Freddie Clayton and Max Butterworth. “Satellite images reveal extent of destruction in the Gaza Strip” (2025).

Warfare Modulation: Atmospheric Violence from Sebald to Sama’ Abdulhadi

Michael Uhall

Peter Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air (2002) explores the history of the interpolation of the “environment into the battle between adversaries” – not so much in terms of mere considerations of geography and weather (for example), but as a form of applied material terror in which “the essential environmental conditions for human survival” become targets and weapons simultaneously (13, 15). The decisive shift is a conceptual and practical transformation of the medium of survival itself (air, atmosphere, climate, ecological or natural conditions) into the explicit object of attack as opposed to the development of ever more destructive weapons.

This is a shift in the logic of violence. He writes, “By working on the enemy’s environment, these new processes, which consist in suppressing the basic prerequisites for life, yield the contours of a specifically modern, post-Hegelian concept of terror” (15). His framing examples include poison gas warfare (starting at Ypres in 1915), gas chamber executions and industrialized genocide, nuclear weapons, bioterrorism, and even gestures toward exotic weaponry. As Sloterdijk notes in an aside, this includes “the prospect of developing a quasi-neurotelepathic weapon capable of destabilizing the human population with long-distance attacks on their cerebral functions” (68). One can’t help but think immediately of very recent developments in the highly contentious media archaeology of the Havana Syndrome phenomenon, which is a fascinating case study in the epistemic instability produced when an alleged weapon acts through an ambient medium rather than upon an identifiable target.in its own right.

From these points onward, warfare increasingly extends beyond enemy bodies or infrastructures to target the very conditions that make bodies viable at all.

Sloterdijk continues:

for technical and tactical reasons, practically all these thermo-terrorist and radiation-terrorist attacks on the enemy’s lifeworlds have required air force operations – a phenomenon whose indisputable paradigms (subsequent to the shocking attacks on Guernica on April 27, 1937 and on Coventry during the night of November 15, 1940 by German warplanes) are the destruction of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945 by British bomber fleets and the August 6 and 9 obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the dropping of two nuclear bombs from American fighter planes. Romantic notions of battle scenes between two equal military aircraft units, of jousts between “aerial knights,” might engross the imagination, but the historical importance of such scenes is only marginal. In truth, the de facto norm for “air battles” is the practice of one-sided, irreciprocable air strikes: either by means of precision attacks carried out on defined targets by individual aircraft or by carpet bombings from large air fleets, in analogy to the approximate logic of gas artillery: in an operative sense, near enough is as good as exact (52, emphasis added).

It is precisely this new regime of “atmospheric” violence that furnishes the conceptual and affective horizon of W. G. Sebald’s Zurich lectures “Air War and Literature.”

Where Sloterdijk theorizes the emergence of a thoroughly environmentalized warfare, Sebald confronts its experiential residue: “the way in which memory (individual, collective and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable” (79). What interests Sebald regarding the historical silence that follows the Allied destruction of German cities during World War II centers less on the military history of bombing campaigns themselves than on the strange cultural void and the “extraordinary faculty for self-anesthesia” following these events (11).

This is particularly notable given the fact that the air war in Germany was so nakedly executed: “The criticism later leveled at the ruthless pursuit of such a program of destruction concentrated chiefly on the fact that it was sustained even when selective attacks could be made from the air, with far greater precision, on targets like factories making ball-bearings, oil and fuel installations, railway junctions, and the main transport arteries […]” (17) And nevertheless: “The war in the air was pure and undisguised,” and few attempts were made to cloak or gussy up the efforts to damage, demoralize, or even exterminate populations of enemy civilians (19).

As Arthur Harris, commander of RAF Bomber Command, wrote in 1943, “the aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.” Elsewhere: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” German rhetoric was scarcely less explicit, as the Luftwaffe’s bombing of British cities during the Blitz and the later deployment of the V-1 and V-2 Vergeltungswaffen [revenge weapons] were openly framed as instruments for breaking civilian morale.

Why, then, the near absence, in postwar German literature, of sustained attempts to absorb or even represent the spectacular destruction of German cities? Why did a society subjected to such devastation leave behind so little durable testimony? As Sebald writes: “I was not surprised when a teacher in Detmold told me, a little while ago, that as a boy in the immediate postwar years he quite often saw photographs of the corpses lying in the streets after the firestorm brought out from under the counter of a Hamburg secondhand bookshop, to be fingered and examined in a way usually reserved for pornography” (98). Sebald’s essay thereby fashions an inquiry into the limits of cultural memory and self-representation, into how societies metabolize, repress, or fail to narrate experiences that overwhelm or undercut the ordinary capacities of language and imagination.

One way to place Sebald’s concerns under creative pressure is to situate them within the broader conceptual and aesthetic frameworks his essay helps provoke.

For example, Derek Gregory’s “‘Doors into nowhere’: dead cities and the natural history of destruction” (2011) expands the historical and geographical dimensions here by examining the physical transformation of bombed cities into landscapes of devastation. Gregory underscores the extent to which aerial bombardment did not simply destroy discrete military targets but reconfigured entire urban environments. In the firestorms produced by Allied bombing campaigns – Hamburg in 1943 being perhaps the most notorious case – heat, wind, oxygen flow, and urban density interacted to produce atmospheric conditions capable of incinerating whole districts. As Sebald writes:

[…] only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at one-twenty A.M, a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out at once. The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing façades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in the tram car windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery cellars. Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night, or how many went mad before they died. When day broke, the summer dawn could not penetrate the leaden gloom above the city. The smoke had risen to a height of eight thousand meters, where it spread like a vast, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud. A wavering heat, which the bomber pilots said they had felt through the sides of their planes, continued to rise from the smoking, glowing mounds of stone (27).

Under such circumstances, the city itself becomes a destructive medium. What emerges from Gregory’s account is the material correlate to Sebald’s “natural history of destruction”: the bombed city as a kind of weaponized terrain in which the distinction between military violence and environmental catastrophe collapses. The landscape of ruins is not merely a collection of destroyed buildings but a transformed urban ecology in which air, bodies, built space, and fire interact in savagely lethal feedback loops.

Where Gregory brings out the physical and operational dimensions of this violence, Nil Santiañez, in “Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism” (2018), addresses a different problem: the question of aesthetic and literary form. Santiañez argues explicitly that aerial bombardment places extraordinary pressure on the representational capacities of narrative itself. Large-scale urban destruction – marked by spatial disorientation, temporal compression, and sensory overload – fractures the conventions of realist description. Literature responding to such events frequently gravitates toward fragmented structures, montage, and discontinuous narration.

From this perspective, the scarcity of convincing literary testimony that so troubled Sebald may reflect a deeper formal problem, extending beyond repression or moral evasion, namely, the difficulty of rendering experiences whose intensity or scale disrupts narrative frameworks altogether. Sebald’s hybrid mode of writing can thus be read as an attempt to find a form adequate to a historical shock that conventional narrative cannot contain. If narrative generally falters under such pressure, the problem shifts from how to represent catastrophe to how it persists in other forms.

Still from Sergey Loznitsa’s experimental documentary adaptation of Sebald’s text, The Natural History of Destruction (2022).

So, what happens when such experiences and their consequences for lived experience are neither repressed nor consigned to silence, but instead displaced into other media, into sound, rhythm, and collective sensation? Through what aesthetic forms might such conditions be registered or even provisionally suspended outside the domain of narrative representation? Sebald’s principal concern is with silence, with the failure of testimony. But silence is not the only possible medium through which catastrophe is reworked and transmitted.

In contemporary contexts of ongoing aerial violence with heavy civilian casualties (for example, in Palestine, in Iran, in Lebanon), problems of representation often undergo mutations (what doesn’t kill me makes me stranger). Under conditions in which, for example, an estimated eighty percent of Gaza’s built environment has been destroyed – amid what numerous observers, legal scholars, and international bodies identify as an unfolding genocide – the transformation of lived space into a hostile medium is continuously lived rather than retrospectively narrated. In strategic discourse, such environments are often rendered as operational problems to be managed, constrained by terrain, adversary tactics, and the limits of humanitarian law. By contrast, aesthetic forms and sensory practices register these conditions as contradictory fields of lived intensity.

As British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman writes, Palestine, especially, makes manifest “the infrastructure of a unique type of political space, one desperately struggling to separate the inseparable, by attempting to multiply a single territorial reality and create two insular national geographies that occupy the same space.” A forever civil war, a continuous condition in which antagonism is built into the space itself. Rather than something that can be consigned to memory only after the fact, it persists as an ongoing condition or tribulation to be navigated.

If such conditions exceed or disable narrative, where and how do they reappear?

Sama’ Abdulhadi, Instagram (@samaabdulhadi).

Sama’ Abdulhadi, a Palestinian DJ with an international audience, offers a different kind of aesthetic response than Sebald, one that uses the modulation of sonic density and intensity in lieu of narrative or prosodic form.

Sama’ Abdulhadi, Instagram (@samaabdulhadi).

Her sets do not narrate or even represent catastrophe. Instead, any given set reorganizes sensory and affective traces, maintaining their intensity without resolving them. Her sets function at the level of affective modulation, reorganizing relations between body, sound, and environment. In a currently unpublished interview, she remarks: “It’s always been like this in the Arab world. We don’t know what tomorrow holds so you feel this really intense energy from the crowd. I love how parties and festivals can disconnect you from reality. They can create this utopian bubble and just put you in a different world.”

What matters here is less the desire for escape than a question of the form that such an escape takes, namely, intensification instead of withdrawal and the production of an alternative sensorium in lieu of grim silence. The “utopian bubble” she invokes is a reconfiguration of the senses, a temporary suspension in which the affective atmosphere of uncertainty, disruption, and violence is redistributed and transformed. This is a way of enduring the presence of catastrophe without resolving it, or reducing it to a tidy narrative.

In this sense, Abdulhadi’s sets also serve as a valuable corrective to the by-now familiar recourse to Walter Benjamin in accounts of historical violence and its afterlives. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), Benjamin famously argues that the task of the historian is to seize hold of a collective “memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” to wrest the past from the conformism of official history and to redeem the defeated, namely, those consigned to what he calls the tradition of the oppressed.

History, on this view, is not a continuum but a field of struggle in which fragments of suppressed experience must be recovered, rearticulated, and held open to a “messianic” interruption that would rescue them from oblivion. Sebald’s own work clearly draws on this framework, and his attention to marginal testimonies, damaged archives, and the psychic residues of catastrophe reflect the broadly Benjaminian conviction that what has been occluded must (or even can) be brought back into view, however fragmentarily – if it is not to be lost altogether.

But Abdulhadi’s practice points in a different direction. Her sets do not seek to recover or narrate what has been suppressed, nor do they assume that the rearticulation of past (or concurrent) suffering carries with it any particular redemptive force. What they produce instead is a dense, immersive field of sound – an associative environment of rhythm, volume, and repetition – in which affects circulate without being stabilized into narratives (much less arguments).

This not a messianic practice of retrieval, but a non-narrative mode of registration in which the events or traumas in question are redistributed and processed into collective, embodied experience instead of being merely redeemed. This suggests the intriguingly counterintuitive possibility that redemption, in fact, is cheaper than survival. Donald Winnicott recounts a remark made by one of his patients: “The only time I felt hope was when you told me that you could see no hope, and you continued the analysis.” In other words, the possibility of carrying on remains in passing through hopelessness together instead of overcoming it. Perhaps something similar obtains here.

In one performance (at EXIT 2024, a festival in Novi Sad, Serbia), Abdulhadi’s set is abruptly interrupted by the unmistakable sound of an air raid siren – sustained for nearly thirty seconds, long enough to register as something significantly more than a quickfire sample, to register fully as the acoustic signature of imminent catastrophe. Indeed, the history of the air raid siren is itself already a history of sonic modulation. During the First World War, British warnings relied on police whistles, bugles, and eventually maroons – explosive fireworks producing the strange recursion of explosions heralding explosions – before sirens began to appear. By 1938, the British warning system had standardized the now-familiar rising-and-falling tone, opposed to the continuous note of the all-clear. What enters Abdulhadi’s set, then, is an acoustic form already informed and structured by a century of death and destruction from above. Without disruption, the siren is folded back into Abdulhadi’s set, mutating rapidly into the drop itself. The signal of danger is modulated rather than narrated or explained; it is transformed into a living rhythm by being redistributed across the crowd.

