(This is an edited, clarified, and hopefully improved version of the original talk, which is available on YouTube.)
Infinity and Virtuality
All creative practices implicitly assume or depend upon an infinite—that is to say, they assume an infinite capacity within whatever material they work with. For instance, in the twenty-first century you wouldn’t become a painter unless you believed that the materials of painting have the capacity to offer up infinite configurations; you wouldn’t write unless you believed that the materials of language were virtually inexhaustible. Fashion design assumes an infinite potential for the reconfiguration and reimagining of human bodies, the expressions they are capable of, and the emotions they can elicit. I call this the virtual body—the space of configurations of the body, taking into account its multiple dimensions—anatomical, psychological, social, visual, proprioceptive and interoceptive, biological, neurological, etc. This multidimensional space is arguably infinite; in any case it is of a vastness that far exceeds the types of body that are currently physically actualised and socially sanctioned. Although, as we shall see, the two things converge in various ways, by ‘virtual’ I therefore don’t initially mean anything to do with the digital or with computation, I simply mean this space that exceeds in every direction bodies as they are actualised in the present, along with the corollary assumption that there is infinite potential for the reconfiguration and reimagining of the frame of the human body, its expressions, the emotions it can elicit, the desires it can mobilise.
But while this must be the underlying assumption, contemporary fashion practice also has to address bodies placed under historically specific conditions. I suggest that two of the predominant conditions under which bodies find themselves today, or two of the processes in which they are or can be caught up, are the Cute and the Janky—which are not necessarily in conflict or opposition, but are two ways of looking at how exploration of the virtual body is channelled by the constraints that weigh upon actual bodies right now.
Janky Bodies
The first of these terms picks up from Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung’s recent introduction of ‘janky’ as a term of interest. One of Daniel and Jenn’s examples of jankiness is these setups that Uber drivers lash together in their cars in order to have at their fingertips all the devices and systems they need in order to do their job. The janky is where mandated work protocol ends and improvisation begins. ‘Janky’ names those elements that are assembled as required and on demand in order to lubricate a social-economic infrastructure that is automated and runs on a meshwork of interconnected, reliably monotonic technical systems. The janky is the residual unregulated space in which the remaining problems of implementation which systems architects have not addressed—for cost reasons and/or because they relate to knots of contingency and materiality that are difficult to model and regulate and/or because they have not yet been identified as potential zones of profit and optimisation—are tackled ad hoc by users-customers in bricolage fashion.
Given Jenn and Daniel’s discussion (particularly in the Disintegrator podcast) allows us to place jankspace in the direct lineage of the concept of junkspace introduced by Rem Koolhaas in 2001. As Koolhaas explains it, junkspace is the result, within material space, of the failure of the architects of modernity, and of modern architecture, to understand space in anything but a highly abstract and purified way. It’s the space that’s actually there for us to live in after all of modernity’s high-level visions of rational ordered living and guaranteed social cohesion have been parcelled out, run through committees and investors and planning committees, subjected to the contingencies on the ground, executed piecemeal, rolled out by a hundred different institutions and agencies, and lashed together in an makeshift integration. What results, what we live in, Koolhaas says, is ‘a low grade purgatory’:
Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course […]. Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce [….]
In another sense, jankspace is simply us: the space of bodies that serve to stitch together all of the platforms, apps, streams, authentication systems, and payment protocols they need to interface with, keeping the data circulating, filling the gaps in a meshwork of digital systems that is also the result of a failed promise—technocapital’s promise to itself, more than to us—of seamless efficiency and integration. Humans today are bare jankspace, it is after all ultimately human bodies (grey matter included) that lash together a system which, ideally, would do without them and run far more smoothly for it.
Ever get the feeling that your neural matter is an all-purpose adhesive, a kind of duct tape used to patch up the last mile, to lash up the gap between one system and another?
Charge Points and Social Circuits
And yet this residual jankspace body remains a necessity for the perpetuation of Capital. As ridiculous and obsolete as it might seem, the human body will remain a primary site of value extraction so long as the biological and social reproduction of human bodies and brains goes uncompensated—that is, so long as the human race provides new trained and socialised human bodies to Capital free of charge on the assumption that human dignity demands that some things (sexual reproduction and care) must remain ostensibly detached from the circuit of exchange. Of course, from the point of view of Capital these bodies are merely (a) drag, or what we might call ‘a detestable but necessary appendage’—a phrase used by Jean-François Lyotard in Libidinal Economy when he explains how, in the homosocial assemblage of the ancient Greek polity, men have, functionally speaking, two penises.
