Becoming Fungible: Queer Intimacies in Social Media (Qui Parle 23:2, Spring 2015)

B n F n bl : r nt n l d

T R h

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 23, Number2, Spring/Summer 2015, pp. 55-87 (Article)

P bl h d b n v r t f N br Pr

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Becoming FungibleQueer Intimacies in Social Media

tom roach

Everything you may have heard about online dating is true: It is steeped in a consumerist logic. It substitutes algorithms for phero-mones. It instrumentalizes intimacy and mechanizes the wily ways of desire. It conjures illusions of privacy, control, and anonym-ity (while simultaneously violating that perceived privacy with the insidious practices of data mining and personalized advertising). It exacerbates the same barbarous impulses— hyper- individualism, cutthroat competition, solipsism, self- aggrandizement— so inte-gral to and rewarded in the marketplace.1 Indeed, it is diffi cult to argue that social media at large do little else but construct and fortify what Michel Foucault designates homo economicus: that calculating spawn of neoliberalism who perceives himself and oth-ers foremost as human capital.2 If the lived experience of homo economicus turns on consumption, enterprise, brand creation, self- optimization, effi ciency, aggressive speculation, and, ironically, amid the never ending workday, the maximization of individual-ized pleasure, it fi nds its virtual Elysium in the profi le pages of online dating sites.3 At fi rst glance, queer social media, including hookup apps such as Grindr and Scruff, would appear to be no dif-ferent.4 They too seem the refuge and breeding ground for neolib-eral subjectivity, communication, and relational forms. However,

qui parle spring/summer 2015 vol. 23, no. 256

in contrast to the chorus of techno- pessimistic voices that holds the Internet responsible for the death of a public queer sex culture,5 I assert that to whatever extent social media have transformed the means of queer communication and connection, the ends are gen-erally the same, that is, connection, hooking up. Despite signif-icant differences between bathhouse cruising and profi le brows-ing, between dark rooms and chat rooms, the antirelational ethical principles constituted in the former can nonetheless be found and fostered in the latter.6 In this article I will foreground an ethical commonality I see spanning public cruising and private browsing, namely, the queer practice of shared estrangement.7

msm (men- seeking- men) media illuminate some ugly truths about the gay community that mainstream lgbt political lobbies aim to suppress. For one, the social institutions of marriage and military, along with the deadened concept of sexual identity that grounds them, cannot harness unruly desires or squelch socially unacceptable beliefs and practices. Moreover, the deep currents of racism, classism, sexism, effemiphobia, and patriarchal masculin-ism that pervade msm media should give any out and proud queer cause for concern. I understand msm media, however, as more than reactionary proof of the failure of a respectable politics of assimi-lation. Rather, I fi nd in them a form of perceptual training for a coming politics beyond representation, one founded in the aban-donment of traditional, dialectical conceptions of intersubjectivity and community.8

The training begins with a paradox: At the same time that screens underscore the distance between interlocutors in the social media exchange, they simultaneously produce intense feelings of connec-tion. In other words, the screen that bridges the distance between individuals also calls attention to their solitude, perhaps even fi ni-tude. As such, the screen stands as an ever- present reminder of the impossibility of intersubjective fusion, and yet feelings of deep in-terdependence brim over. In my earlier work on aids Buddy friend-ships, I argue that death’s constitutive and inescapable presence in these caregiving relationships forces an acknowledgment of the radically common yet thoroughly singular fi nitude the participants (un)share. Such an acknowledgment encourages a respect for the

Roach: Queer Intimacies in Social Media 57

unknown in the self and the absolute foreignness of the other and nurtures an impersonal ethics of nonrecognition: a mode of relat-ing that resists the violent, intersubjective subsumption of self into other, other into self.9 A relation forged through a mediating force that both binds and separates— in the Buddy scenario, death; in the social media situation, the screen— can provoke affective ties that pressure traditional understandings of belonging and community. Despite their capacity for eliciting merciless opportunism and out-rageous selfi shness, social media might also cut another way: in the virtual atmosphere of shared estrangement, the destructive ego might be humbled if not humiliated, unknown selves and unusual intima-cies born, and respect for the inviolable alterity of the other learned.

Furthermore, in the age of hyper- communication there is some-thing to be said, stammeringly, for the untimely power of inar-ticulateness. Location- based hookup apps and other context- based media— such as “Yo,” a mobile app whose sole function is to shout “Yo!” at a recipient— take inarticulacy or, more generously, post- articulacy to new heights.10 The discursive exchanges typical of msm location- based apps— from the introductory interpellations, “hey,” “’sup,” “woof,” to the inevitable request for “pix”— reduce dialogue to a series of churlish grunts and crass propositions— a nightmare (or perhaps a respite) for those who pride themselves on eloquence, wit, or emotional expressivity.11 Adopting the discursive conventions of these forums— bluntness, eschewal of conversation-al niceties, near prohibition of confessional candor— is to learn a new language, one in which any acknowledgment of subjective in-teriority (“deep” thoughts, feelings, etc.) becomes a liability. If in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France Foucault longed to “slip imperceptibly” into a discourse that preceded him, he might well feel at home in the world of msm social media, where ventrilo-quial speakers rehearse utterances that seem to emanate not from any individualized psychobiographical interiority but from the cul-tural milieu itself.12

In this regard, the suggestive and prescient words of Gilles De-leuze come to mind. In a conversation with Antonio Negri, pub-lished in 1990 as “Control and Becoming,” he states:


Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money— and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has al-ways been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.13

Observing that speech and communication, like all modes of rep-resentation, are commodifi able, Deleuze also seems to be imply-ing here that relations grounded in communicative norms are also “by their very nature” both market- ready and politically bankrupt. If, as Negri asserts, communication fuels the productive processes of postmodern capital,14 Deleuze’s command to “hijack speech” seems a logical strategy to “elude social control.”15 But what would that hijacking look (or sound) like?16 Are there any tactical openings, any “circuit breakers,” to be found in social network-ing technologies? Can “vacuoles of noncommunication” be culti-vated in the very heart of the communication- technological beast? If such technologies facilitate the construction of Foucault’s homo economicus, might they also work to dismantle it?

By taking seriously the various forms of post- articulation encour-aged in msm social media, I assert that what initially, and rightfully, may appear as forums of senseless blather and crass self- interest might also be an active creation of an antirelational discourse strug-gling to retreat from dominant systems of commodifi ed communica-tion, on the one hand, and reifi ed classifi cations of sexual identity, on the other.17 This baldly superfi cial, anti- confessional discourse is integral to the production of what I call, following Paulo Virno, connection- as- such: not a Facebook post sharing a portion of one’s “personal life” (however fabricated that life may be), but a sensual mingling of interchangeable types (twink, daddy, bear, bro) devoid of subjective interiority.18 Such traffi cking in surfaces and types— as opposed to selves, individual histories, and identities— can be as liberating as it is dehumanizing. The pleasures of msm media cer-tainly include the relief afforded by escaping momentarily the self that works, pays bills, provides; the self held personally accountable for whatever befalls it; even the self burdened with managing its


“brand” across other, more demanding social media sites.19 At the same time, delinking desire from identity, treating people essentially as objects whose sole purpose is to heighten personal pleasure, runs the risk of devaluing life in dangerous, albeit all too typical, ways. As noted earlier, it is impossible to ignore the impact of neoliberal rationality and subjectivity on the emergence and popularity of these media. Indeed, homo economicus himself cares little for biographi-cal history and emotional interiority: he is simply, as Andrew Dilts puts it, “an array of activities” (“es,” 136– 37). These activities are based not on the principle of mutual exchange, but rather on self- optimization: as a repository of human capital, homo economicus invests in others only if a profi table return is likely. Browsing the skin shots of profi le pages, he calculates his moves using cost- benefi t analysis, contacting those likely to maximize his interest and plea-sure. Accumulated hookups become the tentacles of this virtual Cthulhu whose capacity for destruction increases with the stockpil-ing of contacts.