The effect is difficult to describe within the terms that structure Sebald’s inquiry.

Where Sebald confronts a deficit of representation, Abdulhadi stages something like its inversion: an excess of sensory inscription in which the atmosphere of threat receives no direct articulation (as in a documentary film) but rather gets incorporated into a collective experience oscillating between immersion and awareness. Even the visual field participates in this transformation, as spotlights sweep across the crowd like search beams, recalling, however obliquely, the aerial scanning of targets from above. Here, the environment, however temporarily, is no longer the medium of destruction. It becomes, if only provisionally, the medium through which such destruction is refracted and held at bay, and in which catastrophe, perhaps, is survived.

As Sebald writes, “No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in” (36).

References

Michael Uhall (https://www.michaeluhall.com/) is a political theorist at Indiana University East. His research spans political ecology, critical geography, philosophical anthropology, intelligence and security studies, and film and literary criticism. His work has appeared with Bloomsbury, Routledge, and Stanford University Press, as well as in Contemporary Political Theory, Nature and Culture, Critical Horizons, and Configurations and in public-facing venues such as 3:AM Magazine, Ancillary Review of Books, Lovecraft Annual, Philosophy Now, Radical Philosophy, and Vault of Culture.

This post is part of a dossier that features materials that were generated at, or in the aftermath of, the “Experiments in Listening” conference that boundary 2 co-organized with the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California in January 2025.

Sonics of Silence: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Missing 19dB[1]

Reina Akkouche Halabi

“Saydnaya is the end of life – the end of humanity.”

–Abu Muhammed, former guard at Saydnaya

The downfall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria promoted major geopolitical shifts in the Middle East, establishing a new era in Syrian history and leadership. The authoritarian dynasty of the al-Assad family, spanning decades, had been renowned for its brutal war crimes, corruption, enforced disappearances, mass surveillance and detention. In March 2011, masses of pro-democratic Syrian schoolchildren, inspired by events of the Arab Spring, spray painted anti-regime graffiti on their school walls. They were subsequently arrested, tortured and detained sparking a wave of local protests which escalated rapidly into full-fledged armed conflict. “Between 2011 and 2021, the Assad regime killed 306,887 civilians, including 27,126 children” (Human Rights Foundation 2024). The state would purposefully conceal the whereabouts of those who were forcibly detained, but whispers began to emerge in the shadows that spoke of a massive detention center notorious for its torture methods, mass executions and ill-treatment of prisoners: the Saydnaya prison. It was one of the al-Assad regime’s best concealed carceral centers and death camps. Located 19 miles north of the Syrian capital, Damascus, the prison became infamous for being one of the most brutal detention centers in the world. Saydnaya was emblematic of the regime’s repressive tactics, and a chilling symbol of state terror. While operational, access was completely denied to the public, and visual material of what lay behind its walls were scarce.

Since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Amnesty International estimates that more than 13,000 people had been executed in this prison. The few who manage to survive its brutal incarceration are left psychologically, physically, and mentally permanently marked by the memories of their incarceration.

Saydnaya was not merely a detention center, but a reminder of the potential of the state apparatus to extract, subjugate, observe, record, kill and render individuals invisible to the world beyond the carceral walls. Invisible, and thus easily dominated and controlled. In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault claims that the self-evident character of the prison is first and foremost that it deprives the incarcerated of their liberty (232). But this works on two levels. It’s not only that the prisoner subjected to forcible extraction and limitations within the prison walls; it’s also the whole of society that is reminded of the injury dictated by the conceptual existence of the prison structure—of everyone’s potential incarceration. Thus, the prison is a constant reminder of the precarity of the subject within the confines of the state, and the right of the regime to place its individuals in its disciplining barracks.

In 2016, at the height of the civil conflict in Syria which quickly became a global proxy war on Syrian grounds, Lebanese researcher and sound artist, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, began an experimental investigative journey, alongside Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, to uncover the al-Assad regime’s most notorious carceral centers and death camps, Saydnaya. Known as the “Human Slaughterhouse”, the construction of the prison began in the late 1970s and became operational in the early 1980s. Throughout the decades leading up to the Syrian civil war, the prison would detain political rivals of the regime, journalists, students, military officers and had been rumored to have held detainees of other nationalities such as Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Sudan. The year of 2011 marked a shift in a ferocity of the regime’s systemic abuse perpetrated on the civilian population through a “furtherance of state policy” that concluded with persistent violations of human rights and mass amounts of crimes against humanity (Amnesty International 2017, 6).

In a sound installation and art box piece, Abu Hamdan explores the transformation of Saydnaya from a carceral center to a death camp through a demonstration of silence, a deliberate loss of audible decibels. The piece is a fictional documentation of the moment the sonic dimension clearly makes visible the willful silencing of anti-regime voices, whispers and cries within the penitentiary’s walls. “As the prison is still operational and access is completely denied, we cannot measure its silence on-site with a decibel meter; we can only attempt to reconstruct it through the voices of its former detainees and their acoustic memories. My primary way of doing this was to understand that the level at which the detainees could whisper and not be heard by the guards through the doors, walls, water pipes, and ventilation system provides a measure of the silence at Saydnaya…” (Lawrence Abu Hamdan 2017).

Abu Hamdan, who describes his work as that of a “private ear”, showcases a striking potentiality of the acousmatic. Derived from the Greek akousmatikoi, it refers to a sound or noise which is heard without the causes from which it originates being seen, an untraceable sound to the visual realm (Chion 2009, 11): “[…] The rare word ‘acousmatic’ also described in Greek a sect of the disciples of Pythagoras who were said to follow a form of teaching where the Master spoke to them hidden behind a screen. This was done in order to distract their visual attention from his physical appearance” to fully engage with the sonic without distracting interference from the visual” (12). Inspired by the emergence of musique concrète, a genre of music composition which utilizes recorded sounds as raw material that are later modified and assembled using techniques such as sound collage, Chion would expand on the notions of the Acousmatic and the Acoustic in his work Sound Objects. The compositions of musique concrète are non-traditional, unrestricted to normative musical rules of melody, rhythm, harmony and metre. Chion would emphasize the role listening plays on perception of the sound object where sight and hearing are dissociated, allowing the acousmatic to reveal “all its richness to us” (12). The emphasis is placed on the sound fragment rather than the circumstances surrounding it or its origins. The repeated listening experience illuminates new aspects of the object, enabling the subject to become “aware of [their] perceptual activity as well as of the sound object” (12).

The loss of visible access to the Saydnaya prison acted as the perfect site for investigating the potentiality of the acousmatic in uncovering truths long hidden from view. Abu Hamdan’s work engages with acousmatic fragments in the form of sound, noise and silence to draw out experiences perceivable only through an engaged listening practice.

*

In Aesthetics and its Discontents, French philosopher, Jacques Rancière views ‘contemporary art’ as a dispositif of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’ (see Rancière 2004: 22). He believed that in its origins, art practice displaced art objects such as film, music and other contemporary forms from their materiality, positioning them in partial spaces such as museums where “relations between bodies, images, spaces and time are redistributed” (22). The dispositif, according to Rancière, is the common concept which unites all these art practices, and what emphasizes the political in the art object:  

Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because of the manner in which it might choose to represent society’s structures, or social groups, their conflicts or identities. It is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space. (23)

The investigative approach to the acousmatic in Abu Hamdan’s work reframes the material and symbolic audio-visual space by reconstructing narrative through memory and sound. The very existence of the prison is made visible through the acoustic realm of perception during a time in which the visible is forcibly concealed.

The visible was an obsolete sensorial dimension within the confines of Saydnaya as no light entered its walls. The inside of the detention center was a void, a blacked-out labyrinth with no clear exit. Upon arrival, new inmates are subjected to what was known as the “welcome party”. Former detainees would later assess that inmates who have not yet gotten accustomed to the rules of the prison would often exceed the silence threshold, a sonic deadline, which prompted brutal beatings. The louder the inmates would scream due to the pain inflicted on them, the harsher the beatings became. The intensity would only end when the prisoner learns to control their reactions, and complete silence would occupy the sonic field. The method in which these rules would be taught maintained a sense of control and confusion, both through visual incapacitation due to the darkness of the prison cells and through the willful hiding of direct knowledge as to how the penal system functioned (The Saydnaya Project 2017). The prisoners were literally and metaphorically kept in the dark.

In April of 2016, Abu Hamdan, alongside Amnesty, would travel to Turkey to meet with a group of former inmates and survivors of the Saydnaya prison. Images of the internal architecture of the prison were scarce, so the investigation was dependent on the oral narrative and memories of detainees to reconstruct the structure of the prison. The result was a striking narrative of detention, and an extensive 3D modeled reconstruction, including stairwells, corridors, moving doors and windows refined through interviews and sonic mapping. The “ear-witness” testimonies were crucial to understanding the inner workings of the prison, giving way to an acute experience of sound defined by visual restriction. “There was next to no daylight, and detainees were made to cover their eyes with their hands whenever a guard entered a room. What’s more, speaking was prohibited, so prisoners became attuned to any minute sound” (The Saydnaya Project 2017).  

In a video reconstruction titled “Where Are We”, a former inmate named Salam recounts his experience in the solitary cell of Saydnaya:  

And then they shut the door, and we were in a state of shock – there was a sense of horror. […] A long time passed before we started to communicate first just by touching and eventually, we had the courage to look […] There were no sounds at all, total silence. Only occasionally the sound of water dripping […] And now there was a smell of grease and blood. I started to feel the walls to try and find any messages written by previous prisoners. […] Eventually we started to see each other’s faces. We didn’t recognize each other. They had deliberately shaved our heads haphazardly, and we were all naked. We started to whisper to each other, trying to sense where we were. Asking each other: ‘Where are we?’ And then they said: We are in Saydnaya.  

Salam’s account functions in a two-fold manner. On the one hand, it establishes the significance of the sensorial in accounts of perception beyond the visual sphere. On the other, it permeates the confines of the solitary cell and its concealment from the public through memory and narrative. Touch and smell would become direct markers of place, while listening would insinuate danger as it appeared. The sound of the guards’ boots approaching the cell, the water dripping, the wind of a cold storm, all created a unique interplay of perception and imminence. Witnesses interviewed in this project would listen to tones of different decibels to match them to specific incidents within the cell. A technology referred to as “echo-profiling” would determine the size of spaces by playing with reverberations, while “sound artefacts” would simulate sounds such as doors, lock and footsteps to generate further acoustic memories. The result was a fascinating revelation of the capabilities of the acousmatic to form the visual and material.

It is said that once a sense is lost, the brain can adapt and enhance the function of other senses through a process called neuroplasticity. Certain studies of MRIs pertaining to people with differently-abled visual aptitudes have shown an increased sensibility to non-visual forms of perception such as listening. This form of compensation is the essence of Abu Hamdan’s investigation of Saydnaya. Through meticulous interviews with former detainees, Abu Hamdan surveys the acousmatic in detainees’ memories, which are often enhanced due to limited visibility within the prison. Saydnaya was a true mystery, not only to the public but even to those imprisoned within it. While prisoners may not have recalled the inner architecture nor looks of their cells, they certainly remembered what they sounded like. In his book The Politics of Fiction, Jacques Rancière writes: “I have often emphasized that fiction is not the invention of imaginary worlds in contrast to solid reality. It is first and foremost a structure of rationality. It is a mode of presentation of things that cuts out a frame and places elements within it to compose a situation and make it perceptible and intelligible” (Rancière 2018: 269). Imagination was an integral part of the reconstruction process of Saydnaya, as often the prisoners’ testimonies would be tampered by their psychological traumas. Dehydration, rationing of food, sexual deprivation, solitary confinement and corporal punishment all enhanced the aesthetic and auditory experience of each inmate. A drop of water from a nearby faulty faucet would sound as intense as a loud bang.

Sound would not merely act as a means of orientation, but also as a tool of resistance. In “One Drop of Water”, former prisoners, Samer Al Ahmed and Jamal Abdou, recount a time when drinking water had been cut off from the prison for days. “We started to hallucinate, we couldn’t think straight, we were getting lost in our thoughts. When I closed my eyes, I started seeing waterfalls.” Facing symptoms of dehydration, one inmate gathered the courage to scream “Water!”, prompting other prisoners to follow suit. “So the next cell shouted the same: “Water!” and the next cell:

“Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!”

“Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!”

“Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!”

“Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!” “Water!”

The collective voices of the imprisoned joining in acoustic protest had the entire floor echoing a scream for water.

Plop! Plop!

Plop! Plop!

Sometime later, the inmates would hear drops falling from the faucets. The water had returned. “At first we thought we were still hallucinating, that the sound wasn’t real […] Everyone started crying from the bottom of their souls like little children [banned from holding their favorite thing in life]” (The Saydnaya Project 2017).[2]

The politics of listening takes shape in unprecedented forms in Saydnaya. Listening becomes a survival method, an orientation tool of both space and temporality, and at times a means of control. Abu Hamdan’s work uncovering the forensics of sound gave agency back to the prisoners regarding their own listening practices and speech. Their earwitness testimonies offered integral information about the obscured horrors of the al-Assad regime, which otherwise would be unknown to the public to this day.

*

On December 8^th, 2024, the prison was captured by rebel forces, the regime had fallen, and slowly but surely, detainees were released in an epic, unprecedented scene. Flocks of prisoners ran through the streets, sometimes wearing as little as a piece of cloth. The smokescreen had been unveiled, what laid behind the walls had been uncovered. Listening remained an integral praxis during the release of the prisoners. With no architectural maps or visual aid to rely on, the public had to make use of their listening during their search for the forcibly disappeared and detained. This would lead to underground discoveries of solitary cells where inmates had been deprived of food, water and light for days. As Abu Hamdan claims, “Most crimes are heard but not seen” (Abu Hamdan 2023).

This investigative approach to listening not only restored memories of acoustic events but also gave language to acoustic experiences that are often difficult to describe using language alone.

The goal of Saydnaya was to break prisoners’ souls and those imprisoned bore terminal scars from their time in confinement. The capture of the carceral center unveiled the persistence of suffering within its walls. Some prisoners were completely unaware of the passing of time, believing the rebels to be Ba’athist Iraqi troops under Saddam Hussein’s leadership. Other videos emerged of men in blankets sitting in complete darkness who could only utter the word “Bashar”, the name of the fallen dictator. Foucault writes:

Punishment will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain more or less of everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice” (Foucault 1977: 9).

In the work of Abu Hamdan, the invisibility of carceral punishment is made visible through other means, that of sonic experimentation and composition as well as perception, narrative, fiction and memory. The subjective takes precedence leading to the objective, the sensible and intelligible are reconciled as converging rather than opposed.

The passing of time may have emptied out the prison cells. The water may have dried out. But the incarcerated space remains haunted by the specter of a corrupt establishment. The walls speak stories of suffering, mass executions, kidnappings and unknown fates of anonymous individuals. The imminence of imprisonment may have dissipated, but as Jalal Toufic (2010: 37) writes in his essay titled “Ruins”, war-damaged and historically wrought structures exist in an idiosyncratic, labyrinthine temporality outside of chronological time (see Toufic 2010). The anomalous temporality of Saydnaya, as its building slowly deteriorates with time, invites a certain sense of apprehension, both of the ghosts which inhabit its walls and the labyrinthine space-time of its ruins that has yet to find meaning in a fragile post-war transitional state. “Ruins: places haunted by the living who inhabit them” (Toufic 36). In the aftermath of the fall of the al-Assad regime, Abu Hamdan’s work shifts from sonic memories to ghost stories serving as revenant hauntings and warnings. They do not simply remind us of a dark past but caution for a future where the return of this kind of violence remains possible.

Figure 1.  A detainee works with Forensic Architecture researchers to reconstruct Saydnaya prison, 2016. Courtesy Forensic Architecture.

Figure 2.  A rendered impression of a cell inside Saydnaya, constructed by researchers from survivors’ testimonies, 2016. Courtesy Forensic Architecture.

Figure 3.  A rendered architectural plan of the Saydnaya prison, 2016. Courtesy Forensic Architecture.

Reina Akkouche Halabi is a graphic designer and critical theorist who recently completed an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts.

References

Abu Hamdan, Lawrence. 2017. Saydnaya (The Missing 19db). Accessed January 15, 2025. http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/saydnaya.

Amnesty International. 2017. Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria. Amnesty International Ltd. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MDE2454152017ENGLISH.pdf

Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture. 2016. “Saydnaya.” Accessed on January 2, 2026. https://saydnaya.amnesty.org/?kind=explore

Chion, Michel. 2009. Guide to Sound Objects. Translated by John Dack and Christine North. Monoskop. https://monoskop.org/images/0/01/Chion_Michel_Guide_To_Sound_Objects_Pierre_Schaeffer_and_Musical_Research.pdf

Earshot. 2016. “Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison.” Featured Investigations. https://earshot.ngo/investigations/saydnaya-inside-a-syrian-torture-prison/

———. “Architecture of Sound.” YouTube video, 4:54. Posted November 2, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=DBsVQ8kNLuY.

———. “Earwitness Testimony.” Accessed January 15, 2025. https://earshot.ngo/what-we-do/earwitness-testimony.

———. “Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison.” Accessed January 12, 2025. https://earshot.ngo/investigations/saydnaya-inside-a-syrian-torture-prison.

Forensic Architecture. 2016. “Torture in Saydnaya Prison.” Last modified February 7, 2017. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/saydnaya

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books.

Hamdach, Widyane, “The Fall of Bashar al-Assad: Winners, Losers, and Challenges Ahead.” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, May 2025, https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2025/05/07/the-fall-of-bashar-al-assad-winners-losers-and-challenges-ahead/

Human Rights Foundation. “Assad regime overthrown after 53 years of repression and brutality; pivotal opportunity to establish rule of law and individual rights,” press release, December 9, 2024. https://hrf.org/latest/assad-regime-overthrown-after-53-years-of-repression-and-brutality-pivotal-opportunity-to-establish-rule-of-law-and-individual-rights/

Rancière, Jacques. 2004. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Polity Press.

Rancière, Jacques. “The Politics of Fiction.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 27, no. 2 (December 2018): 269.

[1] This essay was first presented at the Experiments in Listening conference hosted by boundary2 at the University of Southern California and the California Institute of the Arts. I am grateful for the comments and dialogue it prompted at the gathering.

[2] See: “One Drop of Water”, accessible: https://saydnaya.amnesty.org/?kind=video&id=02.

This post is part of a dossier that features materials that were generated at, or in the aftermath of, the “Experiments in Listening” conference that boundary 2 co-organized with the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California in January 2025.

In Defense of Tuning Out: The Captive Audience and Public Sound

Sean Koa Seu

“Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted, and most of our TSA employees are working without pay,” a voice drones over loudspeakers mounted above the security checkpoint. “Our hope is that Democrats will soon recognize the importance of opening the government.”

If you were traveling in the United States by plane during the 2025 government shutdown, you may have encountered this extraordinary announcement by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. The video, produced by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and disseminated via the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), is simply Noem as a talking head (Skores and Park 2025). The real message—that the Democratic Party is to blame for the pay freeze of government employees—is disseminated through the Secretary’s words, over speakers, via sound.

Within a line at a TSA security checkpoint, this sound is difficult to get away from. Human hearing is the most uncontrollable of the senses. Unlike seeing, which allows us to avert our gaze, or look the other way, or shut or shield or lower our eyes (or even turn a blind one), our hearing is mostly mandatory (barring, of course, earplugs, which merely dampen sound; or noise cancellation, a very recent technology which interferes with soundwaves before they can hit one’s eardrums.) Even in sleep our ears are still active; sound offers few opportunities for refusal. It impresses upon us whether we welcome it or not. Which begs the question: how does inescapable sound quietly (or loudly!) affect our capacity for freedom itself?

In 1952, the Supreme Court of the United States was confronted with exactly this question. In Public Utilities Commission of the District of Columbia v. Pollak (1952) 343 U.S. 451, the Court was to decide whether or not the Capital Transit Company had the right to broadcast sound during its operations. By 1949, the company had installed loudspeakers within many of its train cars and had contracted with WWDC-FM to broadcast music, announcements, and commercial advertising.

Franklin Pollak and Guy Martin, two Capital Transit riders, believed that the loudspeaker system violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights. They argued that the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and freedom of association, is violated when sound dominates a public space, creating a situation in which passengers must “compete against the [radio] programs in order to be heard” (Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 463 (1952)). As for the Fifth Amendment, which protects all persons from deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process, Pollak and Martin contended that forcing them to listen to a radio program deprived them of their right to privacy, and therefore their liberty, unilaterally.

I do not wish to complete a full legal analysis of the court proceedings here. After all, the Court ultimately ruled seven–one in favor of the Public Utilities Commission, granting it the right to broadcast sound in public train cars. (Justice Frankfurter abstained due to his own position as a “victim” in the case—he, too, was a transit rider.) The majority did not contend that the freedoms guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment applied in public space to the same extent as private space, instead arguing that in public freedom was regulated by the “mutual limitations” of all involved, including passengers, train conductors, and vehicle owners (464). It also did not believe that the First Amendment was violated—it did not consider the music, announcements, or commercial advertising to be “objectionable propaganda,” nor did it believe the sound interfered with the public’s ability to converse (463).

Still, the noise generated by this case helps us think practically through freedom’s expression in public. It is more than just “freedom from unnecessary impositions on the senses,” as the Columbia Law Review once opined (“Transit Broadcasting” 1951: 109). For what the court expressed was that freedom—liberty—was only guaranteed in the privacy of one’s own home. In public, we can and should expect freedom to be mediated. The mandated sound, precisely because of its ubiquity, is a mediating tactic; impossible to ignore, yet justified because it intrudes not on private life, but on public space. But isn’t the condition for freedom itself a public one? For what does freedom mean if we cannot defend our public spaces from a totalizing sensorium?

“Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance” (Arendt 2006: 147). According to Hannah Arendt, freedom requires public witness because it is, essentially, a capacity for action. Instead of being an expression of will (which Arendt argues, is an internal private reckoning) the capacity for action is a condition, also known as “the free man’s status, which enabled him to move, get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word” (147). This status allowed free people to commit free actions—actions liberated from the necessities of life. But in order for these free actions to appear in the world, they had to be witnessed by other free people. Therefore, freedom’s appearance as a tangible thing is not an innate quality of a private individual, but rather the sum of the capacity for action and the others’ ability to see (or hear) that action. Furthermore, both terms are environmental; they are determined not by the actor nor the audience, but the set on which they are staged.

Arendt’s bar for this staged public realm is a high one—and we might ask ourselves whether or not transit systems like airports or busways should or should not be sites of public displays of freedom. What I would like to discuss here is the tendency of recorded sound to foreclose the possibility of any space’s publicness. It is a type of enclosure; it transforms shared space into a managed sensorium where freedom is preemptively extinguished.

So let’s imagine the streetcar. Or the TSA line. If we think of freedom as a capacity for free action, then we must agree that the imposition of amplified sound is a rather effective way of intervening in, if not completely quelling, this action. It is not the same as a sign announcing train regulations, or a visual advertisement for food delivery, from which I may turn my gaze at will. The way sound is processed is simultaneous; sounds produced at the same time cannot be differentiated from one another easily. One must usually choose a sound to process, and that can be very difficult in the presence of another interrupting or louder sound. As far as a witness to free action goes, it is difficult to witness more than one sonic action at a time; often, we default to the loudest actor. As far as producing sound, a human actor can hardly compete with an amplified sound system, even if you can technically hear them; and, even then, the content of their voice must contend with, and ultimately be shaped by, the quality of the soundscape in which they are speaking.

I do not disagree with the Court’s assessment that, in public, one encounters mutual limitations. In the cafeteria, or on the sidewalk, the rumbles of traffic and the conversations of other members of the public often interfere with one’s own ability to communicate. And the world does not have the proper technology of a stage, with lights and curtains telling a delineated audience where to look. Indeed, there is no delineated audience; since freedom requires free witnesses, it follows that free people must negotiate with one another for attention. I do not bristle at the mariachis on the A train, nor the woman at the terminal gate loudly discussing her business plans in Detroit.