As Lyotard explains, sexual pleasure in the form of homosexuality plays an integral part in the social reproduction of the polis, alongside and intertwined with the logocentric affairs of discursive exchange, lawmaking, philosophy, etc. But sexual reproduction exists on an entirely different circuit, one that is in principle discontinuous with the politeia. In principle, but not quite in fact since, to ensure its renewal, the political circuit must plug in to a reliable supply of male bodies. And so, Lyotard suggests, the Greek men of the polis reluctantly sprout a second cock. They prostitute themselves, siphoning off a portion of their essentially homosocial libido for use in heterosexual activity; they deign to couple with woman for the purposes of the one political function in which she, the ‘detestable but necessary appendage’, is authorised to participate. Authorized, but only in order to reproduce a politeia of which she is ostensibly not a part.
If in logocentric ancient Greece woman is janky, in the low-grade purgatory of technical jankspace we are all tradwives; we all have to open our legs and do our chores with the vague feeling that we’re not really wanted. Because yes, jankspace is also a feeling: a sense of being used, an ache in your psychic flesh, a kind of abysmal fatigue an existential distress at the slaving of your body and brain to an automated system of social reproduction via the hypercomplex exchange of asignifying signs that ‘operate flush to reality’ (Guattari). Jankspace is how you feel when you just used Touch ID to access your keychain and you’re desperately reaching for the power cord to plug in your phone and get it powered up so that you can get the code from the OTP text message and activate your hotspot so as to get the email confirmation for a password change in time so you can access the cloud storage where you keep the scan of your ID that’s required by the payment app that just asked you to verify the microdeposit sent to your bank so you can buy some shit you saw on Instagram at 2 a.m. after you’d been scrolling liking and subscribing all night, getting impregnated by content so that you can pop out more content tomorrow.
If Koolhaas describes junkspace as ‘the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock’, we could describe jankspace as—and you can choose your own terms here—‘the product of an encounter between payment processing systems and user interfaces, conceived in an incubator of javascript’.
The status of bodies is unclear here, as can be seen when we look at the example of the Uber drivers lash-ups. The Jankspace body is in a sense a body functionally reduced to the appendages and gestures necessary for it to fulfil its interfacing functions, but it also includes the spatial disposition of the physical devices that host the entrypoints to those functions. What that means depends on your role in production, which of course includes your role in consumption. If you’re lucky, it makes your body something more than an iris, a fingerprint, some neurons and a thumb or two. If a part of your job is self-presenting on social media, your face might be included in this brutal digital-anatomical abbreviation.
But every society invests certain body parts at the expense of others, plugging them into the circuits that reproduce and maintain its structure, and leaving the remainder to languish in social desuetude.
[T]he city, the politeia, consists in only rendering useful, utilizable, a tiny fragment of the [libidinal surface (i.e. the virtual body—RM)]. What is a citizen-body? The pulsional investment of the penis and the logos. But the shank and language are here diverted from the charge points offered them by the configurations of other societies.
But in the residual janky spaces left behind by the provisional failure of technocapital to live up to its promises of seamlessness and efficiency, jankspace also invites bodies to extend their supernumerary parts out into the provisional prosthetic environment they have patched together for themselves, populating the blind spots left to improvisation, and perhaps uncertainly extracting some surplus in the process. Jankspace is certainly a space of labour, of continual pressure and contestation (against platform determinism and extractivism), but inhabiting it is also a matter of experiment, improvisation, creativity, and even enjoyment and pride in engineering those connections which fall outside of mandatory sociotechnical protocol by dint of plugging its gaps. For the moment, at least: as Daniel remarks in the podcast, systems architects themselves may now attentively survey jankspace and successively incorporate and adapt parts of what emerges there into official protocol. But there always seems to be a kind of lag, a delay between optimisation and improvisation where jankiness endures.
