An Introduction, In Parts

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a portfolio of three essays on the theme “What difference does the digital make?” These essays were originally given as talks at an annual forum co-hosted by this journal and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. After briefly laying out the concerns of these three essays, this article introduces and summarizes the essays that make up the second half of this issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

This issue leads off with a cluster of three essays that ask: “What difference does the digital make?” The essays by Patricia Clough, Stephen Hartman, and Fred Moten are all revised from presentations they first gave at a May 2018 forum at New York University. The forum was co-organized by this journal and the New York University (NYU) Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), with additional support from NYU's Department of Performance Studies, where Moten is based and where Clough is a frequent visiting faculty member. The full title of the forum was “What Difference Does the Digital Make? Critical Encounters at the Edges of Psychoanalysis and Technology.” It was the ninth annual collaboration between Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) and CSGS. Each year since 2009, CSGS and SGS have selected a topic and invited an esteemed group of clinicians and scholars of gender and sexuality studies and other critical studies of difference to talk together across disciplines and across institutional locations.

“What difference does the digital make?” aims to push existing conversations on psychoanalysis and technology beyond some of the typical frames, which have tended to focus on the use of Skype, texting, and other new media within the therapeutic treatment. These are valuable and necessary areas of focus, but the papers published here take a different direction. They all proceed with an understanding of psychoanalysis as already itself a technology, and one embedded in particular historical forms and fantasies of conceiving “the human.” As a jumping-off point for the public conversation and, now, the published essays, we asked Clough, Hartman, and Moten—who come to the conversation from, variously, relational psychoanalysis, media and affect studies, performance studies, Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical theory, and political theory—to consider how new new technologies are drawing on, dispersing, fragmenting, and reformatting social differences and identities of, for example, gender, race, sexuality, and nation. What are the historical violences carried forward in the (new?) digital demographies of the human? What new potentialities of media and mediation between, across, and beyond the human can be identified? At a time of big data and dispersed agencies, how are we now to conceptualize individuals, groups, collectivities?

The second half of this issue is comprised of three papers, followed by a brief personal essay on the aftermath of suicide. The three papers are all richly transdisciplinary. Engaging recent work in queer theory, Daniel Butler offers a compelling and strikingly original reading of Winnicott’s conception of “primary maternal preoccupation” (1956). Butler directs us both to the “disturbing intercorporeality” (his words, this issue) of primary preoccupation and its status as an originary hierarchical relational structure. He pushes us to stay with and clinically frame this disturbance and this hierarchy—or, more exactly, the disturbance of hierarchy—as a way to potentiate instinctual life and new forms of being.

In her contribution to this issue, performance studies scholar Julia Steinmetz introduces readers to the boundary-challenging work of Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), an influential composer, performer, and philosopher of sound. Steinmetz puts Oliveros’s practice and philosophy of Deep Listening into moving, vibratory contact with psychoanalysis’s own long history of thinking about and practicing listening between, within, and across subjectivities. In so doing, Steinmetz also underscores psychoanalysis as performance art.

At a contemporary moment that daily pitches between farce, fascism, and dystopian fiction, we are excited to be publishing an excerpt from Linda Schlossberg’s new novel, The Incubator. Schlossberg—a scholar of gender and sexuality studies, as well as author of a previous novel (2010)—sets her new novel “in a near future United States where abortion is illegal and Fetal People are citizens with inalienable rights” (this issue). The novel fuses satire and horror to diagnose the dangers of the present. As Schlossberg states in her framing remarks, “The world of The Incubator is only baby steps away from our current political moment, in which pregnant women, especially poor women and women of color, have been subject to criminal prosecution and civil interventions under various ‘fetal endangerment’ and ‘fetal abuse’ statutes.” The Incubator harrowingly depicts a world of neoliberal maternal optimization, biomedical management, and misogynist reduction of women to their reproductive capacity. These are issues that have been addressed in the pages of this journal before (Gentile, 2013, 2015; Leve, 2013; Simon, 2013) and continue to require careful critical attention. Scholarly writing has no monopoly on such critique. Schlossberg’s The Incubator demonstrates the power of fiction to document, analyze, and—is this too hopeful for a dystopian novel?—creatively reorient the present by picturing a different future than the one we seem to be hurtling toward.

This issue is punctuated by a brief miscellany. In a pseudonymous essay, “After Suicide,” Lorna O’Dowd reflects on lives lost “like a full stop in the middle of a story, deliberately out of place” (this issue). We meet or, rather, can never meet Richard, whose stopped story O’Dowd connects to another: the magic-stealing stories culture tells about race and mental illness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann Pellegrini

Ann Pellegrini is a professor of performance studies and social and cultural analysis at New York University and a co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (1997), Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen (2004), and the forthcoming Queer Structures of Religious Feeling.