This monster, however, is humiliated in the process: his aggres-sive ego is tempered by the law of equivalence in a (meat) market of fungible goods. Here, as in the halls of commerce, equivalence is not equality. While all profi les in any given msm media plat-form are subject to the same visual and discursive constraints, their popularity tends to correlate with conventional gender and beau-ty standards, body ideals, and racial, quite often racist, cultural norms and expectations.20 That is to say, the virtual grid of the msm hookup app is hardly the picture of Whitmanesque cama-raderie or Eakinsesque brotherly love. Instead, like the neoliberal market from which it springs and for which it works, “success” depends on the attractiveness and marketability of the brand.

This economy functions not on principles of exchange, how-ever, but on fungibility: the profi les and the human capital invest-ed in them— the hopes, desires, and amorous longings— are sub-stitutable.21 Although one personal brand/profi le might “pop” or catch eyes more than others, all are ultimately fl attened into a sea of similitude. Recognizing the replaceability of one’s brand— that is, understanding oneself and others as merely one transpos-able, clickable option among many— can certainly provoke ego-


istic competition (“I must stand out in the pack; I must market my brand better”) and consumer frenzy (“The more I shop, the better my chances of scoring a good deal; This product is fi ne, but let’s keep searching for the best”). And yet this entrepreneurial and consumer behavior is secondary. In fact, it is a response, however unconscious, to the recognition of one’s substitutability. Emphasiz-ing the ego- lessening indignities and pleasures that occur in these forums, I venture to claim that a certain modulation of neoliberal practices and principles might transpire. Not at all a “reverse dis-course” or a conscientious political project, the modulation here concerns bending, perhaps unwittingly, the contours of neoliberal communication and relationality into other- than- neoliberal forms and articulations. Put succinctly, the exodus from intersubjective communication and self- /sexual identity I observe in msm social media is not necessarily socially progressive: it might just forge a dead- end paved with violent egoism, willed ignorance, even more commodifi able forms of communication, or “post- sexual” identifi -catory categories that serve merely to create new target markets. As a vehicle for connection- as- such, however, that road might also lead beyond contemporary communicative and relational conven-tions that, in the name of openness, honesty, team building, and interpersonal respect, have not only created the conduits for neo-liberal global capital but have also made violent, self- destructive, and socially destructive interactions the norm.

Connection- as- Such

In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault notes that the neoliberal so-cial fi eld is one in which “minority individuals and practices are tolerated,” one in which self- development and social mobility are encouraged for all (bb, 259). Such tolerance is only possible, however, when histories— racial, gendered, and sexual histories saturated in inequality and violence— are erased.22 All indeed are nominally equal in the marketplace— labor is fungible, workers are substitutable— but to get a foot in the door one must arrive to the job interview tabula rasa: merely human capital, merely skin and skill sets, devoid of a personal and political past, ready for incorpo-


ration. The celebration of diversity and difference in neoliberalism is thus purely formal. It works, paradoxically, to exacerbate racial-ized disparities in wealth and income.23 For axiomatic to neoliberal theory is the notion that competition is not necessarily innate in human populations: it must be fabricated and continually secured. Inequality, if anything, is a catalyst for competition. While neolib-erals assert that poverty and massive income disparity will vanish once the free market is permitted to do its magical work, histori-cally entrenched social inequalities (evidential residue, we are told, of liberalism’s failure) are convenient, useful, indeed integral to neoliberalism’s functioning insofar as they safeguard competition. The role of the neoliberalized government, then, is to secure, not alleviate, historically entrenched social inequalities— anything else would be socialism, hence political suicide.24

And yet, any signifi cant step toward more socialism— that is, actual social equality and income stability— would entail disinvest-ment in traditional communal forms. Founded in commonality (we have x in common), property (I belong to this group), exclusivity (you are not a member of this group), and intersubjectivity (our singular interests dialectically sublate into a common goal), such communities are the remnant of an earlier stage of capitalist devel-opment. If the two key fi gures in this century’s neoliberal landscape are the entrepreneur and the consumer, if the affects that motivate them are primarily cynicism and opportunism, a more radical and effective remedy to systemic inequality would involve learning to traverse this landscape as nimbly as those fi gures do, but for dif-ferent purposes and toward different ends.25 In the age of global capital, evading completely the roles of entrepreneur and consumer is next to impossible. Perhaps the only way to push past the social atomization and inequality wrought by neoliberalism is to appro-priate and modulate the methods and affects of its prized fi gures: to play the game not to “win” (i.e., to become homo economicus) but to generate alternative defi nitions of success, more ethical play-ers, and unorthodox communal forms.

Virno’s notion of belonging- as- such becomes quite useful in conceptualizing this project. In “The Ambivalence of Disenchant-ment,” Virno argues that the fl exibility and mobility required of the


contemporary laborer, from the migrant farmer to the jet- setting hedge funder, produces, paradoxically, intense feelings of belong-ing. In his words: “The impossibility of securing ourselves within any durable context disproportionately increases our adherence to the most fragile instances of the ‘here and now’” (“ad,” 31). Unlike an exclusive group membership, this belonging is not tied to a sub-stantial entity or community. Rather, it is a belonging to a feeling of belonging, to belonging itself: in a world shot through with precar-ious labor, contingent attachments, morphing self- identities, and unpredictable fl ows, traditional practices of belonging are increas-ingly untenable, certainly less profi table. Put another way, neolib-eralism has little use for belonging in a traditional sense: the more the entrepreneur and consumer abandon a “liberal” understanding of this concept, the more success they are poised to achieve. The af-fects that motivate these fi gures and generate belonging- as- such in-clude cynicism, fear, and resignation in the face of an interminable yet hyper- volatile present. Virno notes, however, that the affective experience of belonging- as- such is ambivalent. Suffusing a diverse range of practices in the communication- technological spectacle of information overload and stimulant surplus, it can spur increased opportunism and competition, or, quite the opposite, engender al-ternative understandings and experiences of connection, solidar-ity, and community. Virno thus locates an immanent strategy, nei-ther nostalgic nor utopian, in the irreversible present: the affects produced in neoliberalism can be put to work in the creation of nontraditional communal formations that defect from contempo-rary arrangements and functions.26 An abandonment of traditional conceptions of friendship, love, the family, the party, an abandon-ment of dialectical, transcendent conceptions of intersubjectivity, community, revolution, might be the only way to deviate from a course dead set on destruction. Although we indeed may be “bowl-ing alone” in our politically disengaged neighborhoods, although we may be “alone together” in our social media, the alienating experiences that generate belonging- as- such hold a promise: the seeds, if properly propagated, of a nonviolent, impersonal ethics.27