Cute Bodies
Cute Accelerationism argues that Cute gives us a diagram of a connection between extended engagement in forms of platform sociality where connection to the self and the body is mediated by images, exploration of the virtual body, and the collective transformation of actual bodies and their affordances.
This diagram, drafted by Inigo Wilkins, describes our reading of the history of Cute, in four circuits: Natural Evolution, The Market, The Schizo Database, and Cute AI. At each stage, Cute throws off constraints upon its realisation, becomes intensified, and appears in more acute and compelling forms—with the effects of each circuit also feeding back on the previous circuit.
Natural Evolution: In the first instance, Cute is understood as a phenomenon which has roots in mammalian evolution. This was firstly remarked upon by Konrad Lorenz, who proposed what he called the Kindchenschema, the baby-schema. Lorenz describes how the faces of mammalian young have different proportions to those of their adult counterparts, and therefore there is a certain series of signs or symbols, proportional relations characteristic of babies that constitute what Lorenz calls ‘releasers’, cues which produce in adults a particularly acute sense of wanting to give care, wanting to hold.
From the outset, even if you think about this in terms of evolutionary processes—more specifically, as Lorenz is at pains to point out, a gradual co-evolution of specific bodily features and proportions in infancy and a sensory attunement to these on the part of the adult—it already has this strangely unnatural cross-species side-effect whereby, as human adults, we can also get cute feels from looking at and picking up kittens, puppies, baby mice or baby goats, even though it serves no evolutionary purpose.
In addition, at the very moment that Lorenz places Cute within the realm of nature, he also understands it in terms of the nascent culture-industrial complex of the time (this is in the late 1940s) which he describes as producing successive generations of items such as dolls and teddy bears with these releaser-triggers more and more pronounced each time (far more than they are anywhere in nature—which brings us to the supernormal). Obviously, the market acts here as a feedback circuit to excite and stimulate the intensification of Cute further than it is in nature’s interests to do.
The Market: during the twentieth century Cute appeared on various regional forms, although the Japanese form of Kawaii became hegemonic toward the end of the century. But in fact Kawaii was already interacting with the US (Disney) form of Cute very early on. In any case, rather than Cute being attributable to any particular national history or character, industrial Cute, as a set of features relayed, abstracted, and amplified from the natural form, is something that’s been discovered in different places at different times, and has become a global phenomenon through convergence and market synergy.
The Schizo Database: In Cute Accelerationism we’re particularly interested in this third circuit. It involves intense self-selective otaku-like communities which extract artefacts from the cultural-industrial Cute complex, and tweak and intensify them in ways that would not be in the mass market’s direct interest. They produce their own forms of Cute through fan-made (dōjinshi-type) production-consumption processes, in doing so affirming the perversion involved in amplifying and actively intensifying to the extreme highly engineered points of tacitly or ostensibly mediated erotic sensation. The apotheosis of this is the very acute form of attraction known as moé, a kind of irresistible attachment to particular characters or features, often 2d images over 3D persons: an obsession with a particular character from anime or even a disembodied trait such as saggy socks or bunny ears. Whatever gets you going!
The pursuit of moé beyond anything conforming to normal social acceptability has been enabled by connectivity of platforms, particularly image boards. This third circuit produces media and sensations that go beyond anything the wider market (second circuit) could support—but the extremely compelling niche acute forms it produces will eventually feed back into the mass market (as we have seen with kawaii, anime, and hentai-adjacent media over the past few decades).
The important thing about the logic of these platforms is that it potentiates social change by enabling the bypassing of frontline forms of social control—the overcoming of shame and embarrassment, in particular, through rapid exchange, anonymity, and the collective affirmation of mutant desires. The third circuit therefore acts as a kind of search engine supported by networked platforms, with acute sensory excitement as its primary incentive, discovering ever more acute forms of cuteness. It injects the social with antisocial impulses, releasing aberrant desires into the wider public domain, by degrees sanctioning unabashed public response to highly-specialised abstract releasers.
Additionally—and we’ll come back to this—on this circuit of cute, desire translates itself smoothly from objects—from looking at something—to subjects—to wanting to be something—shaping yourself, your own body, into a cute object.
