“Monsters never have children,” Peter Sloterdijk told us.  He was suggesting that we moderns, with our obsession with novelty, are about that life, so to speak.

At the end of May, Peter Sloterdijk gave a series of talks at Irvine.  Even if you weren’t in attendance, you may be familiar with Sloterdijk’s work.  The (massive) first volume of his Bubbles was translated into English from the German recently, and it’s making the rounds.

In this particular lecture series Sloterdijk took as his topic “bastards”– the unique, the unprecedented, the uncomfortable– the monstrous, in fact.  His route in was French opulence, with Louis XV’s mistress and advisor the Marquise de Pompedeur (formerly the never-quite-ordinary Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson) and her rise from the emerging middle class to an impossibility of wealth and power.

1. Her every wish was granted

Madame de Pompedeur is a rhetorical figure in Sloterdijk’s talk.  We need to get on board with that right away in order to think about some of the more productive bits that Sloterdijk gives us. M. de P. is not the sum of historical contingence and agency.  She does not bumble along.  She does not, as Marx says, make her own history but not as she would please.  In Sloterdijk’s work, she is pure deus ex machina, the composed story which always already is punching its own punchline.

She was told in prophesy, when still a child, that she’d be the King’s lover. With this information, she became the kind of person who could be. It’s not just her rise that Sloterdijk is working through.  It’s the sheer unprecedented-ness of it. Sloterdijk puts it like this:  ”In all likelihood Madame de Pompadour was at the time the only person in France, if not in Europe, whose every wish was granted.”

She is a creature of unlikely entitlement here, an excess of sexy witty sumptuousness for whom all that stuff is only a stopover on the way to what she was made up for. The unlikeliness and completely produced nature of her triumph is worth taking a moment with.

2. On flourishing super women

Sloterdijk is a great thinker on the topic of flourishing and the mutualism, or exploitation, that sustains.  Bubbles, the first volume in his Spheres,  involves thinking through what he calls placental relationships.  The placenta is the is the companion that makes the subject real, and the framing for similar subsequent relationships. “From it, energies flow to me that form me.  Nonetheless, it remains unassuming in itself, never demanding its own presence” (Bubbles: 357).  For Sloterdijk, the subject will always have a sustaining or constituting other, even if it is imaginary or inanimate.

He gives us placental relationships, sustaining others that “never demand” (or never make demand that we notice) and then he gives us M. de P.

What makes her flourish?   The impossibility that someone like her could emerge from her class produced, after all, the conditions that made her fascinating and facilitated her success.  The fortune someone told her as a child was absurd, her rise was amazing, and she, herself,  a curiosity.  An absolutely integral part of the way deus was clearly in her machina is that she shouldn’t have succeeded.

So now I’m thinking about the superwoman thing.  Maybe you know what I mean.  The thing where high-end lifestyle and demanding professional lives of certain very powerful women become a sort of media (and moral) compass for many of us, and then an argument as we debate why so-and-so should or shouldn’t have said what she said about the difficulty of managing to have all the stuff that a person who’s good should have.

I’m thinking about Beyoncé Knowles, whom I, like much of the world, adore.  I’m thinking of Sheryl Sandberg, too. They are captivating and admired people. I’m thinking of beauty and work and social standards.

Are they as unlikely as Madame de Pompedeur?  No, thank goodness.  But we’re not very well equipped to think through the support that they and their popular images require.

I think Sloterdijk may give us good tools for thinking of the lives we aspire to have, and what they may in fact require. No offense to Ms. Knowles or Ms. Sandberg, but how would it change our orientation to them and to ourselves, as ordinary people, if we recognized them as (a Sloterdijkian) kind of monstrous?