No, the troubling notion is not competition with others’ sounds in general, but about competition with an amplified mandated sound—whether or not the sound is partisan propaganda or merely muzak. This is because these sounds are not produced by free and responsible actors, actors who can choose to cede their time, actors who can be held accountable for their words and deeds, actors who have the capacity to witness me back should I choose to respond, interrupt, or shout over them. No, the sounds produced here are the sounds of an automated system, an environmental design attribute meant to stifle any action without taking an action itself. The sound does not stop if I ask it politely, nor if I yelp. It is designed to address without being addressable. While the mariachis might play over me, we are all free actors competing for witness, and so the limitation is truly mutual. The automated recording does not constitute a mutual limitation in this sense; only I am limited, the recording has no limitations because it is not an actor.

But what of the agency who designed the sound? Surely Capital Transit has an opportunity to speak as the owner of the public utility? And surely the DHS should be able to play recorded sounds in general, as long as they don’t violate the Hatch Act. Again, I do not mean to make a legal analysis—court precedent for what constitutes protected speech by private citizens and non-citizens, government workers at all levels, and government agencies is complex and often opaque. What I am concerned with is whether or not an automated sound recording of any kind, played in the absence of the person who authorizes it, is actually an enactment of freedom of speech. I say no.

For if freedom is defined by our capacity to act, then it is bound up in our ability to perform the unexpected, the new. “Freedom,” says Arendt, “was experienced in spontaneity” (164). A pre-recorded sound cannot, by definition, be spontaneous. It cannot interrupt “the process in whose framework it occurs” (168). It is not enough for a free action to simply replicate automatic processes. Free actions must begin something new. The fact that these recordings are automatic disbar them from the realm for free action. There is no room for the miraculous to occur. Only those people in a public space—those who can both witness and be witnessed—have a true claim to that freedom. Any voice that cannot be interrupted on account of its own relentless technological apparatus impedes on the freedoms of others without offering any negotiation in return.

For a brief moment in 1953, it seemed like public opinion would overrule the Supreme Court. According to Time, after concerted efforts by public groups and an onslaught of newspaper editorials, “bus broadcasts have already been abandoned in St. Louis and Omaha, will be dropped this week in Washington and Cincinnati, are losing money in Tacoma, WA, Worcester, MA and Trenton, NJ” (“Radio: Privacy Regained” 1953). Still, although many public transit systems may have relented in the moment, the case set a precedent that publicly broadcast sound was not a violation of one’s freedom per se. Hence why most objections to Secretary Noem’s clearly partisan video criticized the announcement’s content, not the sound itself. 

Perhaps it’s time to turn to the case’s sole dissenter, Justice Douglas, who, in his opinion, argued that “the right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom” (Pollak, 343 U.S. at 467). Although we cannot know why Justice Douglas failed to convince his fellow magistrates, we can speculate—the right to privacy within a public space has obvious legal and philosophical contradictions, even to those of us unversed in the intricacies of law. I point this out only to highlight the efficacy of Arendt’s own framework, which does not assert that recorded sound violates privacy, only that it forecloses a public space’s capacity for freedom. Still, Douglas remains prescient: 

When we force people to listen to another’s ideas, we give the propagandist a powerful weapon. Today it is a business enterprise working out a radio program under the auspices of government. Tomorrow it may be a dominant political or religious group. Today the purpose is benign; there is no invidious cast to the programs. But the vice is inherent in the system. Once privacy is invaded, privacy is gone. Once a man is forced to submit to one type of radio program, he can be forced to submit to another. It may be but a short step from a cultural program to a political program. (Pollak, 343 U.S. at 469)

The vice is inherent in the system. Not only because we are forced to submit—we may be—but because we cannot carry out our own free actions. Because their sound forecloses that very public space which makes freedom possible at all. That is the unique trouble—and the power—of the ubiquity of sound. It is not enough to stop our ears in private. We let them drone over us at our peril. 

Sean Koa Seu is a writer, dramaturg, and critic. He holds an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts. His writing has appeared in Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, The Rebis, and Mid-Cult. His zine LA Plays Itself was commissioned by Departure Lounge and presented at the L.A. Art Book Fair.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 2006. “What is Freedom?” In Between Past and Future, 142–169. London: Penguin Classics.

Public Utilities Commission of the District of Columbia v. Pollak. 1952. 343 U.S. 451.

“Radio: Privacy Regained.” 1953. Time, June 1. time.com/archive/6797444/radio-privacy-regained/.

Skores, Alexandra, and Hanna Park. 2025. “Multiple Airports Refuse to Play Kristi Noem Video That Blames Democrats for Government Shutdown.” CNN, October 15. www.cnn.com/2025/10/13/us/kristi-noem-tsa-video.

“Transit Broadcasting: The Problem of the Captive Audience.” 1951. Columbia Law Review 51 (1): 108–18. www.jstor.org/stable/1118681. 

This post is part of a dossier that features materials that were generated at, or in the aftermath of, the “Experiments in Listening” conference that boundary 2 co-organized with the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California in January 2025.

Lost Object

Inger Flem Soto

Lost Object is an experimental video work developed in dialogue with my doctoral research on the figure of the mother in Chilean thought and literature. The piece brings together a handmade 16mm film projected over a slideshow drawn from my personal archive of analogue photographs—some taken in the 1990s, others during a difficult month in 2021. An earlier version of the text was first read at the “Experiments in Listening” conference in Los Angeles in January 2025.

Transcription

I look at my hands while making this love letter, and I think of yours. I see them become yours, and I start seeing myself in you. This time with less fear. And I wonder if I’m clinging on to let go.

Surprisingly, I find you not only in me, but also in the most unlikely of spaces: masked behind a fresh shave and the highest of heels. Walking past the working girls during my Saturday night pilgrimage through the heart of Santiago, I hear you, my mother. Their deep voices channel your words, or are they perhaps channeling their own mothers? No po, niña. Cómo se te ocurre, hueona. As they banter and tell each other off, I hear your voice scolding me—your tone a mix of humor and dread.

The hardship of your childhood carved in you a certain knowledge, sharp and tenacious. Nothing gets past you. A mí no me vienes con esa, perrita, que cuando tú vas yo ya vengo de vuelta, ¿o creís que nací ayer? “Do you think I was born yesterday?” you clap back. Because you see it all, you always have—your smothering gaze.

After tripping over the same stone, over and over again, I hear you: Por dios, hasta cuándo. No te digo yo. Si esta otra es dura como palo… ¡no hay caso! You call me out for being hard as a club, stubborn as rust, with the same words your mother called you for the same stubbornness—but with a heavier hand than the one I ever knew.

I search for you in the tongues of the travestis. In the way they talk when, knowingly or not, they may be quoting their own mothers. And, in the wake of these many mother tongues, I even catch a glimpse of my grandmother, whom I never met.

What is it about this singular speech that holds such power of repetition—always somehow echoing The Mother? Something in its bootleg femininity, that fierce artifice, that exposes this chained economy of quotation.

Despite buying into the fantasy of belonging in the kingdom of wealth, you were never able to assimilate. Closer to queendom, your difference also showed, exposing the secret hidden behind your bleached blonde hair. The clickety-clack of your piercing heels, unable to mask the rhythm of the cumbia inscribed in your hips. The imprint of your bruised background, betraying you in the company of the posher, unwelcoming mothers at my school. Your cross-dressed class crossing the other mother’s wires; and their short, stubby nails—so natural, discreet, so vanilla.

But high heels make for unstable steps, however fierce they may have been in my childhood memories.

I wonder if choosing me made you lose yourself.

I fear losing your smothering hands nearly as much as I fear becoming you. My hands reaching out to yours, to some version of you—one that was always already lost.

Before the catastrophe. Before the beginning.

Inger Flem Soto is a researcher, photographer, and translator currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the maternal as a contested figure across Chilean literature, philosophy, and political discourse, foregrounding its role in structuring meaning through processes of erasure and displacement. Alongside her scholarly writing, film photography and darkroom practice are central modes of inquiry in her work. She is also co-director of Grápho Ediciones, a Chile-based independent publishing house dedicated to critical theory and philosophy.

This post is part of a dossier that features materials that were generated at, or in the aftermath of, the “Experiments in Listening” conference that boundary 2 co-organized with the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California in January 2025.

Pussy Listening: Building an Activist Listening Practice

Nina Sun Eidsheim

All images for this essay were taken by Nina Eidsheim, except Image 5, which was taken by Arne De Boever.

The practice of listening is, in large part, a practice of recognition. The recognition of familiar voices, against those of strangers. The recognition of an emotional state—happy, angry, concerned, tired—as a cue for how to interpret words and build a response. The recognition of the sonic patterns that make up a language. All this knowledge is taken into account as we regulate ourselves vocally and otherwise sonically. And so we listen to that as well.

Image 1: Preparing to cut thread into shorter pieces.

Image 2: Organized chaos.

It must be built into our basic instinct to know whether we are adequately listened to. A crying baby is reassured when its call is heeded. In a game of hide-and-seek, a toddler calling to a friend that it’s time to come and find them has been fulfilled. A teenager who huffs that they need to be left alone is relieved to be respected.

Images 3-5: Surfaces that can support Pussy Listening

To get to this room—to read this journal—a large portion of our lives has been (inadvertently) dedicated to listening “correctly,” and to avoid listening “incorrectly.” This kind of relationship to listening comes from a place of submission, a strategy of safekeeping oneself, and often forwards the agendas of those in power.

Evolutionists would say it is part of humanity’s success that we build banks of sounds. We listen for those sounds, or—more importantly—remain alert for sounds unfamiliar. And we ourselves make decisions about the sounds we put into the world, based on a desire, need, necessity to be included.

However, at the same time, sound-making and listening are used covertly. They are used to hide, divert, lie, gloss over, and make nice when there is no nice.

Somehow, whether or not we are even aware of it, we also listen in that register. I don’t know how we are trained to recognize this. It must be an even deeper survival instinct…

And this kind of listening has the capacity to save our lives. It is tuning in to an undertone that warns us to leave a party or a dinner. It is the skill that tells us that nothing is all right even though we are looking at our mother’s smiling, reassuring face. 

Images 6-7: Walking out into the world.

Pussy listening is what I call this kind of non-official listening, and I assume all genders have this capacity.

Pussy listening is not a vaginal listening.[1]

Pussy listening is agential listening that cannot be grabbed.

I have found that pussy listening can be activated or accessed by deliberately disrupting everyday patterns. Since many of us don’t need to make the things we need for daily survival, returning to hands and their coordination with sight and listening can serve as such disruption, or, reactivation, if you will. I thread the needle. I feel the resistance of the fabric or material through which the fingers guide the needle. I consider my presence in the world, determining where to exhibit the badge. I may have tapped into pussy listening more deliberately.

Images 8-11: The choreography of the needle and fingers requires tactile focus.

Image 12: “I wonder if I will always have to wear the same underwear with these pants.”

Complete this form to request the Pussy Listening Kit.

Nina Eidsheim is a vocalist, sound studies scholar and theorist. She brings extensive knowledge, experience and innovative approaches to practice-based research that focuses on sound and listening. The author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, she has co-authored book with and about the composer and trumpet player Wadada Leo Smith and co-edited a volume on music and metaphor and the worlds they make, both of which are forthcoming. She has also just started working on a book about the question of whether it is possible to build sensorial memory of a childhood that didn’t come to be—for which the research involves eating her way through K-town and asking kind strangers to teach her how to cook Korean food. Nina was born in South-Korea, adopted to and grew up on the west coast of Norway, and lives in Los Angeles. 

[1] See, for example, Miya Masaoka’s piece, “Vaginated Chairs”, presented at MoMA PS1 on April 1, 2018, https://miyamasaoka.com/work/2017/vaginated-chairs-2/, accessed April 29 2026.

Graduation picture from the Lincoln School of Nurses in 1915. Larsen is second from left in the front row.

This post is part of a dossier of texts “On Not Hating the State” that was initially generated for a panel with a similar title, “On (Not) Hating the State”, and organized by Rebecca Oh, at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal.

The Case of the Disappearing Institution: Reconstruction and the Quicksand of Representation

Lisi Schoenbach

For those of us committed to not hating the state, the problem of convincing others to join us often comes down to an aesthetic problem. Even in our current moment, when institutions, (including universities, regulatory bodies, arts organizations, departments of public health, and organizations designed to promote racial and economic equality) are staggering under the repeated hammer blows of anti-institutionalist oligarchs, it remains a challenge to articulate to the public why such institutions matter or to offer a compelling sense of what is lost when they are broken beyond repair. I call this an aesthetic problem because there appear to be so few aesthetically compelling ways to capture the urgency of defending, building, and rebuilding institutions. The question I want to pose is this: is the state (and its attendant social configurations) unrepresentable or somehow at odds with innovative and exciting aesthetic forms? How might we look to past representational failures or successes in order to develop more aesthetically exciting and engaging ways to capture and articulate the institutional forms on which our collective democratic life depends?