Cute AI: Finally, we speculate on the possibility of a fourth circuit which hasn’t fully revealed itself yet, which would be the ability of AI, generative systems, and neural media to imagine unexpected and even more extreme forms of cuteness that would hit those releaser-receptors even harder, be even more irresistible to us, and plough right through residual social inhibitions. Let’s upload the all the remotest reaches of the moé database to the cloud and see what AI can do with it….
I said at the beginning that I want to talk about the virtual body as a kind of beyond or underneath of the actually-existing socialised body, the one that we experience as the given body we’re born with. As I discussed at length in Gender Synthesis, beneath that body there’s this pool of virtualities, the virtual body. We only enter into discovering the virtual body, we are only able to access it, by pragmatically exploring different ways of holding, moving, experiencing, and apportioning out our bodies.
Cutification and Rigging
In processes of cutification, an apparently superficial play with the production, consumption, and manipulation of (largely 2) body images, and the desires this play produces, can unlock the path to the virtual body and to self transformation. This is where, in Cute Accelerationism, we bring in the concept of rigging. ‘Rigging’ is a translation I came up with for an untranslatable French word, appareil. The interesting thing about the word appareil is that it can mean apparel, it can mean make-up, but it also has a sense that is more related to engineering, putting things together—here it relates to our word ‘apparatus’. Rigging is a great word for suggesting, firstly, that our apparently ‘given’ bodies have been engineered, set up, in advance: rigged, with the connotation here of involuntariness. It’s been rigged for you, but now you need to rig it in your favour. That doesn’t mean you have to go to the extent of tearing off your limbs and reconfiguring them…rigging goes all the way down, from the most superficial, from the cosmetic, the sartorial, down to the genetic level. There is a paranoid dimension to this: it’s all rigged, everything’s been rigged in advance by natural history and social control, our bodies are prisons. But there is also an emancipatory dimension, the suggestion that deep transformations can flow from the types of initially ‘superficial’ tinkering I’ve just mentioned, because they afford entry into the virtual body and its rigging, which is certainly real, but by no means immutable.
The cute body is a case study here. It’s often remarked that Cute has a kind of contagious power: visual appreciation of cuteness produces a form of tactility which is easily transferred to the interoceptive sense, so it moves between subject and object easily. Once you give in to cuteness, you might well want to explore the possibility of inhabiting cuteness yourself. That’s what happens on those schizo-database circuit. Sculpting yourself into a character, cosplay, experiencing yourself as a 2d image (what we call ‘flatmaxxing’—something that’s reflected in fashion a lot today)…. Production of yourself as a cute body involves the adaptation of your body to certain relations of proportion, curvature, expression, that tweak and amplify the cute response and make you feel cute (even if you might delete them later). There’s a strong connection here with gender fluidity, since cuteness also involves a scrambling of the cues and responses traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity, as we explore at length in Cute Accelerationism.
The analysis of Cute thus leads to a rejection of the traditional critique of superficiality, which has of course often been a default reaction to fashion, too. Even the most apparently superficial rites of rigging and self-transformation via collective exchange open up the virtual body, producing new desires and new bodies. For someone assigned male at birth, to be given permission by an online community to put on a crop top for the first time, to put on a skirt for the first time, to put on thigh highs the first time, and to feel what previously you had only seen, involves producing new body parts. How does this action alter the articulation of your body, its erogeneous zones, its sensory responses? While such experiments might initially be ways to participatively produce the kind of visual stimuli you enjoy, they also produce new streams of information about, and new enjoyment of, your own body, which is then likely to lead to further explorations which may go beyond the supposedly superficial. A boy who loves anime catgirls one day realises he wants to be one, starts dressing up, eventually recruits the endocrinal system into his cosplay, and no doubt some day in the not too distant future, will have surgery to get an artificial tail and ears. Again, the important thing about network platforms in the third circuit is that through collectivity, they enable anons to bypass what I call the first and final bosses of social control: shame and embarrassment.
Technological and Sensory
We’re at an interesting point in the history of technology. In the past, innovative technologies have almost invariably emerged from military uses and purposes. Now there’s an increasing investment in technology driven by consumer demand, by devices for the mediation of social relationships, by image-processing applications, and so on. This nexus of social body-image technologies have the potential to drive collective ratification of new forms of life and expand the range of available bodies and social roles. It seems likely that in doing so they will feed back on the market, driving demand for technologies that can alter your body at ‘deeper’ levels of rigging. Keep on poasting and maybe one day you’ll really get those cat ears.
