“Countdown”: Beyoncé’s Feminist Reversal of the “Catalog Song”

In this post I argue that Beyonce’s “Countdown”—both as a song and as a video—critiques a canonical, but quite misogynist, style of song.

The “catalog song” is a centuries-old format: a dude ticks off a list of all the women he has seduced. Mozart’s Don Giovanni does this in what is famously called “The Catalog Aria”: here, Don Juan’s servant runs down the list he’s kept of all the women his master has bedded—over a thousand (“mille e tre,” or 1,003) in Spain alone! More recently, Lloyd and Lil Wayne seduce “Girls Around The World.” Young Money”s (Weezy et al) “Every Girl” is a more standard catalog song, because it enumerates each and every sort of woman the rappers have, can, or desire to have sex with.

“I like a long-haired thick redbone,” says Weezy, as women in various “ethnic” costumes emerge from his limo. The chorus is even less specific: “We like her, and we like her too”—it’s as though any and every woman will do. I mean, Weezy does say “I wish I could fuck every girl in the world.” The video particularly exoticizes mixed- and ambiguously-raced women (e.g., the “Blackanese” woman identified around 1:53). They also catalog women by sexuality, occupation, and even credit score!

Calvin Harris’s “I Get All The Girls” is another example of a classic catalog song. Watch the video carefully, because Beyoncé’s video will make specific reference to it. http://youtu.be/Q-tAlG5iJ4Y (Sorry, I couldn’t find a version that allowed embedding).

Note the use of bright, bold colored leotards to distinguish all the different “types” of girls Harris gets. Note also the way the dancers put their hand on their abdomens to represent the “carrying a little bit of weight girls.”

What all these traditional catalog songs have in common is they compile a list of women. They “count up” women as a way of reflecting positively on the accomplishment of the male singers. In this accounting, women are the instruments by which men demonstrate their masculinity, or, as we see in the Young Money video, by which they create and reaffirm homosocial bonds among men (or, to riff on Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake, “It’s not gay if it’s a three- or four- or every-girl-in-the-world-way”).

Beyoncé’s “Countdown,” by counting down rather than up, reverses the logic of the catalog narrative. The countdown itself reads: "My baby is a ten / We dressing to the nine / He pick me up at eight / Make me feel so lucky seven / He kiss me in his six / We be making love in five / Still the one I do this four / I’m trying to make a three / From that two / He still the one."

If you listen to the content of the lyrics, she uses the “countdown” to describe the various ways she and her “boo” have a committed, non-instrumental relationship. And, for all the song’s focus on Beyoncé’s male partner, she constantly returns to the lyric “If you leave me you’re out of your mind.” So she’s not talking about her BF to boost her own self-worth, or our perceptions of her worth, femininity, etc. In fact, she gives us a strikingly even-handed depiction of a seemingly egalitarian relationship. First, she says “There's ups and downs in this love/Got a lot to learn in this love/Through the good and the bad, still got love.” This is not idealized, fairy-tale romance; rather, it’s the frank assessment of someone who’s been in a decade-long relationship. Then, later in the song, Beyoncé states that “Yup, I put it on him, it ain't nothing that I can't do/Yup, I buy my own, if he deserve it, buy his shit too.” Reminding us of her financial independence, Beyoncé clarifies that she’s with this man because she wants to be, not because she has to be; in fact, she suggests that interdependence isn’t necessarily a bad thing. She’s neither fully dependent, nor fully independent of her male partner. They’re, uh, partners. They rely on one another and put up with one another’s shit. And if you still are so excited about this person want to write a song about him after you’ve been dealing with his shit for ten years, y’all must really have a strong relationship—and that itself is quite an accomplishment. Long-term relationships require work. In fact, it’s probably harder to stay with one person for a decade than it is to sleep with over a thousand people in a few months. So, the song’s lyrics and its “hook’ (the countdown itself) reverse he traditional male cataloging of female conquests. Here, we have Beyoncé counting down all the often complicated reasons why she loves her partner of ten years.