To explore these questions, I’d like to look back to from the 2020s to the 1920s and to the cases of W.E.B. Du Bois, a lifelong institutionalist and advocate for state-building, and Nella Larsen, whose provocatively tragic and beautiful novellas Quicksand and Passing have come to be recognized as two aesthetic jewels of the New Negro Renaissance. Although Larsen and her husband were social acquaintances of Du Bois, and although Du Bois reviewed Quicksand glowingly in The Crisis, calling it “on the whole, the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt,”[i] Larsen’s novellas could hardly be mistaken for a defense of the institutions that Du Bois had championed. In particular, Quicksand offers a blistering attack on the institutions of education and racial uplift. The question I would like to explore here is how and why a novelist whose own life and career had been made possible by the educational, civil rights, and literary institutions developed in the post-Reconstruction moment, and who could clearly see the urgent need for transformation that her moment demanded, would not only fail to make the case for those institutions; but would in fact relentlessly critique them for their collective hypocrisies, cruelties, and failures.

Larsen’s dazzling but tragically short career as a novelist unfolded during an era in which white supremacist retrenchment had followed fast on the heels of Reconstruction’s promise of racial equality and full democracy. The threat of racial terror continued to define public life for African Americans in the 1920s; although the frequency of lynchings had diminished from their peak in 1892, racial violence, segregation, and discrimination continued to define the decade from the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 forward. The New Negro Renaissance unfolded against this backdrop, and took its place among a variety of social, political, economic, and literary movements, organizations, and institutions that were also responding to urgent needs of the moment. From the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Organization, to the many literary journals, black-owned and patronized businesses and clubs, tenant’s rights groups, and civil rights organizations that characterized the vibrant urban community of Harlem during this time, the 1920s saw a variety of political, educational, and cultural developments that built on the institutional legacies of Reconstruction and prepared the ground for the Civil Rights movements of the twentieth century.

These projects followed in the footsteps and in the spirit (and sometimes were the literal handiwork) of Du Bois, whose thought provides one of our richest and most comprehensive resources for the project of “not hating the state.” From his valedictory address upon graduating from Fisk in 1888, on “Bismarck,” (Dusk of Dawn, 16) to his late embrace of communism, which he described in his posthumously published autobiography as “a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part” (Autobiography, 57), Du Bois unwaveringly celebrated the notion of a strong state that could make “a nation out of bickering peoples.”[ii] Although this concept first emerged in his thought as a mode of constructing a shared black identity patterned on the lessons of Germany, as time went on his vision shifted.  Through a series of intellectual encounters with the legacy of Reconstruction, which he understood fundamentally as a state-building project tragically cut short before it had an opportunity to realize its fullest promise, he developed a vision of a “democratic state;” a strong, flexible, and productive set of interlocking social and institutional forms.[iii]

It was precisely its commitment to these institutional forms that had, according to Du Bois, made the project of Reconstruction “(t)he greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world” (The Gift of Black Folk, 75). Such forms included a wide variety of midrange and non-economic institutions, including federal and state governments, schools, libraries, churches, universities, bureaus, business organizations, and social and community groups. Du Bois’s vision of democratic state-building thus distinguished itself both from iron fist of Bismarckian authoritarianism and from the abstractions and generalities surrounding most theories of the State. It expressed itself through a rich and complex commitment to institutional forms, much like those that flourished in Harlem during the 1920s. Many of these organizations, including the NAACP and its journal, The Crisis, were founded and then guided by Du Bois himself.

Du Bois’s embrace of institutions, as I have argued, is the single most coherent and consistent element of his thought over the course of an incredibly long and complex career, one that spanned more than 75 years and encompassed both his early belief in “the talented tenth” and his later embrace of communism and expatriation to Ghana. Yet Du Bois’s commitment to the varied institutions of education, political advocacy, and literary culture that he learned from, joined, founded, and led was also enabled by those institutions’ unconditional acceptance of him. From childhood, Du Bois was embraced, celebrated, and chosen. He was sent by his community in Great Barrington to study at Fisk, recommended by his professors at Fisk to pursue a graduate degree at Harvard, and then sponsored by fellowship to continue his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin. Although his time at each of these places was marked by challenges, and his accomplishments there demanded fortitude, dignity, and relentless effort, he was nonetheless able to find his place. Even at Harvard, where he struggled socially and was sometimes treated as a curiosity by fellow students, his presence was largely acknowledged as legitimate, and he never wavered in his belief that his degree was an important academic credential that would smooth the path to future success. Even when those around him excluded or underestimated him, he saw himself and was seen by his mentors as a future leader of the race, more or less from the time he was a child. His faith in the meritocratic elements of these institutions was enabled and supplemented by a faith in himself that was continually bolstered by the authority figures around him.

Larsen’s experience could not have been more different. Like Du Bois, Larsen was the product of several HBCUs, educational institutions that were also legacies of Reconstruction, including Fisk and Tuskegee, but her experiences at both places were marred by the sense that she did not belong. She was dismissed from Fisk after a year for rebelling against the strict dress code, an episode echoed by Helga Crane’s decision in Quicksand to leave the fictional Naxos. She enrolled in the Lincoln Hospital and Home Training School for Nurses in New York, where her work was so stellar that she was appointed as head nurse at Tuskegee Institute Hospital. She struggled with the culture of Tuskegee, however, and again left within a year. Years later, on an author’s information sheet for Alfred A. Knopf she described her departure as follows: “[she] accepted a position as Head Nurse of the hospital at Tuskegee Institute – the school founded by Booker T. Washington – but her dislike of the conditions there and the school authorities dislike of her appearance and manner were both so intense that after a year they parted with mutual disgust and relief”[iv] (Davis 110).

Scholars, including Larsen’s biographers, have noted Larsen’s alienation from the two HBCU’s she attended. By all accounts, the problem was not merely the educational philosophy or intellectual environment of either place, but rather their restrictive and conservative social environments, and their explicit and implicit embrace of whiteness as the ultimate standard of success.  According to Angela Watkins, “Fisk offered a liberal arts education while Tuskegee focused on industrial education; yet, both schools enforced rigid social practices in their mimicry of ‘civilized’ societies based on Eurocentric ideals. The administration at both schools also emphasized deference to their white benefactors, on whom they relied financially. These experiences inform the narrative for Quicksand, and are the basis for Helga’s disillusionment with Naxos and with educational race leaders” (Watkins, 251).

Behind these principled misgivings lie a more general set of hesitations surrounding institutions, namely their tendency to grow into “a machine,” or a “big knife with cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern” (Larsen, 4). One can discern in Larsen’s language, in this image of a dressmaker cutting a pattern, a critique at once of violence and cruelty and of aesthetic standardization. Certainly Helga’s objections to Naxos are framed in Quicksand in aesthetic terms. When we first meet her, she is alone in a room furnished expensively with Orientalist flair, reading an Orientalist novel, dressed in a “vivid gold and green negligee and glistening brocaded mules” (Larsen, 2). Helga’s exquisite taste, it quickly becomes clear, has made her an outcast in this institutional setting. She longs for beauty and individual self expression and Naxos feels repressive, coercive, colorless, and joyless. This, too, is expressed through Helga’s relationship to fashion:

Clothes had been one of her difficulties in Naxos. Helga Crane loved clothes, elaborate ones. Nevertheless, she had tried not to offend. But with small success, for, although she had affected the deceptively simple variety, the hawk eyes of dean and matrons had detected the subtle difference from their own irreproachably conventional garments. Too, they felt that the colors were queer; dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks. And the trimmings—when Helga used them at all—seemed to them odd. Old laces, strange embroideries, dim brocades. Her faultless, slim shoes made them uncomfortable and her small plain hats seemed to them positively indecent. (Larsen, 18)

As I have noted, Helga’s incongruous appearance at Naxos echoes Larsen’s own dismissal from Fisk for dressing inappropriately and her failure to fit in at Tuskegee, which she attributes in part to her “manner and appearance.” However, these passages denote more than a simple disagreement of taste; they represent a modernist sensibility growing out of aestheticism colliding with a doctrinaire Victorian style that continued to “ruthlessly cut all to a pattern” even into the third decade of the twentieth century. The “slim shoes” and “small plain hats,” the “lack of trimming,” the “subtle difference” of Helga’s style all signal modernist style. Although the novel as a whole treats fashion in relation to important questions of objectification, exoticism, and commodification, in these passages we can see that the space of Naxos not only crushes innovative and progressive ideas and denigrates Afrocentric ideas, but that its notions of beauty and of style are outmoded and embarrassing. In this aesthetic failure we see a range of other failures: of attunement to the ideas, feelings, and needs of the people it was designed to serve, for instance, or of consciousness of the “odd,” “strange,” “queer,” and “positively indecent” elements of Helga’s character.[v]  Unlike Du Bois, who was noted for his own dapper sense of style, and for whom dandyism added merely an additional touch of professional polish, Larsen’s sense of fashion and refusal to be “irreproachably conventional” was seen as unforgivably transgressive. Punished, disciplined, overworked, and unappreciated, Larsen first retreated from these institutions and later savaged them in her fiction.[vi]

Educational institutions were not the only target of Larsen’s frustration. A similar tone of impatience pervades her treatment of each institution and social form in Quicksand, and can be seen in her disparagement of the (slovenly, poorly dressed) Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s regurgitated speeches on “the race’s ills” and in Anne Grey’s unthinking loyalty to a racial uplift movement that Helga finds exclusionary, conformist, and hypocritical. Exoticized and homesick in Denmark, Helga returns to the United States only to experience yet another disillusionment in the black church, where she finds herself the resented northern emissary of uplift in a rural Alabama community. Each successive social form she seeks betrays and disappoints her. Rather than building stability and futurity or helping to create future generations of leaders, as Du Bois’s institutions promise, these institutions function as technologies for ideological coercion and  threaten to punish anything that deviates from their narrowly constructed norms. As Helga is repelled again and again by the conformist, middle class, Victorian aesthetic of these institutions, she is excluded from the project of uplift, left alone to struggle for herself without any community to support her, and ultimately pulled under, doomed by her reproductive life to stasis and convention while her modernist soul continues to yearn for freedom and mobility.

Larsen’s own story is tragic in its own way, but unlike Helga’s it is also thoroughly institutional. After Fisk and after Tuskegee, she worked as a nurse for the New York department of public health (serving during the influenza epidemic), and after her marriage she attended the library school of the New York Public Library and worked in the 135^th street branch.[vii] After her divorce and disappearance from the literary scene she returned to her nursing career, working at Gouverneur Hospital, a municipal hospital on New York’s Lower East Side. Her engagement with and dependence on these systems, structures, and forms was more complex than Helga’s. Although she continued to critique the implicit whiteness and narrowmindedness of many institutions, she also owed her professional life and her career as a nurse to the kinds of public institutions that continue to make our collective life and public good possible. Larsen’s work should not be taken as a wholesale rejection of Du Boisian institutionalism then, but as a much-needed complement to Du Bois’s idealistic and often credulous imaginings of institutional forms.[viii] In Larsen’s aesthetic critique lies a substantive and urgent reminder that institutions need constant tending, revising, and remaking or they will fail to speak to the people they were designed to serve. If the institutions of the state are blind to the full richness and variety of the people whose interests they are attempting to represent, then the problem I described at the beginning of this piece denotes more than a failure to make a public case for our necessary institutions. It suggests that the institutions themselves have failed to demonstrate that they can rise to an urgent moment. It is well worth considering these overlapping failures with an eye towards our own moment of institutional collapse and cultural exhaustion.