Ironically, it is a centenarian, Charles Swann from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, who, when read against the grain,


presages such a futural ethics.28 A well- heeled socialite with a fond-ness for buxom working- class lassies, Swann comes undone in his troubled courtship with Odette, “a young woman almost of the demi- monde” whom he struggles to fi nd sexually appealing (sw, 255– 56).29 Counter to contemporary romantic narrative conven-tions, Swann’s indifference is not magically transformed in a dis-covery of Odette’s “true self,” her thoughts, feelings, and interests pulsing beneath those uninspiring features. The transformation is in fact motivated by a revelation quite to the contrary: Swann real-izes that Odette bears a superfi cial likeness to another surface that refl ects his class status and aesthetic sensibility. What sets Swann’s heart afl ame, to be precise, is Odette’s resemblance to Botticelli’s rendering of Jethro’s daughter, Zipporah, in Scenes from the Life of Moses. Through the painting Odette becomes for Swann a talis-man of refi ned taste, a fetishized bit of cultural capital. “The words ‘Florentine painting’ were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him, like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from enter-ing, and where she assumed a new and nobler form” (sw, 317). Odette is allowed entrance via “high art” to the world of the titled, the master class. Swann, the urbane bachelor moving gracefully through the upper echelons, requires his beloved to embody a rep-resentation of an aesthetic/aristocratic cultural sensibility so essen-tial to his own (quite fragile) sense of self. As a result, Swann, to his own surprise, becomes vulnerable and progressively unhinged. Suspicious of Odette’s potential infi delities and susceptible to her power over him, Swann rages murderously against those who stand between him and his beloved. In other words, Swann real-izes, in the most self- serving manner, that he is “in love.” In accor-dance with his aristocratic aspirations, he seeks to possess Odette as one would a work of art.

Although Proust is here mocking the shallowness and narcissism of France’s nouveau riche, what if we were to read Swann against Proust’s critique as a way of emphasizing the effect that the self- shattering and subsequent self- expansion the Zipporah/Odette im-age engenders? Upon being stood up by Odette, Swann, half- mad, scours the streets of Paris late into the night to locate her. Up to


this point he has been stoically playing “hard to get” so as to keep Odette guessing, to generate in her what he hopes will be a neu-rotic dependence on him. During this humiliating search, however, Swann becomes not only a “new man,” but a multiplied one: “He was obliged to acknowledge that now . . . he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone even— that a new person was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, whom he might have to treat with circumspection, like a master or an illness. And yet, from the moment he had begun to feel that another, a fresh personality was thus conjoined with his own, life seemed somehow more interest-ing” (sw, 323). Interesting, indeed: Swann’s fi rst folly here is not that he loses and consequently expands himself in the frustration of longing, but rather that he conceptualizes love as an amalgamation, a dialectical fusion of selves, wherein Odette/Zipporah immediately becomes suspect, something to monitor “like an illness.” When love is perceived as adherence or fusion, jealousy, rage, and the will to possess follow naturally. However, if we rewind Swann’s courtship narrative a bit and tarry in the moment of love’s blossoming, things get “somehow more interesting.” For it is only through a mediating image, a painting of a face, that Swann becomes capable of love in the fi rst place. Before being corrupted by fantasies of fusion, this love prompts humiliation and openness, bringing to life a vulnerable self extending outward, seeking connection.

Swann’s second folly in his turn to love is illuminated by the work of Leo Bersani. Understood through Bersani’s ontological framework, Swann’s ego- lessening self- extension— what we can call the discovery of love— affi rms the presence of an asubjective, heterogeneous sameness that undercuts the violent dualism of self and other, subject and object.30 Although the (objective) world is conceived in depth psychology as antagonistic to the subject, as something that must be dialectically sublated into the self so as to be made manageable, Bersani fi nds a “deeper,” nonsubjective interiority ontologically at home in the world. The subject that opposes the world, then, is secondary, merely a subject- effect; the supposedly aggressive object he or she faces and defends against is a projection of the insecure ego. The actual relationship be-


tween these two purportedly distinct entities is a correspondence of forms rather than a contest of rivals or an assimilation of differ-ence. “There is neither a subject/object dualism or a fusion of sub-ject and object,” Bersani writes, “there is rather a kind of looping movement between the two. The world fi nds itself in the subject and the subject fi nds itself in the world.”31 The subject’s ego- armor is thus a defense against its ontological porosity. The ethical task, then, is to learn to redirect our fascination with psychic interiority to our extensions beyond the self, “our innumerable and imper-fect appearances outside” that urge us to “treat the outside as we would a home” (rg, 62). But how to locate this ethical course? How to learn to divest the self of a destructive ego and recognize the world within and our home without? Two practices, two forms of perceptual training that might spur the subject to live less inva-sively are, according to Bersani, cruising for sex and studying art. In both, the self seeks sameness, a resemblance of itself, in others and in objects. Through these practices, the subject might discov-er itself in the world not merely as a fantasmatic ego- projection but as something that was always already there— a thing that ex-ists in solidarity with world- being. The self becomes exogenous: it extends beyond ego and fi nds similitude in heterogeneous forms, both human and nonhuman. Never discovering a perfectly ren-dered self- similitude, the subject learns to respect, not stamp out, difference. “The narcissistic pleasure of reaching toward our own ‘form’ elsewhere has little to do with the fl ood of an oceanic, limit-less narcissism intent on eliminating the world’s difference. Rather, it pleasurably affi rms that we are inaccurately replicated every-where, a perception that may help us, ultimately, to see difference not as a trauma to be overcome, but as the nonthreatening supple-ment to sameness” (rg, 100). Put another way, through practices of self- subtraction and self- extension, the subject instantiates an impersonal ethics of nonrecognition.

Which leads me back, fi rst, to Swann and then, at last, to so-cial media. Although the mediating image of Zipporah prompts Swann’s love for Odette, that love turns out to be “an illness” for two reasons: fi rst, because, as I argued earlier, Swann conceives love as dialectical fusion, and second, because, as Bersani helps


us see, Swann perceives the world’s objects and others as ego- projections. Botticelli’s painting and Odette herself become vain fantasies of class power for Swann because they are merely projec-tions of a trembling ego with a voracious appetite. Swann’s initial experience of love, however, humbles that ego through an exten-sion of the (presubjective) self: “something more interesting” ma-terializes when love comes via a mediating image. In sum, before Swann’s world becomes ego- projection, before he fortifi es that ego’s defenses, he experiences the terror of egolessness in the face of a universal relationality. Such an experience does not perforce result in an agonistic competition between self and other, self and world, for as Bersani shows us, a correspondence of forms between “inner” and “outer” might also prompt a self- subtraction, an un-derstanding of sameness among very different others. “Objectify-ing” others through a mediating image is not, then, always and only licentious. As Bersani notes, this aesthetic experience can also prompt a revelatory self- undoing that brings into view an ethical horizon: “Art gives us a model of the world as the world, one we know as aesthetic subjects thrown outward, ‘defi ned’ by relations that at once dissolve, disperse, and repeat us” (rg, 101).32