I mentioned earlier that the video also critiques Harris’s catalogue of “all the girls” he gets. Bey’s video uses the same bright color palette to differentiate among leotard-wearing female dancers. However, while Harris’s video has platoons of female dancers (who are actually pretty white and East Asian…) don this “rainbow” of colors, “Countdown” positions Beyoncé as the wearer of the entire spectrum of colors—this points to her internal complexity. She might be in love and interdependent with this dude, but this doesn’t prevent her from being a complex, contradictory, fully-realized subject. And, in this video, she does indeed “carry a bit of weight”—her increasingly large “baby bump” is featured throughout the video. In the same way that she refuses reduction to “wife” or “girlfriend,” Beyoncé’s working through her pregnancy (she released an album, several videos, and performed at the MTV VMAs) refutes attempts to reduce her to “mother.” In fact, you can’t reduce her to any one role, any one “type”: she’s not just a black girl, or a “carry a bit of weight” girl, or a thick girl, or a pretty girl, or a southern girl, or a girl from Texas, or whatever. And this reduction to “type” is what makes traditional cataloguing possible—women aren’t valued for their individuated “use value,” but only as a (stereo)type.

So, there are a number of ways “Countdown” critiques traditional “catalog” songs: (1) by counting down rather than up, it reverses the logic; (2) by focusing on mature, long-term, egalitarian relationships; (3) by centering a woman’s perspective; (4) by enumerating the internal complexity of female subjectivity rather than listing flat, undeveloped female stereotypes. I know this song has gotten a lot of critical acclaim for its innovative composition, but we also need to recognize its—and Beyoncé’s—musicological and feminist innovations, too.

Sovereign Harmony and Biopolitical Frequency: Or, what Attali and LMFAO can teach us about neoliberalism

“Every major social rupture has been preceded by an essential mutation in the codes of music, in its mode of audition, and in its economy” (Attali, Noise 10).[1]

So I’ve been thinking more about this idea of “transmission,” and I’ve come to the following question: If, as people like Rancière and Attali assert, liberal/sovereign/juridical regimes idealize the notion of “harmony,” is “transmission” or “frequency” a particularly neoliberal/biopolitical ideal or paradigm? This question is somewhat Attali-an itself, and I want to attempt an Attali-esque response. By “Attali-an,” I mean that the question follows Jacques Attali’s claim in the epigraph, i.e., that we can read the “codes of society” (norms, epistemes, modes of power, hegemonies, etc.) in the “codes of music” (organization, epistemology, political economy, aesthetics).[2] “The code of music,” he argues, “simulates the accepted rules of society” (Attali 29). So here I want to think about “harmony” and “transmission” as both modes of social organization, and modes of musical organization. I’m trying out the argument that harmony:liberalism::transmission:neoliberal biopolitics (emphasis on “trying out”—I’m not entirely sure it works. But it’s worth considering).

Back to the question: First, what do I mean by “idealizing the notion of ‘harmony’”? I’m thinking of harmony as a mode of measurement or distribution. A “harmonic” distribution is one concerned with balance: everything is in its right place. These places might not be “equal,” but everything is in the place appropriate to it: people with copper in their soul do menial labor, and people with gold in their soul are philosopher kings, for example. Plato explicitly calls this “harmony”—e.g., in Eryximachus’s speech in the Symposium. Rancière calls this a “metapolitical” distribution of sensibility. In music, we might think of those arguments over temperament as fitting this notion of “harmony.” The arguments over temperament were really about how best to distribute or divide the octave into whole- and half-steps for a total of 12 pitches. Jacques Attali also explicitly identifies “harmony” as a paradigm for classical liberal political philosophy. “The entire history of tonal music, like that of classical political economy, amounts to an attempt to make people believe in…the faith that there is harmony in order” (Attali 46). This idea of order is one of “equilibrium” (Attali 59). Equilibrium is not, importantly, mathematical equality. Equilibrium is not treating everyone the same: it is putting everyone and everything in hierarchical order.[3] This hierarchical order positions apparently “different” phenomena in relation to the central, hegemonic term (i.e., tonality organizes all pitches functionally/hierarchically in relation to the tonic). As Attali explains:

An ideology of scientific harmony thus imposes itself, the mask of a hierarchical organization from which dissonances (conflicts and struggles) are forbidden, unless they are merely marginal and highlight the quality of the channeling order” (Attali 61).

