groups' to be appropriated and assumed by rich, white, males is deeply problematic, the studio execs decide to "bring back the Latin fad." We as viewers are then treated to a hilarious image of Randy saying to Jimbo et. al. standing on their front porch with a  "hey esse" surrounded by beer and a BBQ grill.

Like fathers, like sons. The boys approach Kyle with a "hey esse, you wanna play catch with us?" When Kyle expresses bewilderment at their sudden change in behavior he asks why all of a sudden they want to hang out with him. Stan says its "cool homes" and Kyle gives a speech about how shitty they have been to him. The language is already catching on in the school, even if they haven't nailed the clothing and 'behaviors' yet. When Kyle finishes his speech, we see that now that the 'gay' cause no longer is 'in', 'cool', and thus applies to their lives, 'gay' returns to its pejorative connotation: "Ah jesus kyle, don't be such a whiny little gay wad" "Yeah don't be such a fag dude."

The appropriation of identity by characters in South Park is always short lived and the identity is promptly forgotten and erased (including lessons that may have been learned from them) once it is no longer "useful" to the person appropriating them. For instance, in the "Ginger" episode, Cartman begins the episode claiming gingers have no soul, but when the other boys trick him into thinking he has become ginger, he takes his rightful place as the leader of the gingers, advocating for their cause and convincing them that everyone but gingers must die. When he almost murders Kyle, the "daywalker" (i.e. a Jew -- a ginger at heart -- or (not)soul according to Cartman), Kyle whispers in his ear that his identity is not even skin deep. Immediately, Cartman has a sudden realization that he was going about it all wrong (since he would then be killed should he wipe of the gunk put on his face) and convinces the gingers that they shouldn't kill each other with a lame song: "Hand in hand we can live together ginger or whatever we're all the same/we shouldn't kill each other cuz that is lame."

South Park, then, shows the danger of a kind of "postmodern" identity, where identity is skin deep and thus can be appropriated and performed by anyone and changed at will. Such a notion of identity does not take into account how much easier it is for the privileged class  to take on whatever identity they please in order to to commodify and exploit that identity to serve their own, selfish purposes.

What is the difference between Eduardo Kac's GFP Bunny (Alba) and the Tortoise with a Desk Chair Wheel?

Today we were discussing animal prosthetics, particularly the turtle with the wheel. Sid said that he hoped the reason the turtle had the wheel was because of some birth defect or that he lost a leg rather than the desire of the consumer, and I hope that too, because what would happen if we as consumers said: hey! I want a turtle with some wheels as a pet! As Melissa pointed out, many of the animals with prosthetics are pets because of the expense of the augmentation. The exception to this may be when the animal makes money, such as a race horse. 

The same worry about access, money, and the fetishization of intriguing animals has made people question Eduardo Kac's GFP bunny project. I'd like to point out some of the differences between Alba and the wheel turtle. 

1.) Alba does not always glow green, but only under certain light whereas the wheel turtle is 'abnormal' either in the way that he has a leg missing or the wheel. This is significant because Alba's glow is not every present, always marking her as different. Kac writes that "for those that are unaware that Alba is a glowing bunny, it is impossible to notice anything unusual about her. Therefore, Alba undermines any ascription of alterity predicated on morphology or behavorial traits. It is precisely this productive ambiguity that sets her apart: being at once same and different" (Kac, "GFP bunny," 274; also found on his website that for some reason is currently down). 

2.) In addition to the invisibleness of Alba, as Kac says, Alba does not exhibit any different behavior. In other words, it does not seem like Alba's modification has changed her embodied way of being in the world. In contrast, as we can see, the wheel turtle, like anyone with a prosthetic, has to reconfigure their embodiment, at least at first. People who now have prosthetic legs have to learn how to move them and operate with them. 

3.) Alba's modification took place before/while she was born. That is, it's not as though Kac took an albino bunny fully grown and injected her with something. Thus, Alba has never known herself to be otherwise (I use known full well knowing I am anthropomorphizing). The turtle, however, may have adapted to function without the leg, but as human beings, we think--huh, he would probably move around better with a desk wheel. Alba's modification, again, has no corrective function. 

I suppose why I highlighted these few difference is to think through the different kinds of modifications. We usually don't call things that are invisible "prosthetics." Does a prosthetic always have to "replace" a missing body part? Alba's modification seems like excess rather than replacing a lack. Alba's GFP is a pro-aesthetic. 

Both of these differences highlight the fact that Alba's case remains ambiguous.