[-empyre-] Compulsion and control . . .

[Shaka McGlotten]

Thanks to everyone for a pretty amazing discussion so far. I’m grateful for
the invitation to participate and am happy to be in the company of some
intellectual friends.



I’ve spent much of the day reading this month’s posts. Of course, I was
interrupted—by phone calls, meetings, and the whiny demands of my dog to be
taken out. She’s jealous of the time I spend in front of screens. If she
were a cat, she’d walk in front of it or on it.



Was my need to read everything first (and take notes and formulate possible
responses) compelled? Is compulsion the same as repetition compulsion, or
might it also orient toward something we might think of as a completionist
impulse (collecting, bookmarking, endless browsing, ordering and
organizing, academic rigor)? The many discussions about flow, its machine
zone dark side, and their relation to neoliberal techniques that manage
both labor and subjectification are apropos here. These days, temporalities
of work and play alike seem extended; there are stretched out times of
desire and pleasure (porn, gossipy phone calls, binge-watching Veep)
entangled with equally stretched and suspended, if more quotidian, labors
(all those fucking emails).



For years I have thought of my computer as a sex machine demanding
engagement in patterns of excitation-capital-frustration-excitation-capital
(I am glad that Mathew added Preciado to the discussion, someone I’ve found
enormously useful in thinking about desire and technology). And obviously
my computer is a labor siphon, too, endlessly addressing itself to me,
promising some other set of possibilities, like crossing everything off my
to-do list, even while it exhausts me. If only I could put in just a little
more time. On the days I do put in that extra time (every day it seems),
there’s the f.lux app to make sure that I’m not too agitated by the
emanations of blue light constantly working on my body and its rhythms.



This activity, that is, this very post, had been planned (dozens of
scribbled iterations on notes or reminders on my digital to do lists);
deferred (I had to do that other thing to do first, and then that one,
too); and then it became immersive, or as Gordon Calleja put it, I became
absorbed, incorporated into what is still as much a virtual as a real
dialogue, a enactment of potential interactions as much as real ones.



Reading this, do you still feel lonely? What is calling to you right now?
Are you compelled, impelled, both?



When I finish writing, a whole host of potential activities await: 27 tabs
open across two browsers of things to read, or maybe I’ll just stream some
yoga from Yogaglo, or get in touch with the pot dealer and find someone who
just wants to engage in an emergent structure of feeling particular I’ve
recently encountered in social media like Yik Yak: “Netflix and cuddle.”



If this post seems somewhat elliptical or obtuse, my apologies. Part of
that has to do with the fact that my absorption in these threads has
created many resonances with my past and ongoing thinking about affect and
online sociality, as well with a concept I recently heard Jasbir Puar use
in a discussion of Israel/Palestine at the Affect Theory: Worldings,
Tensions, and Futures conference, where Natasha and I were also keynote
speakers. “Computational sovereignty” isn’t Puar’s concept—Richard Stallman
and others have used it before—but the ways computation is tied to
violence, specifically to Israeli practices of stunting and maiming
Palestinians, struck a chord.



I’m interested in something similar in my new “Black Data” project, which
brings together queer of color critique with network culture studies by
examining histories of black queer fugitivity and contemporary queer of
color arts practices and media ecologies (quirky or opaque web series or
out of the way Tumblrs, among other examples). Part of the theoretical and
political salience of this project involves thinking through things like
data-based or algorithmic discrimination. In other words, whose bodies
become the targets for affect-modulating games, apps, and other designed
human computer interactions? Or, in what ways might different people
differentially targeted? Are some bodies more apt to be compelled? And what
happens when bodies are exhausted? Does the cycle begin again? Does it
always have to?



One of my upcoming talks will be about porn fasts, the practice of breaking
porn habits in the search of greater intimacy with oneself or with others,
a practice of self-making that has to do with subtraction, with opting out.
Anyone else thinking about compulsion and control in relation to people
going off the grid?



Last spring, I had my students do a series of challenges that were part of
the WNYC podcast New Tech City (now Note to Self) series “Bored and
Brilliant.” Each day came with a new challenge—keep your phone in your
pocket rather than in your hand while walking about, delete your favorite
app, install an app to check the number of times you’ve picked your black
mirror up. The idea behind these exercises was that our constant
engagements (sensual tapping, scrolling, holding, caressing) of our
computational extensions prevent us from just spacing out or being bored,
yet another set of suspended temporalities that allow us to engage in
certain forms of creative problem solving or long term planning about the
kinds of people we might want to become.



All best,

Shaka
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