Lisi Schoenbach is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, where she teaches and works on twentieth-century literature and philosophy, with a particular focus on modernism, pragmatism, and political theory. She is the author of Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford, 2012) and is at work on a second book project, Institutionalism and the Fate of the Public University. Her work has appeared in Modernism/Modernity, The Henry James Review, American Literary History, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

References 

Blain, Keisha N., “Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the 1920s: An Interview with Shannon King,”  December 10, 2015 In, Black Perspectives, blog for the African American Intellectual History Society (https://www.aaihs.org/community-politics/)

Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. “Amiable with Big Teeth: The Case of Claude McKay’s Last Novel.” Modernism/modernity 20, no. 3 (2013): 557-576. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2013.0076.

Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Du Bois, W.E.B., The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois): A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: Oxford UP, 2014

Du Bois, W. E. B., Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. (1940). New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.  1903.New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Du Bois, W. E. B., The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. 1924. 

Oxford UP, 2007.

Du Bois, W. E. B., “Two Novels,” The Crisis, Vol. 35 Issue 6, 1928.

Du Bois, W. E. B., “The field and function of the American Negro college (1933),” in The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques 1906-1960, edited by Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973. (pp. 111-133).

Edmondson, Belinda. “Finding Africa in Harlem: Displacement and Belonging in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem.” In Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, New York: Penguin, 2025.

https://lithub.com/finding-africa-in-harlem-displacement-and-belonging-in-claude-mckays-home-to-harlem/

Hochman, Barbara. “Filling in Blanks: Nella Larsen’s Application to Library School.” PMLA 133, no. 5 (2018): 1172–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45179451

Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Phulwani, Vijay.“A Splendid Failure? Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s Tragic Vision of Politics.” A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by Bromell, Nick. UP of Kentucky, 2018, pp. 271–302.

Roffman, Karin. “Nella Larsen, Librarian at 135^th Street,” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 752–787.

Singleton, Maura. “The Callings of Nella Larsen,” UVA School of Nursing blog, Flashback Friday, May 24, 2024.https://nursing.virginia.edu/news/flashback-the-callings-of-nella-larsen/

Watkins, Angela. “Progression or Regression of the Black Race?: Historically Black Colleges and Racial Uplift in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” Chapter. In African American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930, edited by Miriam Thaggert and Rachel Farebrother, 258–80. African American Literature in Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

[i] “Two Novels” The Crisis, Vol. 35 Issue 6, 1928, p. 22.

[ii] Quoted in Dusk of Dawn. In “The Field and Function of the Negro College,” a graduation address presented at Fisk in 1933, Du Bois elaborated on his inspirational encounter with German culture and identity at the University of Berlin: “And out and around that university of a thousand miles, millions of people shared in its ideal teaching, and did this in spite of caste of birth and poverty, of jostling wealth, because they believed in an ultimate unity which Bismarckian state socialism promised. They sang their national songs and joined in national festivals with enthusiasm that brought tears to the onlooker. And it made you realized the ideal of a single united nation and what it could express in matchless poetry, daring science, and undying music.” (119)

[iii] For a more complete version of this argument, see Lisi Schoenbach, “Institutionalism and the Fate of the Public University,” American Literary History, Volume 33, Issue 3, Fall 2021, Pages 674–690, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab060

[iv] Quoted in Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen, a Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life. (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1994), 110.

[v] Like Helga, Larsen did not have the support of her family and understood her alienation in these institutional spaces in part as a result of her “mixed” background (“mixed” not just racially, but economically and socially) and her lack of family connections. However, there is no doubt that what was most “strange,” “queer,” and “indecent” about Larsen was quite simply her gender. Without oversimplifying the many differences between Du Bois and Larsen and their stories, we might still acknowledge the narrower range of possibilities for self-expression and self-determination accorded to a woman within these profoundly normative and prescriptive spaces. Larsen’s treatment of Naxos raises larger questions, however, about the way that any non-normative identity might be punished or threatened within such institutions.

[vi] Larsen was certainly not the first, last, or only African American author of the twentieth century to critique HBCU’s and other institutions of racial uplift in these terms; Watkins notes Zora Neal Hurston’s satirical essay titled “The Rise of the Begging Joints” and Wallace Thurman’s critique of “colorism and stereotypes about ‘good breeding’”  at HBCU’s in The Blacker the Berry (1929) (Watkins 260). Ralph Ellison’s memorable midcentury treatment of Tuskegee in Invisible Man (1952) shares many of Larsen’s criticisms of universities, social and political movement, and institutions.

[vii] See Hochman, Barbara. “Filling in Blanks: Nella Larsen’s Application to Library School.” PMLA 133, no. 5 (2018): 1172–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45179451.

[viii] Du Bois’s own understanding of institutions, including educational institutions, would change quite dramatically in subsequent decades, as his thought shifted away from integration and towards black self-determination. For a brilliant discussion of this transition in the context of his advocacy of black owned economic co-ops, see Phulwani, Vijay.“A Splendid Failure? Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s Tragic Vision of Politics.” A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by Bromell, Nick. UP of Kentucky, 2018, pp. 271–302.

This post is part of a dossier of texts “On Not Hating the State” that was initially generated for a panel with a similar title, “On (Not) Hating the State”, and organized by Rebecca Oh, at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal.

On Not Hating State Daycare

Christina Lupton

For a few years now I’ve been thinking about the history of British life-writing as a state sponsored activity, something that happens in connection with the victories workers have won over the years: time to attend adult education classes, and to retire in their sixties; time protected by unions, by labor laws around Sundays, or made by state daycare and maternity leave. The idea of a life in which one has a right, not just to live and to work, but to leave a record of having done so has been one of the things protected by the modern state: this has been the focus of my current project.

This paper is taken from the part of that project that focuses on feminist-socialist discussions of women’s labor in the years between 1968 and 1975. These were crucial years in England–as well as the rest of the world–for women diagnosing and articulating the terms of their own oppression. In consciousness raising groups, residential conferences, teach-ins, newsletters and journals, women explored ways to talk, to read, and to write about themselves as workers underpaid in the workplace and not paid at all in the home. The Women’s Liberation Movement that emerged in England in 1970 was a network of local groups that fed ideas and reports to a central committee. National events such as the famously successful Women’s Liberation Conference held at Ruskin College in Feb that year, or the storming a few months later of the London stage at the Miss World Contest, were planned through regional meetings, phone-calls, mailing lists and announced in mimeographed papers with limited circulation. At this same early point in the decade, the Wages for Housework movement, concretized in the publications of Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, was fueling the demand in Europe and Canada and the UK that women’s domestic work be recognized and rewarded through state income.  James was at the helm of that movement in the UK, and her BBC 2 program, “Our Time is Coming Now,” which appeared in 1970, highlighted this aspect of the British Feminist cause.  Not all newcomers the Women’s Liberation Movement endorsed the demand for a state income, or the right of women to reject paid employment.  But most local women’s groups represented in the archives show a strong uptake of the idea that what women did–at home, with their children–should be described and compensated as a form of work.

As domestic workers, the argument went, women should be able to claim state pensions and welfare payments; they should also be entitled to holidays, and to study leave and to the time given in paid workplaces to union activity. In 1971, this logic helped to fight off, for example, the proposal that UK family allowances be converted to tax credits, which would have made only formally employed parents eligible for them. Dalla Costa’s 1972 words channeled what many women were feeling: “We have worked enough. We have chopped billions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies, by hand and in machines.”[i] “Those who advocate that the liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home,” wrote James, “are part of the problem, not the solution.”[ii] This line of thinking is echoed in pamphlets and flyers written by women in these regional groups. “It’s time to put an End to Slave Labor” states one flier of a London Group meeting in 1971: “we don’t need more work we need more money. We need the right to work less.”[iii]

These arguments for a woman’s right to state income ran alongside fights to improve women’s access to and experience of being in the workforce. Examples of those influential on this other front would be Juliet Mitchell, whose “Women: The Longest Revolution” had appeared in the New Left Review in 1966, taking aim at the idea of mothering as a full-time job, and Sheila Rowbotham, whose 1969 manifesto, “Women: the Struggle for Freedom,” expressed the frustration of women “struggling to combine badly paid work with bringing up a family,” and “unable to do work for which we’ve been trained.”[iv] Rather than rehashing here the factions of feminism that have emerged and continued along these lines, I want to zoom in here on childcare as an issue that united those fighting for their right to work less with those of women fighting for equal career opportunities.  In this micro moment of British feminism, the interests of women who wanted and/or relied upon paid work converged on this point with the interests of middle-class mothers wanting time to participate in their own revolution.  In 1970, as now, this made childcare a flashpoint for thinking about what women might need or want from the state:  in 2025 in the US, for instance, the promise of universal childcare was a signature part of Zohran Mamdani’s high profile campaign to become mayor of New York, while the state of New Mexico made headlines for offering its citizens this state service.

As a literary critic, what I want to underscore about childcare is the way discourse itself, particularly in the form of parents in conversation with each other and with or against the state, becomes its own case in point for the importance of redistributing childcare.  As material activity, it bears the weight of the argument that even women without paid employment have a right to time away from care work.  Childcare is not just an issue for women wanting paid work:  it affects all parents wanting to study, join a campaign, or represent in writing the condition of their own lives.  Childcare, in other words, is intimately connected to the way feminist writing gets done around and about children and their care.  The documents I’ll reference do not just describe this view–they are evidence of the state’s role as childcare provider in supporting or impeding the production of women’s writing.

In England in 1968, the struggle to increase and improve the provision of childcare was a cause supported by many. Women who’d come of age in the early 1960s, been pioneers in going to university, training for careers, and having pre-marital sex, were confronting by their late 20’s the burden of care-work as a bottleneck in their own path to equality.  A co-written paper, “Childcare and Women’s Liberation,” given at a national feminist conference, complains of the fact that there are only 5 places per 1000 children available in England in 1971.[v]  Measured against European states, Britain lagged far behind in supporting middle-class women to pursue careers.  This deficit was also apparent to those who had experience of spaces where multi-generational living routinely involved the distribution of care work.  Buchi Emecheta, for instance, arrived in England in 1962 expecting to find opportunities for women greater than in her native Nigeria.  There she had worked as a librarian at the American Embassy while her mother-in-law looked after her children.  But Emecheta found London to be a city full of women occupied with their babies:

 … at home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept.  But in England she had to wash piles and piles of nappies, wheel the child round for sunshine during the day, attend to his feeds as regularly as if one were serving a monster, talk to the child, even if he was only a day old!  Oh yes, in England, looking after babies was itself a full-time job.[vi]

While Emecheta found her rights as a woman greater in England, she also found herself dramatically disadvantaged as a mother.

Yet many of these British women Emecheta observes occupied with their children were themselves frustrated by their isolation and limited opportunities to be in the public sphere.  In “Why I Want Wages for Housework,” a paper written by a full-time typist, “Helen” expresses the desire “get out of the house…not to bash a typewriter for capitalism, but to be part of the struggle to get rid of capitalism altogether.”[vii]  We might think here of the activities and spaces that Nancy Fraser names as the formation of the “feminist subaltern counterpublic”: the “journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centers, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals, and local meeting places.”[viii]  Writing of the US, and against the limitation of Jurgen Habermas’s model of the official print public sphere, Fraser is mindful here of feminists engaged more directly with matters of domestic and personal experience than Habermas’s state based model recognizes. Yet for women with children in their care, many of those spaces on Fraser’s list were inaccessible.  Whether they were funded by the state or not mattered less than the question of whether they came with a creche or stipend that would allow mothers to pay for private childcare.

This need for childcare at feminist meetings and gatherings was met in some ways that can seem to us now to circumvent almost gloriously the need for state involvement.  Gay men’s groups, for instance, were sometimes enlisted by feminist groups as a force who could step in to care for children at women’s conferences.  The conference held at Ruskin college at Oxford in 1970, in which the male partners of Tufnell Park women’s group staffed the creche, is still held up as exemplary. This image of Stuart Hall still circulates today as illustrative of the victory of the women organizing the event in drawing men into care work:

The press statement issued by the organizing collective at the time left “no doubt that these facilities have been an important factor in the range of attendance at the workshop.”[ix] Catherine Hall, Stuart’s partner and a key member of that organizing committee, remembers the Ruskin Conference underscoring “the importance of looking after everybody else’s children, sharing childcare.”[x]

Archives from this time are rich with examples of flyers like these, which show childcare being offered along similar lines, by members of the feminist community:

Bishopsgate Institute, Working Class Lives Collection, copyright Camden Women’s Group.

LSE Women’s Library, copyright Brenda Corti.