Dissolved, dispersed, and repeated: the self that ogles the kalei-doscope of portraits and body parts while cruising online certainly might experience such sensations. Adrift in a sea of resemblance and difference, lost in a spectacle of others “like me” but distinct in their virtual frames, the self recognizes itself as one of hundreds, thousands, seeking connection. Although the tendency toward Swann- like ego- aggrandizement is palpable here, might this plat-form also encourage a self- subtraction, a process of humiliation through which one discovers, à la Bersani, the ontological porosity of subjecthood? Wishful thinking, perhaps. But, as I’ve been imply-ing, in the experience of self- aestheticization, an aestheticization performed by and shared with others, one might discover ways of relating founded not on ego- projection or other- assimilation but rather on a nonrecognition that prompts a respect for difference. Again following Bersani, whereas the study of art teaches us about the correspondence of heterogeneous forms in a universal solidar-ity, cruising for sex reduces the self to an impersonal rhythm of


sociability. For cruising, if anything, is not about personal invest-ment, attachment, or possessiveness. Rather, it is a scattering of the self among superfi cial acquaintances or strangers. Cruising, in Bersani’s conceptualization, puts one in step with the most imper-sonal of “ecological” rhythms (the tides, the moon) and prompts feelings of “place- ness” in the world. By this logic, the mingling that takes place in a virtual chat room, the fl ittering among aes-theticized object- others, moves to a music that exceeds the ebb and fl ow of individualized desire. Aesthetic subjectivation and imper-sonal sociability, which Bersani values, respectively, as a practice of self- subtraction and an education in respecting difference, merge in the experience of virtual cruising. It is the form and movement of this experience that I am designating connection- as- such.

Connection- as- such concerns the intense feeling of connection produced in the online cruising context rather than, or prior to, the personal encounter (or hookup). From the self- abbreviation involved in profi le setup to the distracted glances and ephemeral chats in the play, it is both form and rhythm: aestheticized selves circulating among repetitive others in impersonal cadences. Al-though frequently understood as inferior to face- to- face connec-tion, if not as evidence of our inability to be intimate in an age of increasing social alienation,33 virtual connections carry power-ful affective resonances. After all, these are the intimacies that fre-quently expose the “scandalous” fantasy lives of individuals, break up domestic couples, and so often prompt morning- after shame, embarrassment, and regret. Instead of overemphasizing the libera-tory potential of the virtual self (the unleashing of repressed de-sires, the experimentation with new personas, the “global citizen” encountering others from far away lands, and so on), I wish to call attention to its imminent humiliation: especially in the msm online cruising context, that self is poised to lose itself, to empty itself, to dissolve into an expanse of types. Like Virno’s belonging- as- such stripped bare, connection- as- such emanates in a world of, fi gura-tively and frequently literally, headless subjects: fragmented and vacated types who mouth seemingly authorless scripts— jumbles of porn dialogue, hip- hop slang, bro- speak, and texting shorthand.34 The bastardized language here belongs to the contemporary cultur-


al milieu more than any particular individual or social group: one “slips imperceptibly” into a post- articulate discourse to connect with ventriloquial others. Pushing Virno’s insights, I pursue the ethical potential of connection- as- such for the remainder of this article by focusing on two features of msm online cruising: fi rst, the traffi cking in types as opposed to identities, and second, free indirect discourse as a possible “circuit breaker,” in the Deleuzian sense, in the neoliberalization of communication. In short, I will attempt to answer the following question: If the dream of capital is to co- opt human affect and communication to the extent that we speak no other language, relate on no other terms, and feel nothing beyond that which the market commands, does connection- as- such rise to the challenge?

Whatever Belonging

“To indulge some uncomfortably organic metaphors,” Shannon Winnubst writes in “The Queer Thing about Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning,” “if sexuality is the heart and lifeblood of biopolitics, neoliberalism is its birth- mother” (“qt,” 79). While in my previous work I emphasize the integral role of sexuality in the formulation of biopower,35 Winnubst, through a careful reading of Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics alongside his History of Sexuality, Volume 1, makes an intriguing case for the complemen-tary (“maternal”) role neoliberalism plays in this development. As a psychobiographical hermeneutic, so Foucault’s story goes, sexuality works to discipline subjects through normalizing dis-courses concerning health, population, and security. Caught up in the historical sweep of post- normative neoliberalism, however, sexual identity becomes increasingly irrelevant. The sexual self is supplanted by the neoliberal “subject of interest” for whom ques-tions of anthropological interiority matter less than those con-cerning success, optimization, and maximal profi tability (“qt,” 86). The result of this shift, for Winnubst, is the subsumption of ethics into aesthetics. When the market becomes the site of ethi-cal veridiction, right/wrong transcodes to success/failure and the “good life” is achieved through superfi cial self- fashioning via the


accumulation of both fi nancial and characterological interest(s). Winnubst insists: “Neoliberal practices embed us in a mode of rationality that cannot hail us with any normative force: as neo-liberals we cannot think ethics” (“qt,” 88).

If Winnubst fi nds these neoliberal times ethically bankrupt, Dilts locates an ethical opportunity amid the bleakness. If the subject is no longer held captive to a disciplining interiority, if the subject is simply an assemblage of practices and choices, it might, Dilts argues, modulate the rules of the neoliberal game to develop criti-cal practices of self- care.36 In “‘Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self’: Neoliberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics,” Dilts is careful not to promote a specifi c liberatory program that transcends the ethical wasteland of neoliberalism. For him, ethics begins with a critical response to neoliberalism from within neolib-eralism. The ethical neoliberal subject, like the entrepreneur, fash-ions a “lifestyle,” but does so with a self- conscious understanding of “the rules of the truth game as a game” (“es,” 144). For Dilts, then, critique offers an ethical opening— and quite a convenient one for a critical theorist. Although sympathetic to his attempt to locate an ethical horizon within neoliberalism, I am left wondering about other ways one might come to comprehend the emptiness of neoliberal concepts of freedom, choice, and the “good life.” Read-ing Foucault is one method, perhaps, but are there other forms less intentional and rational, less “consciousness- raising”? Might the hyper- simulated pleasures and humiliations of online cruising move the neoliberal subject— unconsciously, affectively— toward other- than- neoliberal ethical practices of self- fashioning, commu-nicating, and relating? In short, might the aesthetic experience of becoming fungible give way to an impersonal ethics?

Although the types that populate the msm online cruising arena— the twink, the jock, the bear, the leather man— emerge from a history shot through with racism and misogyny,37 it is their very fungibility as superfi cial types, not unique interiorities, that I fi nd intriguing. Fungibility, according to Winnubst, plays a more crucial role than exchange in neoliberal economies, becoming “the singular barometer” of social value. She writes:


To be fungible is to have all character and content hollowed out. It is a relationship of equity that requires purely formal sem-blance. In economic terms, fungibility refers to those goods and products on the market that are substitutable for each other. . . . This is different from exchangeable goods, which must be relat-ed to a common standard (such as money) in order to judge their differing or similar values. (“qt,” 92)

Seeking a non- fungible site of queer pleasure/resistance that might confound the calculating logic of neoliberalism, Winnubst puts stock in a thoroughly historicized concept of jouissance, “to engage it as a way to intervene in the rationality of fungibility” (“qt,” 96). While this strategy is quite logical and tactical— exemplifying in some ways what Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” in this case, the seeking of a non- fungible point of resistance in a world that values fungibility— I wonder if relations and, for lack of a better word, exchanges based in fungibility might themselves carry an ethical promise. Specifi cally, I wonder if the practice of traffi ck-ing in substitutable types on msm social media, however steeped in neoliberal relationality it may be, holds the capacity to set off on other- than- neoliberal trajectories. The transposition of interior-ity to surface in these forums, the delinking of erotic desire from sexual identity— the latter, for Foucault, a tactic marking an exo-dus from biopolitical management38— might be understood as the striving toward what I designate whatever belonging: the affi rma-tion of an impersonal heterogeneous sameness in the gathering of nonidentitarian types. The “whatever” to which I refer here, and which I adapt from Giorgio Agamben’s notion of whatever being,39 denotes a common asubjective substance that fi nds expression in variegated modes: it is that which seethes beneath identifi able sub-jects seeking to locate its place in the world and assemble singulari-ties in nonidentitarian communal forms.