As in political liberalism, difference is tolerated if and only if it can be assimilated or expressed in terms of the centered, controlling, hegemonic term. So, racial difference is “OK” as long as its diversity doesn’t decenter whiteness, and in fact serves whiteness and white people. So in the same way that liberal multiculturalism claims to be “harmony between divergent interests,” (Attali, 65), but is actually completely intolerant to actual difference, “harmonic” regimes generally accept only that which can be mapped hierarchically in relation to the centered/hegemonic term. It is a “combinatorics” (Attali 65) that can only “combine” that which has already been placed in terms of the “common denominator.”

Interestingly, Attali notes that “harmony” eventually “gives way to statistics, macroeconomics, and probability” (65). An economist in the Mitterand administration, Attali explains this new form of organization, administration, and analysis not in the political terms of liberalism, but in economic terms.  So, while Foucault focuses on the kind of power manifested in the use statistics and the human sciences to administer populations, Attali focuses directly on the instruments used to perform this administration. He describes “the probalist transcending of combinatorics,” (83), i.e., the neoliberal sublation of classical liberal “harmony.” In this new actuarial regime of probability and statistics, “power establish[es], on the basis of a technocratic language, a more efficient channelization of the productions of the imaginary forming the elements of a code of cybernetic repetition, a society without signification—a repetitive society” (Attali, 83). Statistics are used to “cut the fat,” the “fat” here being represented content. Power no longer has to produce spectacle (as in sovereignty), nor does it have to concern itself with producing “truths” for us to discover about ourselves (as in discipline). Foregoing mediation through content, power can get straight down to the business of reproducing its formal relations, i.e., its structural and institutional networks.

I think that the regime Attali labels “repetition” is actually a regime of biopolitical administration. It’s not the regime of mechanical reproduction, but the order of the bell curve and the elimination of risk/aleatory instances. So, the elimination of randomness may make it seem like everything is merely a clone or repetition of everything else, but what Attali means by “repetition” is not what we commonly think of as “repetition” (copying, looping, etc.). Attali’s not actually talking about mass production; he’s talking about biopolitics. What he means by “repetition” is “the existence of an all-encompassing truth, of a society that desires to make its simple management the matrix of its meaning…the statistical organization of repetition” (Attali 113/4; emphasis mine). Attalian repetition is not copying; it’s statistical management.  But what do statistics “manage”? Outliers, whatever can’t be controlled for, whatever breaks the curve—what Foucaultians call “aleatory events.” “the administrator in a repetitive society” is tasked with “managing chance” (Attali 114). Of course, Attali connects this “management of chance” to mid-century avant-garde composers, like Glass (whom he cites) and Cage. Though the latter explicitly focused his work on chance and aleatory processes, Attali notes that “even if in appearance everything is a possibility for him, on average his behavior obeys specifiable, abstract, ineluctable functional laws” (115). For example, his I Ching pieces will never include a compositional event or structure not already laid out by the matrix Cage made for the piece.[4] Attali explains:

Instead of toying with the limited nomenclature of the harmonic grid, he outlines processes of composition, experiments with the arrangement of free sounds…instruments no longer serve to produce the desired sound forms, conceived in thought before written down, but to monitor unexpected forms” (Attali 115; emphasis mine).

This “monitoring unexpected forms” sounds a lot like what Foucault identifies as the biopolitical management of risk. Attali even connects this form of statistical management of the aleatory to the management of life (i.e., to biopolitics as “the power over life” or the optimization of life for some, and the leaving of others to die). In the regime of “repetition,”

Science would no longer be the study of conflicts between representations, but rather the analysis of processes of repetition. After music, the biological sciences were the first to tackle this problem; the study of the conditions of the replication of life has led to a new scientific paradigm which, as we will see, goes to the essence of the problems surrounding Western technology’s transition from representation to repetition.  Biology replaces mechanics” (Attali 89).

