Consent as Dissent in an Age of Co-Option

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

What is dissent in a moment when there appears to be no way out? Critics have recently struggled to theorize resistance when radical action and avant-garde practice have proven easily co-opted. As it becomes clear that crisis and confrontation are not what threatens the stability of the system but what it profits from and reproduces, we must re-evaluate the modalities of dissent available today. This panel takes up this task by exploring the new visibility of an immanent, highly ambivalent form of dissent that we are calling hyperconsent. We will examine artists and other figures who have responded to their political, institutional, and historical constraints—whether hegemonic scripts of enslavement, bureaucratic infrastructures, or digital control protocols—not by fighting them frontally but by accepting (or rather performing an acceptance of) such constraints—often in a hyperbolic and exaggerated manner—ostensibly to challenge them “from the inside.”

We identify this move in conceptual media, art, medical and subcultural performance sites–from digital networks to medical research, systems of law and finance, sex and the body, the art world, and the everyday bureaucracy of the U.S. postal system. Across these sites, we theorize hyperconsent between two ascendant, but ideologically divergent strands within contemporary cultural theory: The first is that of (predominantly white, masculinist) theories of contemporary capitalism and cultural production associated with “accelerationist” thought. The second is that of a queer, feminist, and anti-racist perspective that situates performances of hyperconsent as tactical inhabitations of the entanglements and affordances of power.

While we explore the impasses of the present, we see the problem of hyperconsent as rooted in 18th-century legal and political doctrines of liberalism that posit the capacity to consent as the essential measure of freedom and autonomy. How, then, do we interpret the historical formation and contemporary intensification of questions of consent in relation to those lives marked within the zones of unfreedom against and through which the liberal subject has been constructed: that is, the queer, the enslaved, the feminized, and the primitive? As the cultural contexts and practices centered in our various projects suggest, the liberal subject of choice and rights cannot be presumed. Instead, the practices we gather attempt to pose interventions under conditions where direct or straightforward refusal is not an option. They emerge within zones of unfreedom, enjoining us to evaluate less an expansion of the category of the consenting subject than performative re-negotiations with the normative grid of political action currently on offer. Importantly, however, while performances of hyperconsent have been embraced as a queer-feminist experimental practice, we argue that their reactionary and exclusionary features and complicated critical legacy have remained undertheorized.

Our discussion will be framed by such questions as: How do performances of consent and dissent recall, obscure, or refigure the uneven histories of autonomy and sovereignty that ground them? What is the disruptive potential of mimetic forms of resistance when they work too well and threaten to blend in with the systems they seek to challenge?

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Bill R Johnson Gonzalez, Depaul University

Individual Presentations

• Dissent in an Age of Embeddedness - Anna Watkins Fisher, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

• The Accumulation of the Primitive: Racializing Nature to Intervene in the Propertization of Human Genes? - Coleman Nye, Simon Fraser University, Canada

• On Capitalist Masochism, Financial Domination, and the Racialization of Consent - Alexander Pittman, Barnard College

• In Correspondence: Ray Johnson’s Mail Art as Mimetic Critique - Johanna Gosse, Columbia University