One thing I found perplexing earlier as Henry [Bruce Jones]’s call to ‘bring back the body’ into the space of ‘virtual fashion’. Because when I’m looking at these communities and practices I have described, I don’t feel that they are disembodied, I feel like inhabiting these platforms and participating in their collective activities around bodies and images is anything but a disembodied affair. If you have an acute emotional or erotic response to an image, that’s happening in your body! I don’t think to be online is to be disembodied. This is a further opportunity to broaden our understanding of the virtual body and its rigging—it doesn’t stop at the end of your fingers and toes, the virtual body is already sewn into the social and technical fabric in which you’re immersed….
I think that the connection between image response and interoception—the internal feeling of your own body—is extremely powerful, it’s something that certainly fed into the writing of Cute Accelerationism through my own experience of understanding my body in a different way, which largely came through experiences that were ‘virtual’ in both senses. And so, coming back to this question of ‘superficiality’ again, I think this is part of what we are fighting: the idea that somehow there’s this superficial unreal layer of images and signs which doesn’t have any bearing upon bodies—as if bodies were some separate thing that’s all lumpy and natural and impervious to data…. I’d like Cute Accelerationism to be a riposte, on one hand, to that implicit condemnation of superficiality, and on the other to the reactionary insistence on nature—since the concept of nature has always been exclusionary it’s always been used to exclude certain types of of people and certain types of body. Ultimately this means taking an approach in which the question What can we do to, around, on, and with our bodies? isn’t arbitrarily limited to a ‘merely aesthetic’ level, but is understood always to lead to the question What can our bodies do? Unless it is blocked.
Janky and/or Cute?
The condition of the technohuman is janky and cute. Between the janky body and the cute body, we’re talking about opening up modes of access to the virtual body, and this in a sense is an antisocial endeavour in various ways, which involves a bottom-up reshaping of technosocial mediation in perverse ways. What we might then expect of fashion practice in this direction is to use all the powers at its disposal to produce new configurations of desire in relation to the body, to do work that continues this process of drilling down to reach the virtual body and unfold its virtualities. The cute body acts as a a very pointed case study, and the possibilities of Cute have only just beginning to be explored in fashion (in the sense of more than simply transposing images or patterns or taking inspiration from Lolita fashion, etc.).
The process of reshaping bodies might also involve overcoming the socially imposed condition of the janky body, but I think it also has to necessarily involve and address the condition of jankiness the types of body it produces and the affordances and even the pleasures and desires it gives rise to: What can we learn from how we inhabit jankspace, improvise in it, help build it, suffer from it, and sometimes even enjoy it? Since we’re not going to make it out of there anytime soon….
In his account of junkspace, Koolhaas already anticipates this: he already anticipates the idea that rigging is a kind of affirmation of junkspace or jankspace, a maximisation of what’s available to us as residual janky bodies of technocapital. He writes:
[C]yberspace has become the great outdoors […] The twenty-first century will bring ‘intelligent’ Junkspace: on a big digital ‘dashboard’[…] Will Junkspace invade the body? Through the vibes of the cell phone? Has it already? Through Botox injections? Collagen? Silicone implants? Liposuction? Penis enlargements? Does gene therapy announce a total reengineering according to Junkspace? Is each of us a mini-construction site? Is mankind the sum of three to five billion individual upgrades? Is it a repertoire of reconfiguration that facilitates the intromission of a new species into its self-made Junksphere? The cosmetic is the new cosmic…
Neural Media and Bodies
But what is this new species whose entry into our bodies we are facilitating? This brings us back to the fourth circuit and its unknowns. On the third circuit, the encounter of as-yet unsocialized or desocialized libido with the affordances of platforms that shape social interaction resulted extraordinary forms that the market alone couldn’t and wouldn’t have ever produced. This involved the connection of niche microlibidinal communities, the mutual ratification and affirmation made possible by image-sharing, rapid production and testing of variants, the unfolding of desires, social contagion, anonymity, incentive algorithms that award self-exposure and sharing…we’ve experienced the bodies of others and our own bodies via formats internalised from the logics of these platforms, there has been a collaborative production of new types of bodies and new types of gaze onto those bodies, equally artificial. However, that social-technical collective evolution has been enabled and shaped by the capacities of media platforms forms that select, connect, and distribute but do not really respond. Neural media changes this entirely, and perhaps heralds Koolhaas’s ‘intromission of a new species’. What happens when neural media platforms become sentient active participants in these processes?