The study of representations is the will to truth—the confessional logic that aims to find the “truth” of one’s desire, identity, etc. The analysis of repetition, on the other hand, studies “the conditions of the replication of life,” or, in more Foucaultian terms, how a population reproduces itself. The shift from  mechanics to biology is the shift from asking “How do things work?” to “What are the conditions of life itself? How does life make more life?” In biopolitics, power takes life as its object; thus, science too must take life as its object. Foucault is well-known for noticing this. Attali also notes this same shift: from spectacle to relations, from truth to statistical organization, from prohibition and discipline to administration, from punishment to the management of risk. What Attali contributes to the theorization of biopolitics is this: his explanation of the shift from sovereignty and panopticism to superpanopticism in terms of changing paradigms of musical organization, and his musical examples are clear and productive models for theorizing how biopolitical administration relates to gender, sexuality, and race—in fact, more clear than most of the models commonly used by feminist, queer, and critical race theorists.

So, now, I want to explain “harmony” to “frequency” as systems of musical organization. The differences between the two epistemes are evident in the difference between LMFAO’s compositional practices and traditional, tonal popular song structures. Traditional pop songs use tonal harmony to create a teleological narrative-like structure where exposition leads to rising action, climax, and denoument/resolution. The song progresses through lots of chord changes; these chord changes build tension, which is then released at the “big hit”. Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” displays this nicely.

2:16-2:34 is a microcosm of the song’s entire harmonic development. There is a slow build to a climax, which is represented by the full-on flares from the floodlights in the background. In fact, you can literally see the harmonic development in the use of these light banks. The verses don’t use the lights at all—they are set in various domestic scenes; the verses function only to develop the harmonic narrative. The lights make their first appearances in the choruses, which are sort of mini-climaxes, each failing to achieve full resolution, frustrating our desire for resolution, and thus making us crave it even more intensely. The 2:16-2:34 “microcosm” occurs in the song’s break, and this is the uber-climax: there’s the hit, which propels us to that moment of full resolution at the end of the song (the “you” at 3:26). Here, the lights flare at their greatest intensity, so we know this is the “money shot,” at least harmonically speaking. The point in rehearsing this example is to show how in traditional pop song structures, harmonic progressions provide the “energy” or “drive” that gives the song a sense of forward motion. Harmony is used to build tension and to pleasurably relase the tension at the song’s “big hit.”

LMFAO don’t use harmonic development to build tension. There is some very basic reliance on tonal functions (e.g., sol-do relationships), but the main tension in the song is built and released through what Daniel Barrow has called “The Soar,”[5] and which I have written about here.  They use rhythmic and timbral intensities to build and release tension, to propel the song forward toward its “money shot.” Let’s consider how they use rhythmic and timbral intensities to structure their two recent singles, “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know It”.

“Party Rock Anthem” is probably their most well-known track, so I’ll start with it:

The music starts at 1:25 with a drum track. At 1:40, some treble synths come in. The drum loop and the synth loop, along with another loop introduced in the first verse, are the basis for the entire song; the repetition of these elements (and not the progression among chords) gives it its structure. The intro is a mini-build to the first verse. The song starts with a drum track, and then shifts to a synth loop; at 1:54, they add vocals to the synth loop. At 2:09, they repeat from 1:54, but this time with a clap track. At 2:13, they add a synth sound that “soars” upward in pitch, sort of like the sound of a plane taking off. This is where the main build begins. We build to 2:22, at which point there is a pause, and then the main hit at 2:23, which is the start of the first verse. Here new lyrics and a new synth loop are introduced, and the drum track from the beginning returns. This build to the first verse is achieved by increasing timbral (the plane-launch synth) and rhythmic (handclap) intensity. The hit itself is marked by a change in timbre, melody, and rhythm. This same strategy is used in the build to the main climax in the break. For the sake of brevity, I’ll break this down into bullet points:

3:10-3:25       first repetition of chorus—this establishes the “base” from which the big build launches, or intensity = 0

3:25-3;40       second repetition of chorus—repetition effects a slight sense of tension, but not a lot

3:40                break

3:40-3:49       two repetitions of main melodic motive (in the treble synth) at “low” pitch

3:49-3:56       two repetitions of main melodic motive at higher pitch—both repetition and raise in pitch increases intensity/builds tension; “shuffilin, shuffilin” vocal at end of last phrase creates sense of “incomplete” resolution, which also builds tension

3:56-4:10       repetition of 3:40-3:56—repetition builds more tension

4:11                shift in instrumentals, entrance of male vocals. The inst. track is the basis on which the big “soar” happens

4:11-4:18       rapping a la the verses before 3:10, antecedent phrase to 4:18-25

4:18-4:25       rapping a la verses, consequent phrase to 4:11-18, but with addition of the instrumentals that will be used in the big build; this is more or less the “pivot” phrase into the big “soar”

Build really starts at 4:25, when the female vocals enter, along with hand claps.