To clarify the connection between msm social media and what-ever belonging, I propose a visual analogy. The profi le grid of most gps- based hookup apps is composed of distinct blocks: an expand-ed grid of tic- tac- toe, but with photographs of faces and body parts instead of Xs and Os. Although the variety and distinctness of the


individual profi les are noteworthy, the grid creates the optical ef-fect of fl attening profi le pictures into a homogeneous, somewhat Borg- like cube, each unit being merely a facet of a larger whole wherein difference evaporates in similitude. Moreover, the profi les come to resemble one another in their conformity with dominant cultural fi gures and archetypes: the beefcake fl exing as if a cover model for Men’s Fitness; the bear doing his best Paul Bunyan im-personation; the twink posing like a supermodel; the tough guise appropriating hip hop gestures and styles; the jock/bro making certain to display his allegiance to whatever sports team; the boy- next- door, often admittedly an “average guy,” devoid of any spe-cifi cally gay cultural signifi ers, fueling hetero- erotic fantasies— all obviously borrowed, banal, willful reversions to types. Although Grindr, the self- proclaimed “biggest mobile network of guys,” em-phasizes the internationalism and multicultural diversity of its us-ers,40 its profi le grid, now the standard for msm apps, seems to have more in common with Andy Warhol’s soup cans than with any imagined “global village” (see fi gs. 1 and 2). This is precisely what makes it interesting. As dehumanizing and, literally, objecti-fying as this analogy may seem, the Warhol canvas envisages the form of whatever belonging: difference becomes identical yet re-mains discreet; units “touch” but do not violate; similitude un-binds the subjects, yet singularity remains intact; relating is not a Venn diagram but bounded. This community, for lack of a better word, has everything and nothing in common; it coheres merely in the form and movement of its seeking.

The language of this seeking might now generously be under-stood as an attempt to articulate a discourse of whatever belong-ing. The monosyllabic, often grunt- like propositions and rejoinders traversing online cruising forums, hardly expressions revealing in-terior states or personal histories, signal weariness with two cur-rently dominant discursive forms: a discourse of transparency so valued in neoliberal communication, and a confessional discourse foundational to the invention and deployment of sexuality.41 Al-though comparable to, perhaps deriving from, the businessman’s pitch that works to “seal the deal” as effi ciently as possible, the often brutally honest exchanges in cruising forums might also be

Fig. 1. Grindr grid. Courtesy of and with the permission of Grindr llc.

Fig. 2. Andy Warhol, 100 Cans. 1962. Oil on canvas, 72 x 52 in. All- bright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Copyright © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Campbell’s trademarks as depicted in Andy Warhol’s 100 Cans are used with permission of Campbell Soup Company.


read as a rejection of the “good communication skills” extolled in business education and the tell- all imperatives of gay identity politics. If twenty- fi rst- century capitalism values “team building” based in clear written and verbal expression, online cruising fo-rums, in all of their inarticulateness, reveal disenchantment with this skill set. The forced social niceties of the business world are typically absent here: affects are not instrumentalized into “service with a smile” but permitted to take alternative forms; competitive resentments are not sublimated in “cooperative innovation” but are put, sometimes disarmingly, on display. Indeed, it takes a thick skin, an armor with little or nothing in the way of subjective interi-ority beneath it, to negotiate this terrain. But rather than bemoan-ing the death of eloquence, moralizing about the barbaric rudeness of “kids these days,” or fi nding in the discourse of online cruis-ing only more evidence of capitalism’s triumph over all aspects of human sociality, we might also discover in this discourse an at-tempt to invent a language not yet captured by capital, a pared- down and context- based discourse that undercuts or brushes up against the obligatory transparency and expressivity of commu-nicative capitalism.42 For creating a personal, marketable brand is an arduous and never- ending task: optimizing the self by choos-ing “interesting” hobbies, maintaining an employer- friendly online reputation, “being in touch” with and expressing appropriately one’s feelings— all of it requires an enormous expenditure of time and energy. Put frankly, it seems that even the most networked of people, especially those screen- crazy Millennials we hear so much about, are growing tired of it: a life in which leisure means only more labor is not a life worth living.43 Thinking back to Deleuze’s words that opened this essay, if capital seeks to occupy and dictate all forms of human expression specifi cally through intersubjective, dialectical exchanges between rational market agents, both the in-articulacy witnessed in online cruising forums and the increasingly pared- down forms of dialogue in context- based apps might signal an unwillingness to play by communicative capitalism’s discursive rules— that is, they might be the rudiments of that “circuit break-er” Deleuze urged us to create.

In “Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of Derri-


da’s Politics of Friendship for Today,” Irving Goh likewise seeks a relational language beyond the contemporary communicative norms of the “knowledge- based” economy.44 For him, however, social media are the last place one might fi nd it: networked friend-ship not only holds no promise for a new ethics but poses a pri-mary obstacle to it. The networked friend, according to Goh, ac-cumulates contacts as a hoarder does merchandise. He or she only “friends” others if they share cultural interests or acquaintances; he or she avoids “truly knowing” another by keeping conversa-tional topics and inquiries as superfi cial as possible (“rf,” 97). The nonsensical blather and, in Goh’s words, “hyper- gregariousness” of social media produce a form of friendship that is always and only complicit in the capitalist co- optation of communication:

The “concept” of friendship proclaimed by digital social net-works, then, is no less corrupt than the mode of communicative sociability that Deleuze analyzed in the late ’80s and early ’90s. And users of contemporary social networks, caught up in, or bought into the friendship archive fever and the ecstasy of hyper- gregariousness that digital social networks offer, are equally complicit in sustaining capitalist ideology and its network ap-paratuses. (“rf,” 96)

Goh’s rejection of friendship, then, begins with a specifi c rejection of networked friendship and the utterly commodifi ed, intersubjec-tive communicative forms through which it materializes. His quite compelling alternative to these debased forms originates in an “anti-gregarious solitariness”— the likes of which Nietzsche (and Derrida, when pushed) theorized as the foundation of friendship— that might blossom into relations that, among other things, evade capitalist capture (“rf,” 98). However, because Goh confl ates all forms of social media into one monstrous entity (forgivable, given the dizzy-ingly fast pace at which such media develop), he overlooks what I have been designating the impersonal ethical possibilities emergent in msm media. For an online presence is not a direct expression of an individual’s “inner self” that one can “truly know,” but rather a highly mediated aestheticization of that self seeking connection in similitude. Understanding, then, the “headless” subject of msm social


media and the confounding subject- position from which it speaks is the fi nal step in articulating these ethical possibilities.