Do you collaborate? What have your experiences been like? Are you struck by the ways in which humanists cite Foucault’s “What is an Author?” and enjoy demolishing (in theory) the myth of the heroic-male-solo-author, and then proceed (in practice) to make sure that the infrastructure of academic productivity rewards only the solo author performance?
Here’s one of the many articles that have appeared on this topic in academic publication outlets:

Friends With Benefits

Written by two philosophers, this essay has a title that’s a bit annoying (for its adolescent humor – really, is collaboration like an experiment in alternative sexual practices? Does that make scientists promiscuous, and humanists traditional monogamists?), and fails to mention that Helen Keller was a socialist from the deep South (complicated political economic considerations would be required to wrap that around the “wise blind girl” image). But it’s a useful think-piece and might be a spur to generating discussion. For example, their concluding point applies nicely to both the labor of teaching and of writing:
“We have to actually care when others don’t grasp our point … We cannot do this by ourselves.”
It’s a pretty simple point. But the infrastructures of humanist academia tend to work against recognizing it. So collaboration remains in the space of invisibilized labor. The work of rendering opaque that which should be transparent might also be called the work of mystification.

What would the labor of de-mystification look like?

We here in the Difference Engine room are talking a bit about the future of this space. We’ll be meeting over dinner May 21 in Orange County to discuss. The purpose of this blog has been to provide a forum for developing feminist, critical, and transnationally oriented understandings of technology, science, and technoculture — and for doing it safely (anonymously when necessary) and in public. We never wanted to be the most famous blog in the world. We imagined perhaps that more people might step out of the woodwork to write, comment and discuss. These and other issues will be discussed.

If you have thoughts and energy to share, email blogladies@differenceengines.com or comment here.

Our friend deuxlits tipped us off that the editors of the upcoming Handbook of Science and Technology Studies seek chapter proposals, and in particular are interested in global technoscientific phenomona.

These handbooks get referenced a lot so this seems like a good chance to interject examinations of engines of difference from a Difference Engines point of view. See the full CFP

Here are some comments I made at the recent meeting of the American Association of Geographers in downtown LA. The Westin Bonaventura (search Jameson, postmodernism if you don’t remember his rant about architectural anti-democratic design and downtown LA) was the site of more lefty urban theorists than you could dream of.

This panel was called “The Future of the Capitalist City,” organized by NYU PhD candidate Daniel Cohen, who invited me to do the introduction. I’m so glad he did, as it was a blast seeing so many marxists at the art-deco Biltmore.    

So we started with:  ”How might we think about the future of the city, and think it in conjunction with the future of capitalism?”

more »

A group of organizers across the UC are discussing new directions in feminist technology studies. Speakers include Anne Balsamo, Lisa Parks, Kelly Gates, Adele Clarke, and more!

Livestreaming here today and tomorrow

Fascinating article about Cornell-Technion partnership to build NYC tech campus. It’s going to be organized as a hub for interdisciplinary work, like the WW2 RAD labs Peter Galison and Fred Turner have written about.

Ido Aharoni, Consul General of Israel in New York, told The Jewish Week that Technion’s partnership with Cornell “is of strategic importance in terms of positioning Israel not only in America, but all over the world, as a bastion of creativity and innovation.” He added that “When Americans think of Israel, overwhelmingly the first thing that comes to mind is the association with conflict, the fact that Israel is in dispute with its neighbors.”

Technion is a top international university particularly strong in developing military technologies. Israel is a top exporter of drones. And Technion developed unmanned bulldozers.

Why would someone need an unmanned bulldozer? <pause> Hrm? Search Rachel Corrie just for a start.

Cornell faculty and students are angry that this partnership has gone through without even a debate among faculty who, by school bylaws, are to approve cross-school educational policy.

For those of us studying creativity and innovation cultures, the consul general is explicitly binding togetherinnovation economy diplomacy to Israel’s military actions and racialized exclusion of Palestinians. It’s not even entirely surprising, since a lot of the cultures of creativity we celebrate today, Fred Turner teaches us, came right out of military technology research into networks and ballistics systems.

phdstress:

Given the association between innovation and masculine Silicon Valley cultures, I totally feel for humanistic scholars who feel like they need to invoke that language to get support for their work. We need critical inquiry into cultures of “innovation.”