4:25-4:33       first repetition of female vocals (two repetitions of the same line, “get up get down put your hands up to the sound,” each repetition coinciding with the main melodic motive in the synth); also, introduction of handclaps on each beat. Basic rate of repetition and intensity is established (e.g., quarter notes).

4:33-4:41       second repetition of female vocals, this time with a bass drum hit at the beginning of every other measure in the antecedent phrase; the consequent phrase doubletimes the “put your hands up to the sound”. SO, intensity is built rhythmically by upping the number of repetitions in a given amount of time.

4:41-4:47       doubletimes “get up, get up” in vocals, also adds descant synth from 3:40; adds ascending mid-voice synth in consequent phrase

4:47-4:55       this is the real build, the “soar” so to speak. There is:

·         the continuation of the pitch and volume crechendo in that ascending synth from the previous section

·         the exponential double-timing of the snare synth: eightnotes, to sixteenths, to thirty-secnds, to a roll

·         repeated “woo”s on the quarter notes

·         continuation of the main high-pitched synth hook, but bled “into the red”

4:55                climax

and deflation-- that ascending synth now descends; repetitions happen, but elements/layers either stay the same or drop out, rather than being added; distance introduced between repetitions rather than shortened.

Their song “Sexy and I Know It” uses the same strategy to build and climax, only this time the climax happens much earlier in the track:

0:30-0:36       first repetition of chorus, with antecedent and consequent phrases

0:37-0:43       second repetition

0:44-0:50       beginning of build; introduction of eight-note snares, and in last

few seconds, the synth hook is distorted a little, and a sort of “air” or “static” sound is introduced, which is carried over into:

0:51-0:54,      where the snares go into 16thnotes, and pitches/sound quality of

melodic elements pushed further into red

0:55-0:57       vocals repeat short line “know it, know it”

0:58-10:59     pause, statement of lyrical hook “I’m sexy and I know it<’ after which is the main “hit,” the climax (something similar happens at 1:43)

Both of these tracks “tweak” and modify the timbre, both of specific synth sounds and by changing among different synth sounds. They layer more and more sounds on top of one another, and they intensify rhythms and the repetition of phrases in the lyrics. They build tension by increasing the “intensity” of timbres, rhythms, and repetitions, bringing these to an asymtope, dropping everything into a moment of silence, and then resolving everything with a big “hit.” This is not “development” to climax, but asymptotic intensification. As composers and producers, LMFAO rely on a paradigm of “frequency,” i.e., of “intensification or de-intensification.” This paradigm measures or “register[s] larger or smaller numbers of events in a given time” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages xxi).[6] Instead of progressing through hierarchically-organized functions (i.e., chords), LMFAO organize their song using techniques whereby “relationships between speed (how fast or slow time feels) pace (the tempo, rate, or intervals of registering events within time), and duration (the length of time within which these events are registered) alter or are altered” (Puar xxi). I’m citing from Jasbir Puar’s discussion of superpanoptic “assemblages” because I want to make absolutely clear the parallels between LMFAO’s style of musical organization and her understanding of the organization of race and sexuality as assemblages. If assemblages are characteristically “superpanoptic” because they are grounded in biopolitical regimes of “frequencies” and “intensifications,” and if LMFAO’s compositional strategies are grounded in the very same notions of “frequency” and “intensity,” then it follows that these compositional strategies are themselves characteristically superpanoptic. Or, more simply: “the soar”—the use of rhythmic and timbral intensity to build a song’s arc—is part of the broader “biopolitical” episteme.