The chatting someone in the online cruising forum speaks in the register of free indirect discourse, a rhetorical form whose ef-fect is that the subject of an utterance is unclear and the myste-rious speaker’s words occupy a middle ground between author and character (or, in this case, between self and avatar). Martin Jay describes the event of free indirect discourse as “an experi-ence without a subject: one is never quite certain of who exactly is saying what, if that ‘who’ is sincere, interested, or simply hav-ing a laugh.”45 Compounded by the fact that profi le photos are often direct references to cultural types and that online cruising repartee seems more the property of whatever cultural milieu than anyone in particular, the words expressing intention and motiva-tion in msm forums must be parsed both for sincerity and source: not only “Is that someone speaking to me sincere?” but, even more perplexing, “Who exactly is the subject of these incomplete sen-tences?” The conundrum posed by free indirect discourse, specifi -cally the impossibility of knowing for certain the source and tone of statements, became a cause célèbre in the 1857 obscenity trial of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Dumbstruck by the novel’s narra-tive style and scandalized by its content, France’s moral authori-ties forced Flaubert onto the stand precisely because they could not distinguish author from character. Was Flaubert condoning, even encouraging, Emma’s adulterous behavior and sexual fanta-sies, or merely recording them?46 Ken Hillis asserts in Online a Lot of the Time that the actual “threat” of free indirect discourse in nineteenth- century France lay not in its capacity to promote an im-moral sexual libertinism but its presaging of a form of subjectivity unanswerable to industrial capitalism’s then- disciplinary norms: “Through its production of a middle voice, free indirect discourse infers the truth of emerging forms of plural, hybrid or possibly even fragmented subjectivities ready to challenge, or at least un-settle, the idea of the unitary subject so central to Enlightenment principles, capital formation and the nation state” (ot, 151– 52). That fragmented subjectivity, that fl exible, mutating, multitasking self becomes, as we have seen, the Janus- faced entrepreneur/con-


sumer of neoliberalism, the selfsame calculating agent that cruises online profi les. Hillis notes, however, that free indirect discourse in the virtual arena allows users “to give voice to something exceed-ing representation, to an emergent future and what is at the thresh-old of imagination and cannot yet be thought. . . . In this sense, the middle voice does not function as a disguise. . . . Instead, to reiter-ate, it may point to, ‘speak’ more of, the ineffable and constitute a nascent effort on the part of an author to symbolize or potentialize that which still remains virtual, incipient, not fully thought” (ot, 158). Free indirect discourse, the requisite discursive register of on-line cruising, thus affords the user the opportunity to articulate an unknown, embryonic “something exceeding representation.” That “something”— emergent in the evanescent affects produced in connection- as- such, striven for in the ephemeral and post- articulate chattering of subjectless speakers— can be understood as the blueprint for a communal form beyond the scope of neoliberal relationality: a community, namely, of whatever belonging.

The desire for whatever belonging is nothing new: one can sense it in various encounters with queer cultural and intellectual history. Lynne Huffer locates this desire in Foucault’s use of free indirect discourse in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, in which “the radical disorientation of Foucault’s headless sentences exposes the illusory stabilities of the present, the subject, and repressive sexual-ity” (“fs,” 38). In the work of a thinker so critical of the insidious effects of a psychobiographically conceived sexuality, Huffer fi nds a “self- releasing” style that holds the promise of outliving sexual-ity, and potentially its kin, biopolitics and neoliberalism: “Outliv-ing is our continually renewed encounter with the concrete traces of queer modes of belonging that exceed the oppositional logic of repression- liberation and the continuous ontology of biopoliti-cal gradation” (“fs,” 40). The queer mode of belonging I have sketched in this paper, a whatever belonging rooted in connection- as- such, resonates with the anti- intersubjective impersonal ethics emergent both in the anonymous public cruising rituals of the gay liberationist era and in the friendships of shared estrangement cul-tivated in the aids crisis. And while it remains perfectly sensible to condemn msm social media for anchoring us ever more fi rmly to


the neoliberal present, for its service in commodifying once and for all human intimacy and affect, for transforming us all, willingly or not, into “businessmen,” sometimes it is necessary to probe the nonsense to locate the rudiments of whatever belonging, to discov-er an ambivalence that signals a desire for something more: alter-native presents, other futures. In this regard, we might understand online msm cruising as a contemporary site in which a queer ethics, long in the making, seeks to outgrow the present, outlive sexuality, and outsmart, or, perhaps, “outdumb,” the maneuverings of neo-liberal rationality.

Notes

1. For a basic discussion of the illusion of anonymity and privacy on the Internet as well as social media’s encouragement of impulsive, socially inappropriate behavior, see Frank Bruni, “Our Hard Drives, Ourselves,” New York Times, November 18, 2012.

2. Discussing the shift from a logic of exchange to a logic of entrepre-neurship in neoliberalism, Foucault writes: “In practice, the stake in all neoliberal analysis is the replacement every time of homo economicus as a partner of exchange with homo economicus as en-trepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of earnings.” Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978– 1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226. Hereafter cited as bb.

3. For helpful elaborations of Foucault’s concept of homo economicus, see Wendy Brown, “Neo- liberalism and the End of Liberal Democ-racy,” Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003); Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo- Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjec-tivity,” Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 25– 36, hereafter cited as “gh”; Shannon Winnubst, “The Queer Thing about Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning,” Foucault Studies 14 (2012): 79– 97, hereafter cited as “qt”; and Andrew Dilts, “From Entrepreneur of the Self to Care of the Self: Neoliberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics,” Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 130– 46, hereafter cited as “es.”

4. Grindr claims it is “the largest and most popular all- male location- based social network out there,” while Scruff encourages potential users to “meet millions of Scruff gay guys in your neighborhood


and around the world.” Both are quite popular geosocial network-ing apps for men seeking men. See Grindr (2014), http://www.grindr.com, and Scruff (2014), http://www.scruff.com.

5. For a succinct formulation of a queer techno- pessimistic line of thought, see Michael Joseph Gross, “Has Manhunt Destroyed Gay Culture?” Out Magazine, August 4, 2008. For a more nuanced cri-tique of msm online cruising, see Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacies: Refl ections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 176– 212. Hereafter cited as ui.

6. I view this project as a counterpoint, or possibly a complement, to thinkers such as Samuel Delany and Tim Dean, who, for good rea-son, value queer public contact over private networking. In Time Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), Samuel Delany laments the loss of a public sex culture in the sanitization and Disney- fi cation of Times Square. Delany ar-gues that a vibrant public sex culture encourages an interclass con-tact that cuts through hierarchical social strata and ultimately con-tributes to a city’s safety and viability. In this discussion he marks a key distinction between “contact” and “networking,” a distinction Tim Dean seizes upon in his praise of public cruising and critique of online connection (ui). Contact for both authors refers to public, so-cial interaction: bodies mingling among bodies with the potential for chance encounters and happy accidents. Its opposite is networking: an instrumental, means/end form of communication, more bounded, focused, and purposeful. Although Delany notes that these two com-municative forms are not simple binaries and do not fi t tidily into the moral categories of good versus evil, he clearly prefers contact to net-working. For him, networking is the privatization, mechanization, and domestication of public contact.