The perforated form of these documents makes clear a material relation, between the language that was circulating above the line, in the workshops and meetings, and the being labor done under it. That line is a significant marker of care work as something mediates writing — and activism, gathering, and conversation – without being directly expressed in it. Words here are not written by those doing the childcare: that’s the very point. Discourse is a direct result of care being redistributed and shared amongst other people who do the work of care in order to free others up to speak.

It is the uptake of care work by people other than mothers that allows for the ‘perforated’ condition under which all women might have the chance to write, talk, print, attend the conference, etc. after their day’s work. For women trying out their own voices, describing their work situation, or simply talking to others about their experiences, the fact of their children being cared for by others was central to the possibility of them correcting the injustices of gender inequality. “We are four women” begins one paper given at the Ruskin conference, “three of us have kids. On three evenings we asked each other questions…we wanted to write a paper.”[xi] Not only does the writing of that paper depend on where and how the children sleep; presenting it at the conference becomes possible because of the children being cared for elsewhere.

This triangulation–of writing done by and between women because of childcare arrangements that relieve them of their daily work–draws on the logic of the Wages for Housework Movement, which insisted that the unpaid work (of cleaning, feeding, soothing, nursing, education) underwrote all of capitalism’s visible, above-the-lines scenes of productivity. Only men free from having to worry about raising their kids, or reproducing life at home, argued James and Federici and Dalla Costa, could hold jobs that were publicly recognized as productive. By this logic, the distributive logic of the perforation matters to the way we read any scene of production. Whether its words or cars that are being made, unpaid care work underpins that output and activity.

Communally organized childcare was important in this sense to the first years of the women’s liberation movement. Collectivized childcare could free up women to gather, to write, to protest, to be themselves. In her preface to a 1970 collection by the “Power of Women Collective,” Priscilla Allen celebrates the opening of spaces in which women have “a chance to relate to people on a fully human level, not as doormat, sacrificing angel, or cannibalizing matriarch.”[xii] Federici stresses on a similar note that the Wages for Housework movement succeeded most powerfully in giving women the chance to leave their domestic lives behind and “write songs, make posters, analyze the newspapers day after day, and find…life interesting.”[xiii] All this entailed women (or men) supporting other women in being able to take a break from their too routine domestic work. To quote from the newsletter of the “Tough and Tender Collective”: “If we give kids space and time and opportunity to play/shout/paint/run/cry with their friends, we also have more time to do the same with ours.”[xiv]

But even when these scenes of the feminist subaltern counterpublic were private, it was ultimately state daycare that many women saw as the enabling condition of their full access to them.  One of the key demands at that Ruskin conference was for 24-hour free daycare.  On this front alone, British feminism was inaugurated as a movement whose premises, texts, and cross-class ambitions were intimately entangled, not only with men or with the collective, but with the state. This shift from women experimenting in community-organized childcare to the demand for 24-hour state daycare happened within months of the Ruskin conference.  The same women (Sally Alexander, Sheila Rowbotham, Catherine Hall) who had organized and advertised the creche staffed by men, pushed back against the demand to reproduce the model in future gatherings. When Catherine Hall sent out notes about the National Conference in London later that year, the organizing committee was suggesting that women’s groups enlist regional childcare support rather than bringing their children to the city.  Marie, writing into the “Mothers in Action Newsletter” describes herself looking for a way not to bring her children:

I would very much like to go to the Lesbian conference in Nottingham next weekend.  However I have a problem.  Would someone please take care of my kids for the weekend.  They are both boys aged twelve and nine.  You could stay with them at my home and I could provide food. They really just need someone to be with them.[xv]

The big follow-up to the Ruskin conference, at Skegness in 1971, offered a creche, but was famously hampered by the sheer complexity of organizing family accommodation at what was meant to be a women’s conference.

While the Ruskin conference succeeded in providing its own childcare, it also underscored the fact if working-class women and mothers were really to be included in the movement, a much more comprehensive system of state childcare would be needed.  Not only were most working-class fathers unlikely to step up in the way the fathers at the Ruskin conference had, working women were already overburdened by their combination of poorly-paid part-time jobs with a second shift of domestic work. The demand for 24-hour state daycare institutions was written into the Working Women’s Charter, which took its final form in 1974. The charter, debated in working groups in 1971-3, makes a connection, grounded in a recognition of working-class women’s experience, between equal pay and opportunity for women, and the provision of free local-authority nurseries “with extended hours to suit working mothers.”

But it also, as its tenth item, emphasizes the fact that working-class women deserve the opportunity to participate in trade unions and ‘political life.’ The 1973 meetings in which the charter itself was discussed made childcare both case and point. Some women felt it wrong that the meetings about the charter did not have creches. Others felt that women had already done enough and had learned their lesson about organizing that service amongst themselves. One pamphlet defending the organization of the campaign meetings without creches states that “one of the fundamental demands of the charter is to fight against the assumption that women are the child-rearers and to fight for adequate child-care facilities.”[xvi]  The state is presented here as the only proper agent in freeing up time for gathering and co-writing: the ability of working-class and single-women mothers depends on children being a zone of state responsibility and organization.  The minutes of meeting and papers given in those years suggest that women of all classes united around this campaign for state daycare, not just as a way of leveling the professional field, but of allowing mothers to participate–as writers, speakers, activists, and trade union members–on equal grounds in articulating their own position.

This is a case not just of not hating the state, but of leveraging its power into being as a mediator of a public sphere in which women with children and with jobs might participate. The hopes for new childcare institutions that emerged in these conversations were ambitious. They conjured up centers financed by the state but creatively controlled by parents and staff. They involved men doing their fair share of domestic organization, with the arrangement helping to support a shorter working week for all. Childcare centers were also described in many papers as being good for kids, with the social and creative opportunities they could provide outpacing what was possible in the private home. “Sounds too good to be true?” asks one leaflet from the London Nursery Campaign. “Well, that’s up to us; we won’t take what the state is dishing out to us at the moment.  It’s time we fought for our rights; nobody else will, and if it means we will change the state, well, we’ll change it.”[xvii]

The axis of change imagined here put women in close negotiation with the state around the care of children in ways we have largely forgotten. But literary critics are well-placed to read and to see how these negotiations played out, in thousands of hours of conversation and dialogue and public speaking, and thousands of pages of talks and newsletters and life narratives that were themselves evidence of the writing that might happen if care work did not fall to the mother alone. In many of these documents, women write and speak in specific reference to the state as allowing them time of work, and as enabling their membership of the public sphere.  We see this very directly in the story of Emecheta, who became by 1970 a conscious advocate of the British welfare state as an institution of care. By that point she had three more children born in England and had experienced in mostly positive terms the National Health Service, maternity leave, local authority daycare for her children, access to free adult education at the University of London, and public housing.  Her two early autobiographical works, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), are openly underpinned by the recognition of these state services as vital to her life as a writer. In her study of the twentieth-century British Bildungsroman, Janice Ho describes Emecheta’s representation of the welfare state being driven by an unusual narrative causality in which “Adah’s interior sense of her autonomy and agency proceeds from – rather than precedes – the welfare state’s recognition of her as a citizen.”[xviii]  The particularity of this relation really does rest with Emecheta’s interaction as a mother with the state.  Her first taste of freedom to write comes with paid maternity leave from her job at the British Library.  This is followed by the welfare payments and council housing that allow her to leave her marriage, and the Inner London Education Authority Grant that provides her with time to study while her children are in state daycare. Emecheta’s early columns for the socialist paper The New Statesman perform as a reminder that much feminist writing, particularly by working-class women, should be read in this order, as evidence of a state shouldering some of a women’s traditional workload. The very possibility of a single mother and working immigrant writing her way into that largely middle-class British Feminist movement is the direct result in Emecheta’s own terms of her imbrication in the state.

In the late 1970s and 80s, Emecheta also became the face of the state, by working as a social worker and coordinator in the same North London childcare group that Rowbotham helped to set-up.  This organization offered community-based childcare that women had argued earlier in the decade should be funded and facilitated by state-funded lines of employment:  “Until we extend the responsibility for raising children beyond the mother to the state, we cannot increase the responsibility of women, nor hope to change the means of production,” writes Sally Alexander in her summary of the minutes to one 1970 meeting of the Tufnell Park Women’s Liberation group.[xix] To read that note in its full force, we need to hear both the limited conversation it records, between middle-class white women who’ve dared to leave their children at home with their babysitters or fathers, and the fuller one it anticipates, of which Emecheta is a part, where a more inclusive discourse would emerge if all children were cared for freely and generously by the state.

Christina Lupton is Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University, and author of several books about the history and experience of reading. Her new project, When Writing Wasn’t Work offers an alternative history of life-writing since the eighteenth-century as a non-professional, working-class practice that has held space open for institutions and experiences distinct from those of labor.

[i] Mariarosa Dalla Costa in The Power of Women and the Subversion of The Community (Falling Water Press, 1972), 45.

[ii] Selma James, “Introduction” The Power of Women and the Subversion of The Community, Ed. Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa (Falling Water Press, 1972), 16.

[iii] LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 6.

[iv] Sheila Rowbotham, “Women: the Struggle for Freedom” Black Dwarf, January 10, 1969.

[v] Childcare and Women’s Liberation, issued by the Wandsworth Brach of the Women’s Liberation Group, LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 1.

[vi] Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen [1974], (Heineman Educational, 1994), 45.

[vii] LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 5.

[viii] Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56-80; 67.

[ix] Press Statement regarding Ruskin Conference, Feb 1970. LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 1.

[x] Catherine Hall interviewed by Andrew Whitehead, History Workshop Journal, Volume 96, Autumn 2023, pp. 205–213, 212.  https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbad019

[xi] “Ruskin College Women’s Weekend:  Reflections on Politics of the Family” LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 1.

[xii] Priscilla Allen, Preface to Writings Produced by Women in The Power of Women Collective, June 1973. LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 5.

[xiii] “Interview with Silvia Federici” in Louise Toupin Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-1977 (UBC Press, 2018, Trans. Kathe Rothe), 241.

[xiv] Pamphlet produced by the “Tough and Tender Collective” LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 4.

[xv] In “Women and Deviancy” newsletter, LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/1, Folder 4.

[xvi] “In Defense of the Working Women’s Charter Campaign – a reply to the paper “Some Fundamental Problems with the WWCC”. Bishopsgate Institute.

[xvii] Nursery Campaign Newsletter, LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 1.

[xviii] Janet Ho, Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 144.

[xix] Sally Alexander handwritten notes.  LSE Women’s Archive, Sally Alexander Papers, 75AA/2, Folder 3.

This post is part of a dossier of texts “On Not Hating the State” that was initially generated for a panel with a similar title, “On (Not) Hating the State”, and organized by Rebecca Oh, at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal.

On Taxes

Bruce Robbins

How does the slogan “tax the rich!” sound to you? New York City under its new Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not the only place where that slogan has been resounding lately, though of course it has run into stiff opposition, not all of it on the right—for example, from Gavin Newsom in California. If “tax the rich” sounds to you like a proposition that’s at least worth discussing—I’ll accept variants like “tax the 1%” or “tax the billionaires” or “tax secondary residences worth more than five million dollars”—then we might not have much to talk about, at least politically speaking. I mean, you may hate the state, but if you acknowledge as plausible the imperative to tax the rich in order to achieve a more equal redistribution of society’s goods and resources, you would also be accepting the state as the agent of that redistribution. Redistribution needs an agent. The state is the best agent of redistribution we have, perhaps the only agent. Politically speaking, end of story.[1]

If we may not have much to talk about, politically speaking, we may still have something to talk about when it comes to how the politics of the state connects with literature. That’s trickier. I took a stab at that question in my book Upward Mobility and the Common Good, where I tried—I don’t know how successfully—to read the emergent sensibility of welfare state institutions into the role of the mentor/mediator slot in the upward mobility story, as the figure who makes the protagonist’s upward mobility possible, a reading that is implausibly formal given the representational way the question about the state’s connection with literature is typically posed.[2] I’m sure other people have better ideas: ideas about how literature helps display not just that our intimacies are shaped by the social flows and structures around us, but that our intimacies are shaped by collective decision-making, however alien to personal experience the decision-making and the decisions appear.

