FINE PRINT A Foreword

Joseph J. Fischel

The young boy Kyle, in the 2011 premiere episode of season fifteen of Comedy Central’s cartoon South Park, finds himself sewed mouth to anus to two other equally ill-­fortuned human beings. This grotesque assemblage is to serve as the battery for the humancentiPad, a new product soon to be released by Apple that promises, as Apple always does, to revolutionize everything about the way we anything. What happened? Kyle consented. Kyle, a metaphor for the rest of us, accepts the iTunes license agreement without reading its terms and conditions, terms and conditions that permit Apple to stitch human orifices into other human ori- fices for technical progress. As a cartoon Steve Jobs insists a little too defensively, “They all agreed!” Whereas inHuman Centipede, the horror filmSouth Park satirizes, the sewn subjects are kidnapped in their sleep, against their will, and without their consent, here in South Park, Kyle and his companions composing the singular gastric system of the humancentiPad signed off to their own debase- ment. In the parlance of 2017, they even consented affirmatively: they clicked a pop-­up agreement validating their prior agreement. Several of the entries in this impressively interdisciplinary volume, Querying Consent: Beyond Permission and Refusal, anatomize how consent is so often not the remedy for unjust social arrangements, for the dehumanization of humanity, but the cause—­or worse, the alibi. If we consented, so goes the thinking, it must be OK. Inspired by Marx, Marxists, and critical theorists from one side and feminist and queer theorists from another, some of the chapters in this collec- tion ask, Why did we consent to this? Today, especially in proximity to sex, consent is proffered as a solution. If we get consent right, sex will no longer be wrong. But we consent to deadening and underpaid jobs, toxic intimacies, medical (mal) practices, cultural memes, and bad art—­not to mention so much unwanted and unpleasant sex. We consent to our own attrition, whether or not we wish to.

ix x Fine Print: A Foreword

It is the very fineness of fine print that affirms to us consumers, clients, users, and patients what we already know to be true—­nobody reads the agreements. Why? Because we have no other options than the one in front of us; because we waste time investigating whatever alternative options we might have when time is the always vanishing, ever precious commodity of late capitalism; because we trust that the big bad corporations or pharmaceuticals will not do anything that bad even though they usually do; because, as South Park’s Cartman observes, “everyone knows that everything but Apple is stupid”—­and who wants to be on the wrong side of savvy, mouth-to­ -­anus obligations notwithstanding? In the face of too little time and too much information, in a world where for an elite few the choices are so many as to be dumbfounding while for the rest of us the choices are so limited as to be nonexistent, what is consent good for, if anything? The contributions ofQuerying Consent, in their engagements with lit- erature, pedagogy, digitalization, biomedicalization, and beyond, interrogate the allegedly transformative force of consent, whether consent to sex or to school, to medicine or to art, in imaginaries online or off. If Apple is the poison, it is also the medicine. Indeed, it is only the Apple geniuses who are qualified to save Kyle from his own consent to Apple, and the solution requires Kyle’s father to sign an Apple contract with no choice but to “agree” to its terms and conditions to rescue his son. Think ideological corporate apparatuses. Think totality. The contributions ofQuerying Consent explicitly or implicitly approach the problem of the totality, the a priori: not only the Why did we consent to this? but the When did we? If consent provides an answer—­to extant social, sexual, or eco- nomic inequalities—­it tells us nothing about the question. Who decided upon these terms and conditions? We consent or not to x, y, or z in the already built world. But what if we wish to build new worlds? Unlike several of the authors included in this volume, I do not hold that domi- nant discourses of consent presuppose a subject whose desires are transparent to herself, unidirectional and unequivocal. To the contrary, while the subject must be informed and competent to this or that degree, a performance of consent in fact ratifies that any outstanding ambivalences, hesitations, or untidy desires are irrelevant as a matter of liability. But not as a matter of ethics. This is whyQuery - ing Consent is such a necessary intervention. Collectively, the contributions call upon us to imagine kinds of ethical attunement to objects, ourselves, and nonhu- man animals that consent, as a guarantor of limited liability, may mystify. Likewise, a few of the scholars herein point to a paradox of consent: that whatever our initial agreement—whe­ ther to sex or to text—we­ can never know in advance what will happen next; how we will change or not; how words, things, or bodies may move us; how our bodyminds will expand, contract, or remain the same. We might call this the problem of penetration and prolepsis. We can Fine Print: A Foreword xi consent to the possibility of a perturbance but predict neither its caliber nor its consequence. And openness to perturbance, to a not-­rote feeling worth having, requires a certain willingness to be violated. One must read the text, the “agree- ment,” and not just click through it. The humancentiPad snags on a glitch before it can launch. Steve Jobs and his Apple team cannot get “it” to read over license agreements before “it” signs them. We humans are incorrigible, refusing to review the agreements to which we agree. The dimwittedness that authorizes humans’ very envelopment into the technological apparatus now presents a flaw for the gadget, not the person. Of course, Apple has helped generate the problem it needs to solve: slavish, appe- titive human subjects for whom contemplation, deliberation, and most of all reading are not only inconvenient but nearly incompatible for our iLives. Non- reading lubricates mass-­scale sociality, human connectivity that is instant and everywhere yet amounts to little more than shitting in each other’s mouths. Querying Consent: Beyond Permission and Refusal beseeches us to be reading subjects once again but without nostalgia. As Apple put it years ago, Querying Consent wants us to think different. A reading subject suspends consent. A read- ing subject cannot be a consenting subject. Or rather, even or especially when we read the fine print, it is only once we soften our attachments to the safety, sovereignty, and mastery falsely promised by consent that we position ourselves elsewise, to learn a new thing or two. Querying Consent is a fine print. I found myself opened by and then opened to its precise provocations. Parodying what we now call “trigger warnings,” the South Park episode opens with a caution to its audience: “The following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.” Querying Consent contains challenging ideas and, due to its content, should be read by everyone.

QUERYING CONSENT