At fi rst blush, networking seems the discursive form dominat-ing queer social media. Staying at home to “order in” a hookup on computers and phones, becoming ever more tethered to private screens instead of public communities, learning to be more effi cient, focused, and opportunistic in interpersonal interactions (“no fats, no femmes”), closing ourselves off to serendipity, corralling our desire into rigid sexual or anatomical confi nes— all of this is perfectly con-sonant with the logic and practice of neoliberal capitalism. However, in taking seriously the discourse, the form of connection, and the feelings of belonging produced in these forums, I claim in the pages


to come that there is something in excess of solipsistic, self- serving networking traversing the ether of queer social media.

7. In Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, aids, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012; hereafter cited as fw), I develop the ethical implications of Foucault’s peculiar understanding of friendship as “a desire, an un-easiness, a desire- in- uneasiness” to test its functional and political viability. See Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in The Essen-tial Works of Michel Foucault, Volume One: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 135– 40.

A practice of friendship as shared estrangement, I argue, avoids the assimilation of difference into identity by refusing a discourse of transcendence. The friendship is guided by an ethics of discomfort that encourages an openness to alterity and that nurtures the foreign-ness, the unknown potential, of and between friends. In welcoming absolute foreignness, that is, an inarticulable, unknowable stranger in the form of fi nitude, the friend lays the groundwork for a politics of shared estrangement. Such a politics, which can be glimpsed in the work of South African aids activist Zackie Achmat as well as in act up’s “Ashes Action,” for which David’s Wojnarowicz’s writings were an inspiration, confounds both the biopolitical command to foster a “life worth living” and sovereign power’s ability to make live and let die. The (in)communicative and anti- intersubjective relational in-novations of the queer community— from the micro (Foucault’s im-personal friendship with novelist Hervé Guibert) to the macro (the sexual practice of anonymous cruising)— reveal the value of this re-lational model for political movements, specifi cally those related to aids caregiving and activism. Friendships of shared estrangement cultivated in queer relational practices, I claim, form the bedrock of activist organizations such as act up, whose powerful interventions and tactics continue to resonate. Above all, the book seeks to reclaim and resuscitate a nonidentitarian politics of friendship for contempo-rary queer activism. In this essay I emphasize the antirelational ethics at work in queer social media and question whether the culture and practice of online cruising might too have political potential.

8. In Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013; hereafter cited as vi), Sha-ka McGlotten likewise explores the ethical and political potential of queer social media. He writes: “While I understand virtual inti-macies as situated within the circuits of what Jodi Dean calls ‘com-


municative capitalism,’ the commodifi ed self- styling and interactive exchanges that express the democratic freedom to produce the self but only in and through fantasies of the market, there is also, I sug-gest, an uncaptured immanence and excess: the typically invisible but nonetheless present alternatives to the hegemonic forces that demand we believe that There is No Alternative to neoliberal hegemony” (10– 11). McGlotten’s auto- ethnographic approach to these media has infl uenced my project immensely, and I work to develop some of his insights concerning the “uncaptured immanence” of the virtual arena in the pages to come.

9. For a discussion of an ethics of nonrecognition in gay male public cruising rituals, see ui, 204– 12. For a discussion of this ethical model in aids Buddy caregiving, see fw, 112– 15.

10. Context- based messaging, arguably the “next wave” in telecommu-nication, relies on an unwritten but preestablished understanding be-tween users. That is, the word or words contained in a message— “Yo,” for instance— are meaningless outside a given context and contract between users. As Michael Brodeur states: “Depending on the Yo- er, the Yo- ee, and the circumstances surrounding one’s ‘Yo,’ a ‘Yo’ could mean just about anything, from ‘I’m pulling up outside,’ to ‘I miss you but I’m in a meeting,’ to, ‘You were right, he’s gay,’ to well . . . ‘Yo!’ Any practical use of Yo is predicated on the assumption that you have something worth Yo- ing about in your real life.” Brodeur, “Real Talk: The Rise of Context,” Boston Globe, June 28, 2014.

11. For an important and insightful analysis of the infl uence of hip- hop culture and African American slang on the linguistic discourse of msm Craigslist ads, see Jane Ward, “Dude Sex: White Masculini-ties and ‘Authentic’ Heterosexuality among Dudes Who Have Sex with Dudes,” Sexualities 11 (2008): 414– 33. Hereafter cited as “ds.” Ward’s analysis of the racial, often racist, and hetero- erotic sexual politics of Craigslist forums is certainly applicable to the msm location- based apps I discuss in this essay.

12. Here I am referring to Foucault’s “The Discourse on Language,” published in English, among other places, as the appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972). Hereafter cited as ak. The fi rst paragraph of the lecture is worth quoting in full, as it foregrounds my discussion of the self- humiliation occurring in queer social media. In msm hookup apps specifi cally, the visual fi eld prompts users to recognize their substitutability, and the discourse appears to emanate from “subjectless” speakers.


I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path— a slender gap— the point of its possible disappearance. (ak, 215)

13. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 175.

14. The idea that abstract knowledge and communication are the prin-cipal productive forces of post- Fordist capital is conceptually central to Negri’s oeuvre, from his early “Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpre-tation of the Class Situation Today,” in Marxism beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 149– 80, to the more recent Empire trilogy coauthored with Michael Hardt. See Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), and Common-wealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

15. In terms of “hijacking,” I do not think Deleuze has in mind here the whistleblowing tactics of Julian Assange or Edward Snowden. Their work might be better understood as “speaking truth to power” by illuminating secret histories and suppressed information. In other words, these provocateurs are not necessarily creating new modes of communication, nor are they dismantling old ones. Rather, their exposure of governmental cloak- and- dagger tactics reveals (merely?) how power actually speaks and works behind closed doors. Like-wise, the information relay and organizational tactics shared among activists through social media in the service of political movements such as Occupy and Spain’s indignados are likewise not necessarily Deleuzian circuit breakers. In these contexts, social media fulfi ll their promise of connecting vast numbers of people almost instantaneous-ly. Although new forms of protest have certainly been invented in social media, and although social media activism is important work, Deleuze seems to be implying in this passage that a new form of ar-ticulation is necessary— one that might be incomprehensible to the


communicative circuits of capital, one perhaps deemed utterly inar-ticulate by conventional discursive standards. For more on the role of social media in progressive movements for social justice, see Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets in the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012).

16. My initial answers to this question in regards to queer social media: a Beckett play? (Grindr directs Godot.) A Warholian conversation? (Scruff’s monosyllabic dialogue as queer strategy of opacity.) Kidding aside, I take seriously the inarticulacy of queer social media as an at-tempt to create a language not beholden to the confessional discourse of “coming out” identity politics, one seeking to escape the strait-jacket of sexual identity. For more on inarticulacy as queer strategy, see Nicholas De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press, 2012).

17. Brad Elliot Stone argues that the Down Low, a social phenomenon in which heterosexually identifi ed African American men seek sex with other black men, creates “an interesting heterotopic space” in which black men can negotiate “the heterosexist and racist forces that play on black bodies.” Stone, “The Down Low and the Sexual-ity of Race,” Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 50. Thinking along similar lines, I wonder if the anonymous, arguably anti- identitarian envi-rons of queer social media might allow for an experiment in a post- identifi catory sexual politics.

18. In the next section of this essay I discuss Virno’s concept of belonging- as- such, from which my notion of connection- as- such derives. See Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” in Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapo-lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 13– 34. Hereafter cited as “ad.” Also, it is necessary to mark a distinction here between “type” and “identity,” since the distinction is important for my argument concerning the ethics of fungibility in msm social media. While self- identity by most accounts involves interiority, personal history, and subjective uniqueness, a type in my understanding is superfi cial, in-terchangeable with like others, and more a cardboard cutout of a fi gure than a complex intellectual and emotional creature.