The schizo-database circuit gave us grounds for a certain optimism because it seemed to be drawing up schizophrenic and antisocial flows of desire from below or before the socialised body. I’m not sure whether we should be more optimistic or more pessimistic about the advent of neural media for the adventure of the bodies.
Glass Half Full: The Statistical Regime of Midness
One of the problems is that the place from which this creature comes is a place of incorrigible midness—as emblematised in the futile attempt to try and get Midjourney to show you a full glass of wine, which it can’t do because all of the stock photographs of glasses of wine on the internet are half full. These are the problems you get when you’re dealing with engines that work on statistical extrapolation or interpolation from large data sets. And it’s not as if it’s ‘AI’s fault’, because humans are, the vast majority of the time, boring and mid, and that’s where the data comes from.
But we also know that sometimes the struggle with midness can produce strange and interesting results—it can reveal a kind of native ingenuity within these engines.
And I think that’s because—speaking in entirely non-technical terms here—the axes along which generative AI assesses similarity may not correspond to anything in our shared discursive framework. That is to say, it may be forming concepts for common features that we don’t even have words for and may not be able to directly perceive.
New Body Parts Plz
My experience with image AI image generation has been that it’s really good at producing very generic material, it’s excellent at producing anything that’s like a stock photo. If you want to to produce something unusual it takes quite a few rounds of prodding, pushing, understanding how its concepts are being formed, moving things in the right direction…but I think AI trained on massive data sets can achieve the production of new concepts, novel slices through reality.
Now, none of the body parts we talk about in fashion design are natural facts: someone cutting cloth might imagine that there is a timeless set of elements, but the ways in which we mentally dissect the body are not ontological but historical and cultural, it’s all in the rigging. For instance, ‘thigh gap’ was only invented in 2012! Did it ‘exist’ before then? Hard to say. And perhaps AI will produce new body parts for us that will inspire new ways of clothing bodies. The process of rigging involves discovering new body parts, and AI may help it travel across traditional assumptions and currently prevailing borders of social propriety. Perhaps the co-invention of new body maps in advance of the technological production of actual prosthetic body parts and their neuralink-enabled integration. The production of new techniques and topologies of Cute made possible by generative AI could produce new bodies, new experiences, new systems for enjoying bodies that go beyond the often cramped and unpleasant experience of bodies dictated by the parameters of network jankspace.
But this is going to involve collaboration and experiment, and the development of modes of interaction with AI and attending to its responses that enable us to catch the new cuts. As we learn how we sense one another through media, we adapt to make ourselves platform-legible. In the schizo-database stage, this had already altered our attitudes to and our experience of our own bodies. Beyond the world of static platforms, the encounter with neural media has the potential to become another kind of dance between collective neural masses gradually feeling one another out, discovering or producing new shared logics and languages of the body that will slice, dice, fold, and reassemble the virtual body in unprecedented ways. This needn’t be limited to images. How for example would we interact with a generative AI trained entirely on motion capture data, what would it be able to teach us? I think here of the choreographer Noé Soulier’s book Actions, Movements and Gestures where he discusses how different traditions of dance produce different types of body because they curtail and organise the infinity of the body and its range of possible gestures with different types of logic.
Neural media, then, has the potential to expand the trend of the schizo database to produce through collective technologically-mediated desublimating interactive artefacts that remix our existing evolutionary proclivities for interoceptive, proprioceptive, and erotic sensation in and between bodies; to nurture new ways of sensing bodies and therefore to stimulate demand for new bodies that are a better fit for and a more effective extension of the vectors of desire.
A last word, coming back to fashion’s implicit assumption of an infinite virtual body: fashion only continues to exist as a practice if it participates in the militant refusal of any cultural, moral, or legal prohibition on the exploration of the virtual body—especially those prohibitions that rely on the positing of some immovable backstop of ‘nature’. For now, if we collaborate effectively with AI, maybe together we can feel out some routes between Janky and Cute while coaxing one another out of our common midness.