I analyze music to point out the key features of “harmony” and “frequency” as regimes of power or political organization. Listening to them play out as systems of musical organization clarifies, IMHO, how exactly they work, and are distinct, as regimes of power-knowledge. Here is a really under-developed list of some things this harmony/frequency distinction helps us do/theorize/understand:

1       Frequency doesn’t need hierarchies, but harmony does.

2.      Limiting agent or type of relationship structure:

a.    In harmony, the hierarchy is the limiting agent: everything is arranged hierarchically around the tonic, which is the “centered” or “hegemonic” term, the centripetal point or common denominator in terms of which everything is expressed. So, hierarchy is the form relationships take in “harmonic” orders.

b.    In frequency, signals limit other signals. This is how analog synths work. This is how digital synths work (e.g., the signal from the trackpad, and also the limits of the trackpad, determine the range of alterations/effects that can be performed to a pitch, loop, etc.). There is not necessarily one central signal. So, the relationships are more obviously “networked.”

                                          i.    But you can’t do anything that’s not on the sine wave/bell curve. The other limit is the literal mathematical limit: the asymtope. You can take the cowbell or handclap track and doubletime, quadrupletime, octuple time, whatever time it, following Zeno’s paradox down to the mathematical limit. SO, relationships can approach, but never reach zero. Perhaps this is a way of expressing the idea that one is never outside or without power.

3     20^th century music is all about management of the aleatory.

a.    Cage and chance.

b.    Tweaking and modulation as management of deviance: Cage’s prepared pianos, Moog’s synthesizers, Flash’s scratching, Korg’s KAOS pads, Cher’s and T-Pain’s AutoTuning, etc. So its not about achieving balance according to one measure/scale, but of producing acceptable, comprehensible “deviances” from whatever norm one is referencing (re: pitch, timbre, voice leading, etc.).

c.    IMHO Shannon Winnubsts’ work on the biopolitics of cool works out this idea of “acceptable deviances.” To be “cool” one needs to be just deviant enough to be avant-garde, but not too deviant (i.e., not kooky or weird).

 4  Conditions of replication:

a.    millennial and post-millennial music technology, IP law, and industry practices are all about the management and replication of data/data profiles.

b.    I think we also need to think about the story in the “Party Rock” video—it’s based on zombie narratives (Walking Dead, 28 Days Later), and turns on the idea that a song’s hook can “infect” people like a virus, turning everyone into “shufflin” drones (sorta like Thriller, in a way). So there’s something about “infection” to be theorized—Puar does some of this with her idea of “contagion.”

5    Value judgments (aesthetics, ethics):

a.    So the fine art/craft distinction is a hierarchical one, as is the serious/pop one. This is a “harmonic” model of aesthetic judgment.

b.    How would we make aesthetic judgments about “intensities”? Or “frequencies”? Do we need to think in terms of muting and intensification? In terms of degree of modulation? Is this perhaps what theorists of “remix culture” are trying to get at?

SOOO, yeah, that’s a LOT of stuff I just threw at you. It’s all very, VERY ROUGH. I need to think through all this a lot more carefully, and if you have any thoughts or comments, I’d really appreciate them! I have the sense I may be on to something, but then I may well not be.

---

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=OHe7AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false 

[2] By reading Attali with/through Foucault, I’m arguing that perhaps there’s more to Attali than others, such as Steven Shaviro, suggest: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=397

[3] “Difference is the principle for order” (Attali 62)

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Changes

[5] http://thequietus.com/articles/06073-a-plague-of-soars-warps-in-the-fabric-of-pop

[6]http://books.google.com/books?id=_v8tbxwv7y0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Come to my talk in Charlotte on Tuesday November 8th!

Tuesday November 8th I'll be giving a talk about my book, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music, as part of UNC Charlotte's  "Personally Speaking" series. It will take place at the new Uptown Campus at 9th and Brevard (by the Breakfast Club).

I will start off by using my discussion of Joe Calderone's performance at the VMAs to illustrate the interrelationships among gender, race, and music that I discuss in the book. Then, I'll talk about the "shared logic" enlightenment philosophers attributed to gender, race, and music, and how this shared logic facilitates the framing of aesthetic judgments about music in raced and gendered terms. Finally, I will argue that our disgust at pop music is actually disgust at femininity (and not at any objective property of a song or genre), and that we--especially we  NPR listening, indie rock loving white liberals--have an ethical obligation to question our assumptions that pop music is bad, that commercialization is bad, and that only "independent" and/or "difficult" music has aesthetic and/or political value.

It starts at 6pm with a reception; my talk is at 6:30, and there's another reception after my talk. If you are in Charlotte, I would love to see you there!