19. In Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), Lauren Berlant uses the term “lateral agency” to designate practices of self- management interruption. Eating, one such practice, “is best seen as an activity releasing the subject into self- suspension,” becoming a site


of “episodic intermission from personality” (116). In the biopolitical, neoliberal context in which well- being and self- optimization are en-couraged if not enforced, cruising online can be understood similarly as an exercise of lateral agency.

20. For more on the racial politics of msm social media, see vi, 61– 78.21. For an insightful elaboration on the role of fungibility in neoliberal-

ism, see “qt,” 92– 94.22. Regarding the deemphasizing or eclipsing of personal identity in neo-

liberalism, see “qt,” 85– 87, and “es,”136– 39.23. Winnubst writes: “Diversity is the explicit aim of neoliberalism as so

many have argued (Duggan, Giroux). But because it is following out the logic of fungibility that the market demands, these differences are purely formal— they must be hollow, stripped of any historical residues, espe-cially if those residues bring with them the ethical and political confl ict of xenophobia” (“qt,” 94). Contrary to Winnubst, I explore the queer potential of “the logic of fungibility” in the pages to come.

24. For more on the construction of competition and the necessary per-petuation of social inequality in neoliberalism, see “qt,” 93.

25. Todd May argues that the consumer and entrepreneur are the two key fi gures of neoliberalism. Although I fi nd his concept of friendship too indebted to traditional philosophical understandings of belonging and intimacy, and hence ill equipped to challenge neoliberal relationality, his staging of the neoliberal scene and its key players is quite useful. See May, Friendship in an Age of Economics: Resisting the Forces of Neoliberalism (Lanham md: Lexington Books, 2012), 17– 55.

26. Dilts argues that Foucault discovers a similar ethical opportunity in neoliberal subjectivity: when the subject is reconceptualized as an ar-ray of practices and thereby “freed” from psychobiographical interi-ority, it might formulate regimens of self- care that brush against the grain of the very logic that “liberated” it. See “es,” 140– 46.

27. I refer here to two best- selling books bemoaning the lack of tradi-tional civic engagement and communal involvement in contempo-rary America: Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

28. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 2003). Hereafter cited as sw.


29. Swann’s initial sexual disinterest in Odette is best articulated in the following passage: “She had struck Swann not, certainly, of being de-void of beauty, but as endowed with a kind of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion, as one of those women of whom all of us can cite examples, different for each of us, who are the converse type which our senses demand” (sw, 276).

30. For a more detailed discussion of Bersani’s “homo- ness” as it relates to an impersonal ethics, see Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1995), and my explication of Bersani’s concept in fw, 130– 32.

31. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 147. Hereafter cited as rg.

32. Aesthetic subjectivation does not necessarily open up a space for ethics, according to both Shannon Winnubst and Jodi Dean. In fact, for Winnubst, “aesthetics displace ethics as the fi nal arbiter of value” in neoliberalism (“qt,” 87). From this perspective, the self- aestheticization of the sort we see in social media is merely another instance of neoliberal self- optimization. While both Winnubst’s and Dean’s work on neoliberalism have been instrumental to this project, I part ways with them in terms of conceiving other- than- neoliberal subjectivities, relations, and practices. In short, on a fundamental ontological level we begin thinking our way through neoliberal ra-tionality in different places: myself, in immanentist conceptions of a heterogeneous sameness; Dean and Winnubst, in psychoanalytic, dialectical understandings of difference.

33. For a critique of the popular assumption that virtual intimacies are inferior to irl (“in real life”) relations, if not indicative of the failure of “real” intimacy altogether, see vi.

34. For more on the history and politics of msm social media discourses, see “ds.”

35. See fw, 97– 122.36. Winnubst is not persuaded by Dilts’s claim here, because, as noted,

she believes ethics has been subsumed by aesthetics in the neoliberal context. Any anti- neoliberal strategy that relies on aestheticization, or a stylization of self- care, then, holds little promise. Winnubst ar-gues instead that a properly historicized understanding of jouissance might be a point of resistance to neoliberal rationality, specifi cally, the rationality of fungibility. Because jouissance is a limit- experience that “radically disarms the self, not the identity- confi rming, self-


enhancing domesticated pleasure that saturates neoliberal culture” (“qt,” 96– 97), the experience is non- fungible, unsubstitutable. By contrast, I fi nd fungibility itself ambivalent: just as, for Virno, belonging- as- such might be put to work in the service of revolution-ary goals, fungibility could serve as an immanent strategy for modu-lating neoliberal rationality toward other- than- neoliberal ends. For the remainder of this essay, I work to develop this idea in relation to msm social media.

37. For a discussion of racist stereotyping in online msm cruising forums, see vi and “ds.” For a discussion of the masculinist hetero- eroticism of these forums, see “ds.”

38. I discuss the delinking of sexual desire from self- identity as an exodus from normalizing biopolitical constraints in fw, 123– 44.

39. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1993). For an elaboration on the political viability of this concept, see fw, 149– 51.

40. Grindr explicitly emphasizes the diversity of its client- base in the “Stories” page on its website. Here, we are treated to testimonials concerning the international and biracial romances Grindr helps in-spire. See Grindr (2014), http://grindr.com/stories.

41. For more on a neoliberal discourse of transparency, see “gh.” For more on confession and the invention of sexuality, see Michel Fou-cault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), and my elaboration of Foucault’s insights in fw, 20– 23.

42. I borrow the term “communicative capitalism” from Jodi Dean, who informed much of my thinking about neoliberal communication. See Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

43. A 2014 survey by Piper Jaffray fi nds that between the spring and fall of 2014 “Facebook use among teenagers aged 13 to 19 plummeted from 72 percent to 45 percent. In other words, less than half of the teenagers surveyed said ‘yes’ when asked if they use Facebook.” Cor-relation does not, of course, prove causation, but one can’t help but wonder if the labor of image management and the neoliberal im-perative of discursive transparency played a role in this social media exodus. See Caitlin Dewey, “Teens Are Offi cially Over Facebook,” Washington Post, October 8, 2014.

44. Irving Goh, “Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of


Derrida’s Politics of Friendship for Today,” Cultural Critique 79 (Fall 2001): 94– 124. Hereafter cited as “rf.”

45. Jay quoted in Ken Hillis, Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 154. Hereafter cited as ot.

46. The following excerpt from Madame Bovary, which moves from a report of Emma’s adulterous thoughts to an authorially ambivalent statement concerning adultery, was particularly scrutinized during the trial: “She repeated: ‘I have a lover! A lover!’ delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had de-spaired! She was entering upon a marvelous world where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium” (ot, 154). Lacking the contextual phrase “she repeated,” the latter sentences position readers in a space in which it is unclear whether the thrill prompted by adultery belongs to Emma, the narrator, or the author. For more on the trial in relation to free indirect discourse, see ot, 152– 56, and Lynne Huffer, “Fou-cault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited,” Foucault Studies 14 (2012): 33– 34. Hereafter cited as “fs.”

Becoming Fungible: Queer Intimacies in Social Media (Qui Parle 23:2, Spring 2015)

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