At approximately 3:30 today, there was a total solar eclipse in upstate New York, where I live. Fordham University, where I sometimes teach, emailed about safety precautions during the eclipse. This email mentioned that the earliest record of an eclipse was from around 1223 BC in Ugarit, Syria. The email then cheekily mentions that Ugrait collapsed a few days later, but this is unlikely for New York City, where Fordham is located.
When I teach Cyberspace: Issues and Ethics, at some point in the semester, we look at different aspects of life and ask how this technology is, and of course, we ask.
How is “The State a technology?
From the first paragraph, 3:30, New York City, the month of April 1223 BC, are technologies of the state. I always think of Ninefox Gambit, the science fiction book by Yoon Ha Lee, where calendar manipulation is the primary tool of imperial technological warfare. Measurement and standardization are technologies. Measurement makes standardization possible. As anyone with a child knows, when you take a child to the doctor, they measure and weigh the child and then say what percentage of the population they fall under. That is, how much do they deviate from the norm?
Norms and Technology
It’s hard to imagine technology without norms. Algorithms appear to be a collection of rules and heuristics for how to do something, from flying to an airplane to editing a video. Greater technological abstraction and frameworks like Java Springboot have a normative function similar to the standard measurement. As a technologist, it is more efficient to work with frameworks, but perhaps it used to be a lot of fun to work with personal idiosyncratic C++ and PERL code — although time-consuming.
The State, Norms, and Queerness
I picked up a thin but rich copy of” Queer Theory of the State’’by Samuel Clowes Huneke at Palais de Tokyo. It asks the question, “Can the state be queer, and what would that look like?” Huneke looks at queer rights and queer health (the AIDS crisis) and spends the first part of the book on this notion of norms; focusing on the work of Michel Foucault, Hunke examines queerness as that which is “not the norm,” with the norm being heterosexuality. The fight for equal rights by different groups, which are “not the norm,” exposes the state as that which sets the norms.
I and We
Towards the end of the book Hunke writes that one way to create a queer state is, to begin with the community rather than the individual, to start with the We and not the I. So many of the foundations of our society are individual rights, what would happen if we began with communial rights — the right of communities to access housing, food, land for food, clean water. So many of our environmental resources today are affected by aggregates (communities, nations, corporations), not individuals. Perhaps we need to reorient our values to start with the aggregate, the community.
Queerness intersects with the state on the level of community or aggregate and the individual. The queer community gains access to the support of the state (rights, health care, etc.) when it acts as a group. We can expand this to all groups excluded by the state and to identity politics and say that when we call for equal rights for any group, we begin with the we.
Dividuals and Reproduction
We can also think about the dividual of Deleuze and Guattari. Dividuals think of individuals as a collection of identities, desires, and interactions. The individual itself is a collection, and dividuals can combine with other dividuals beyond and in different ways than the concept of the individual. It is the individual — unbundled, like the unbundling of the record into individual songs available on the latest streaming service. It also recognizes the fluidity and construction of the bundle/ the self. There is no self — the Advaita Vedanta approach to the state. I think of Buddhist teacher and meditator Gil Fronsdal and his recent Dharma talk on the self. The self is a garment sewn together by the tread of desire.
When we create a state from dividuals or group identities how does the state or society reproduce itself? How does it continue for the next generation over time? There is a group at the heart of the contemporary state — perhaps we call this the straight state — and that is the family. The family has the mechanism for reproduction built in — it is biologically reproduced. The queer state historically could not reproduce itself — perhaps culturally, but not biologically. Although perhaps with IVF and other new reproductive technologies, the queer state could reproduce itself. I am unsure and still thinking about these constellations of ideas.
The State as a Technology Again
Lewis Mumford looks at ancient societies and sees machines — he calls the techniques of labor and logistics that built the pyramids — a megamachine. A machine is not the same as technology, but a machine is a technology. So maybe the question I am asking is — is the state a machine? A machine follows a process or a set of instructions until the instruction set is complete. In the case of a loop or precision, the process repeats almost indefinitely. Would the queer state be a machine in the way a straight state is? Is there an instruction set, and would the instruction set repeat (reproduce)?
I feel the ghost of Aristotle here and the law of non-contradiction. Maybe the queer state is not a machine — then it cannot be a state at all. But then we are left with the original question — is the state a technology?
Aristotle — Politics
Deleuze and Guittari — Anti-Oedipus (but all their works)
Gil Fronsdal — https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
Michel Foucault — Discipline and Punishment (but all his works)
Samuel Clowes Huneke — A Queer Theory of State
Yoon Ha Lee — Ninefox Gambit
Lewis Mumford — The Myth of The Machine