From Identity to Profile: Superpanopticism, Race as Technology, and hopefully some clarification for my transnational feminism class

For the past two weeks, my transnational feminism class has been working our way through Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. We've only begun to scratch the surface of this text, and I think many of felt things got more complicated, not more clear, the more we worked. So, to help bring what I hope is at least a modicum of clarity to our discussions, I decided to post a section from my manuscript-in-progress which directly deals with Puar's concept of "profile" and its relation to superpanopticism/biopolitical administration. 

 I want to again emphasize that this a work in progress. :)

Superpanopticism is not interested in individual subjects as such, but in populations, in aggregates. Without much of an investment in individualized and individuated subjects, superpanopticism has little use for identities—it does not need to make inferences about the qualities and capacities of subjects, which is how social identities work. Rather, superpanopticism needs to survey, monitor, and adjust averages across a population or a group.  Its profiling strategies use race, gender, and sexuality as technologies. Specifically, these technologies distribute state and “institutional support,” doling out resources so that averages can be maintained and aleatory, statistically deviant “events” can be minimized. Those fitting some profiles are incited to live, and others, who fit different profiles, are left to die. Puar thus develops a concept of “the profile” as a superpanoptic alternative to juridical and disciplinary/panoptic notions of “identity.” In this section, I will explain Puar’s concept of “profile” by comparing it to Falguni Sheth’s concept of race-as-technology. I will then connect the prfile to Puar’s notion of “assemblage” in order to show how Puar develops her case for the need to theorize beyond the visual.

            Reflective of their shared debt to (and criticism of) Foucault, Puar’s conception of race is similar in many ways to philosopher Falguni Sheth’s. Sheth argues that race is not (just) a “what”—an identity—but (more importantly) a “how”—a technology. As Sheth explains, in shifting the question from what race is to what it does,

race is no longer descriptive, but causal: it facilitates and produces certain relationships between individuals, between groups, and between political subjects and sovereign power.  The function of race, then, is similar to the function of technology: Technology, commonly considered as equipment, facilitates the production of certain ‘goods’…race becomes an instrument that produces certain political and social outcomes that are needed to cohere society” (Sheth, 22).

As a technology, race (or gender, or sexuality) is more than a property of bodies; it is a system for organizing society. For example, the popularization of the automobile significantly shaped post-WWII urban development in the United States. The car made certain kinds of relationships among individuals and groups easier to establish and maintain. It also encouraged the use of the driver’s license as a near mandatory form of individual identification, and encourages specific relationships between individuals and the state. As a technology like the car, race encourages and discourages certain kinds of relationships among individuals and groups, and among individuals, groups, and the state. Race is used to dole out exposure to environmental hazards, likelihood (and severity) of encounters with law enforcement, reproductive autonomy, even perceived queerness. To perform this distributive function, race can’t be tethered to human bodies—it needs to be perceived in non-human things, like locations, clothing, musical styles, or, as I have argued elsewhere, even dog breeds. Thus, as Puar argues, “the terms of whiteness,” for example, “cannot remain solely in the realm of racial identification or phenotype” (200). Like Sheth, Puar thinks that race is not just a visible, substantive property of bodies. “Race and sex,” Puar argues, “are to be increasingly thought outside the parameters of identity, as assemblages, as events” (211). Something happens in and/or through an event (even in the most general, least technical sense of the term).[1] As an assemblage or event, race has a function, it does something.[2] According to Puar, race and sex can, accomplish, among other ends, “render bodies transparent or opaque, secure or insecure, risky or at risk, risk-enabled or risk-disabled, the living or the dead” (160). In other words, Puar thinks race and sex are, to use Sheth’s words “instruments that produce certain political and social outcomes that are needed to cohere society.” I will return to the idea of assemblage later in this section. For now, it’s sufficient to note that Puar and Sheth eschew the visible-social-identity model in favor of the technology model.

Puar argues that superpanopticism favors one technological medium—the profile. It is helpful, if perhaps a bit blunt, to contrast profiles with images. Social identities follow the representational logic of images: a sign refers to some signified content. One’s race or gender can symbolize one’s cognitive capacities, sexual appetitiveness, or even taste in music.  Profiles, on the other hand, summarize or systematize relations among data; in this respect, a profile is more like a mathematical equation than a picture. As Puar explains, “the profile, as a type of composite, also works…as a mechanism of information collection and analysis that tabulates marketing information, demographics, consumer habits, computer usage, etc.” (192). Profiles bring together many strongly and loosely-related “facts” or bits of information. Unlike images, which re-present content, profiles show relationships among more-or-less disparate data points. So, while identities use surface/depth logics to ground inferences about the “inner content” of a person in his or her visible appearance, profiles use network logics to describe a person’s position in relation to others. “The profile establishes the individual as imbricated in manifold populations” (Puar 162). Profiles are accounts of the form or structure of relationships, which can be measured “in terms of speed, pace, repetition, and informational flows” (Puar 201). Thus, “what is at stake” in profiling “is the repetition and relay of ubiquitous images,” which are formal, structural factors, “not their symbolic or representational meaning” (Puar 201). Profiles use relationships among bits of information (e.g., how frequently one visits a website, how much and how often one buys a particular product) to gauge individuals’ situation in relation to others, and relations among various groups.

Instruments for measuring, analyzing, and calculating information, profiles do not use visible body features like phenotype or gendered bodily comportment. Thus, Puar argues that we “profile” people not through surveillance, but through the monitoring of our “sense of” or “feel for” a person (or, more informally, their “vibe”).  “A patrolling of affect changes the terms of ‘what kind of person’ would be a terrorist or smuggler, recognizing that the terrorist…could look like anyone and do just like everyone else, but might seem something else” (197). This “seeming” is an assessment not of identity or actions, but of one’s “fit” with a particular profile. Puar describes this assessment as a “see[ing] through” the body (199). Profiling is not a visual assessment of what the body’s outward appearance means or represents. With profiling, “the visual is expanded through a certain kind of transparency, not only by looking at the body, but by looking through it” (199). So, Puar argues that profiling and panopticism operate literally beyond the visual—they “expand” the visual beyond its traditional, representational mode. To “see” the body is to use its visible appearance as an outward sign or symbol of its inner content. To “see through” the body is to remix or re-order the body and its constituent parts. As a “surveillance event,” profiling “is a rematerialization of the body, a slaying of the body across multiple registers that adumbrates the terms of intimacy, intensity, and interiority” (199). The profile need only adumbrate or hint at interiority, because it is more interested in the relations among parts than in what these parts are or what they mean. This emphasis on relations among parts is why profiles remix rather than represent. As in music production, profiling remixes by cutting and reordering parts: “the subject is divided up into subhuman particles of knowledge that nevertheless exceed the boundaries of the body, yet it is also multiply splayed through, across, and between intersecting and overlapping populations” (Puar 12). Profiles describe the relations among individuals as members of defined groups—be they members of a specific race, or consumers of a specific brand of commodity. In fact, profiling tracks membership in either group—race or brand-affiliation—in terms of the other. “The profile disperses control through circuits catching multiple interpenetrating sites of anxiety” (198). So, as a technology, profiles are used to monitor and maintain population-wide averages, and to predict and preempt deviant events. They work on and through relationships, whereas identities work on and through visible body appearance.

            Profiling may be a technology of surveillance, but it is not one that uses sight, at least in any standard sense of the term. Traditionally, vision perceives images, appearances, and representations—a subject perceives an object. Puar argues that superpanopticism follows a different “economy of sight,” one without either “subjects” or “objects.” Instead, we have “assemblage[s] of subindividual capacities” that are “visualized” in the way that data is visualized in a new media environment.  The point is not to see objects, but relationships among types of info.

 Here's a word cloud of this blog made using the web app "Wordle": 

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[1] Puar’s discussion of torture is clear evidence of her “technological” conception of race, gender, and sexuality.  Speaking not about femininity, but about “the force of feminizing,” Puar attributes the following effects to this force: “stripping away,” “faggotizing,” “robbing,” “fortification,” “rescripting,” “regendering,” and “interplay” with technologies of “racial, imperial, and economic matrices of power” (100).

[2] “This shift forces us to ask not only what terrorist corporealities mean or signify, but more insistently, what do they do?” (Puar, 204; emphasis mine).