In spite of general agreement on the need to appeal to the state as a provider of socially necessary services and a potential agent of redistribution, then, and thus also presumably agreement against the defunding and dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, the agents we have, it’s possible that we do still have things to talk about, politically speaking. Because there exists, of course, a lot of anti-bureaucratic feeling among progressive people. And there exists of course the old idea that a radically egalitarian redistribution would require something like a revolution, a revolution to topple all that bureaucratic machinery and overthrow the power of the state. I’m not sure there are many who would still want to pursue this argument, the prospects for revolution in the US being as unpromising as they are; but if so, I think it’s worth saying that for such a revolutionary event to happen, for a revolution to happen that would not fall back into authoritarian coercion, that is, for a successful revolution to happen, that revolution would first have to have won large-scale approval of the program of redistributing society’s goods and services in an egalitarian fashion. It would have had to establish radical redistribution as common sense, just as the graduated income tax very gradually established itself as common sense, and over stiff opposition. In other words, “tax the rich!” would have to have become common sense even among those who remain skeptical that the taxing powers of the state could ever serve as the proper agent of radical redistribution. One reason for staging this discussion at a conference devoted to literary culture is literature’s role in helping to shape a society’s common sense.

A recent essay by Michael Denning called “Tax Forms” is frankly skeptical that taxes can serve any desirable social purpose.[3] I suspect that the essay speaks to shared hesitations both about taxation and about the state in general. For Denning, it is a mistake to see the state as an agent to rein in the power of capital, even when forced to do so by pressure from below—as in my view it was forced by pressure from below to create and maintain welfare institutions. One key move in this argument is that Denning rejects the differentiation between the economic and the political. For him, the economic and the political are one; taxation by the state is just another means of exploitation, working alongside exploitation by corporations. There is no daylight between corporations and the state. The state is corporations; corporations are the state. (Literature is one agent allowing us to see some daylight between corporations and the state.) But if there is no separation between corporations and the state,  then it is not wrong to hate the state, and the fact that it is the anti-statist right, not the left, that has made tax revolt a crucial part of its program is not an argument against tax revolts. On the contrary, the implication would be—this is just an implication, not something Denning actually says–that the right has been right to organize revolts against taxation, and following its lead might be a winning strategy for the left.

I don’t much like Denning’s argument, but I suspect that others will look more positively on it than I do, and not just because, as Denning does not need to say, the state has so often used its power shamelessly on behalf of enhancing corporate profit and to diminish the power of workers. If people are ready to assume, with Denning, that it’s a waste of time to try to glimpse any daylight between the interests of the state and the interests of the corporations, one reason might be a strong impulse, in the humanities, to reject distinctions like that between the economic and the political. The proposition presents itself to us more frequently with culture taking the place of politics, so that what’s rejected is a separation between the economic and the cultural. It may look like economics, but it’s turtles of culture all the way down. (On the left, we have to deal with the symmetrical illusion that it’s turtles of economics all the way down.) We who work in the cultural disciplines tend to smile upon the merging of the cultural with the economic, if only because what happens in culture can thereby borrow some of the aura of significance enjoyed by politics. What I’m trying to say, translating back from culture-and-economics to politics-and-economics, is that there is a cost to this refusal of distinction: the cost of losing the state as a potential political agent, an agent that’s not entirely separate from the corporate economy but that’s separate enough from the corporate economy so that, if pushed hard enough, it can be mobilized to rein in and regulate the corporate economy. Unsurprisingly, anti-statism being as entrenched in common sense as it is, the place to look for such a logic, however fragmentary, is among the comeuppances of greedy corporate villains in science fiction.

To my mind, the state/ corporation issue is of a piece with that of whether a line can be drawn between modernity and whatever came before modernity—the Bruno Latour, “we have never been modern” issue. (I had to take this issue on in writing a book about atrocity, a word that could not exist in its modern meaning until attitudes toward conquest and toward violence against noncombatants had changed radically.[4] One of the most complicated themes we could get to, in terms of hating or not hating the state, would be the meta-history of violence, or violence and modernity, and the place in that history of the state, as Max Weber said, coming to enjoy a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence. Can we assume that the state only exercises violence but does not in the slightest degree restrain it?) For some time sentiment has run with Latour, and against the modern/pre-modern line. To the extent that it has, it has also had to downplay the emergence of the modern state as a distinctive and consequential actor on the world stage.

In postcolonial theory, for example, Robert Young argues that colonialism remains a primary force in the world, so many decades after the success of the national liberation struggles, and the reason is that colonialism imposed on its colonies the form of the modern state, a legacy which is responsible for endless chaos and suffering.[5] The state is the definitive injury that the West has inflicted on the non-West. I think Young is overstating this case, but he’s right that the modern state form is indeed distinctive and consequential. In her new book, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South, Rebecca Oh very rightly insists that despite all the harm for which it is responsible, the intervention of the modern state remains a legitimate addressee of appeals for improvement: “complaint about and desire for the state are two sides of the same coin” (2).[6] Legitimate and, I would add, unprecedented. For better and for worse, and taking our distance from Latour, there is indeed a significant line between modern and pre-modern. And with the state, we are on the modern side of the line.

Within the discourse of Marxism, which is where Denning locates himself, his argument fits into a recent tendency to give more agency to the state in the history of capitalism—more agency, but agency that is entirely on capitalism’s side. This tendency is associated with the phrase “primary accumulation.” The argument is about the origins of capitalism. It goes, very roughly, like this: in order for capitalism to come into being, with some people forced to sell their labor and others in a position to buy it, the sellers had to be impoverished by being uprooted from the land and the buyers had to be rich. How did this happen? Marx’s answer is that the buyers didn’t get rich by frugality, as Adam Smith had suggested; they enriched themselves by uprooting and impoverishing the others, that is, by means of violence, conquest, coercion. Once capitalism is functioning smoothly, this originary violence can be forgotten; now the rich get richer merely by paying their workers less than the value of their labor. That is, by exploitation, not by expropriation. Marx puts the discussion of primal accumulation at the very end of the first volume of Capital in order, it seems, to suggest that violence was a one-time moment, and that after this, capitalism would work mainly by peaceful exploitation, not by violent expropriation. The recent tendency in and around Marxist theory has gone in the opposite direction. Influenced by historians of colonialism and of slavery, thinkers have tended to see violent expropriation not merely as a founding moment that is then superseded–—no Manchester without Mississippi– but as a permanent factor in capitalism’s functioning. As Sandro Mezzadra puts it, “whatever happened for the first time at the origin of capitalism must logically repeat itself every day: this apparent paradox prevents us from seeing the historical time of the capitalist mode of production as merely linear and progressive” (104).[7] Those who are convinced that history cannot be “merely linear and progressive” will be drawn to this argument. Those who get stuck on the “merely,” less so. In any case, if you consider yourself progressive, you might want to reconsider: there is no doubt that history is not merely linear, but there is also no doubt that in some sense history is linear and indeed irreversible. Since the state is a and perhaps the primary dispenser of coercion and violence, the shift from primal, one-time accumulation to permanent accumulation gives the state a bigger role not just in capitalism’s history, but in its ongoing functioning. In this way lots of agency is attributed to the state, but it’s unambiguous bad-guy agency. It’s not the sort of relatively autonomous agency that would encourage strategies of redistributive taxation, or Wisconsin-style sewer socialism, as progressive goals.

In spite of my anxiety that all this may be too inside-baseball, I go on to one more facet of Denning’s argument in “Tax Forms.” Why doesn’t Denning see much promise in the precedent of the graduated income tax? For one thing, he says, because most Americans never fill out form 1040. “For three-quarters of US workers, the payroll tax—a pure wage tax—is the major tax, not the federal income tax. Thus, the famous 1040 form is not your tax form: or rather this document is part of what Marx called ‘the religion of everyday life,’” that is, one of “a host of fetishisms and mystifications.” There is no doubt that, as Denning goes on to say, the tax system brings into being the political identity of the taxpayer, and the political identity of the taxpayer does lend itself to possible mystifications. There is a dangerous illusion of equality in the idea that we all have our wages taxed given how much more income goes untaxed because it doesn’t come from wages but from investments, from wealth.

Still, when Denning inveighs against the payroll tax as “the major tax” on the majority of American workers, he is not saying something that in the context of hating or not hating the state very much needs saying. Money from the payroll tax goes directly into the funding of Social Security and Medicare, that is, into provision for old age and ill health for people whose old age and ill health are not otherwise provided for. I would not claim that Social Security and Medicare are fragments or foretastes of socialist utopia. But I’m simple-minded enough to deduce, from right-wing opposition to Social Security when FDR signed it into law in 1935 and onward to the present, and from the dismantling of so much of the federal bureaucracy that we have seen under the present administration, that the state has been doing things that the corporations have never wanted done. There are more things we can get it to do. The state is in crisis. We shouldn’t let the crisis go to waste.

There are many who feel, in Stefan Collini’s words, that taxation is a kind of “protection racket: pay up, and we’ll look after you.”[8] The assumption is “that the money is emphatically mine, and I’m prepared to let the government ‘take’ a portion only if in return it provides security and other services from which I benefit. But the basis of our existing tax system can’t be as simple as that even if, for the moment, for the moment, we leave aside the question of how the money came to be ‘mine’ in the first place’” (15). “Taxation is sometimes scanted,” Collini goes on, “as a superficial form of social-democratic tinkering that leaves the underlying structure of economic power untouched” (18). But if a focus on taxation can help raise “the question of how the money came to be ‘mine’ in the first place,” we will be doing more than tinkering. Consider this an invitation to join the hunt for examples.

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022). He is a long-time member of the b2 and b2o editorial boards. 

[1] On the confused and confusing politics of taxation in the US, see Andrea Louise Campbell, Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.

[2] Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

[3] Michael Denning, “Tax-Forms,” in The Future of Totality: Fredric Jameson and the Prospects of Critical Theory.

Ed. Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, and Robert T. Tally Jr. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026.

[4] Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.

[5] Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001

[6] Rebecca Oh, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South. NY: Fordham University Press, 2026.

[7] Sandro Mezzadra, In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjectivity. Trans Yari Lanci. Rowman and Littlefield, London. 2018.

[8] Stefan Collini, “Where To Draw the Line,” The London Review of Books, 19 October 2023, 15-18.

Image: Nam June Paik, Zen for Film. 

This post is part of a dossier that features materials that were generated at, or in the aftermath of, the “Experiments in Listening” conference that boundary 2 co-organized with the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California in January 2025.

The Author as Listener: On the Politics of Ben Lerner’s Transcription

Arne De Boever

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

–Epictetus

The crisis of democracy is first and foremost a crisis of listening.

–Byung-Chul Han

Last Words

Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription constitutes itself almost entirely across two extended scenes of listening that make up the first and third parts of the book: “Hotel Providence” and “Hotel Arbez”. In the first, a young father travels to Providence to interview his former mentor Thomas, a genre-dissolving and genre-founding (32) filmmaker who, advanced in age, is making plans to die with dignity in Switzerland. As several reviewers of the novel have noted, Transcription invites us to pick up on the connections between the character of Thomas (whose talk fills up most of the novel’s first part) and (among others) the German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge (mentioned in the novel [25]—Thomas has his books lying around, unread, on his couch and floor), who died around the publication of Lerner’s novel at age 94, and is sometimes compared to Jean-Luc Godard, the French nouvelle vague filmmaker who died by assisted suicide in Switzerland at age 91.

The second scene—the third part of the novel—consists of an interview (or perhaps just a conversation; although it is more like an extended monologue) with Max, Thomas’ son, after Thomas has passed away. The reader gathers that the listener—the one who is spoken to–is the same as in the novel’s first part. Max and this listener turn out to have been college friends at Brown University, where Thomas used to teach. Both Max and his interlocutor have young children, girls, who are going through a rough patch: Max’ daughter Emmie is having trouble eating (Thomas, to Max’ irritation, refers to her—referencing Kafka–as a “Hungerkünstler” [47; 50], a “hunger artist”), and his interlocutor’s daughter Eva “is flirting with what the school counselor called ‘school refusal’” (15). Their lives (or at least what we know of them through the novel[1]) appear to be so much alike that you may be forgiven for reading them as interchangeable. Transcription in fact suggests that Thomas, most likely as part of cognitive decline, confuses his former student with his son, unsettling both the student (did he forget that twenty years ago, he was in Switzerland with Thomas to work on a film project? Is Thomas right to accuse him of “tell[ing] this untruth” when he says he’s never been to Switzerland? [48]) but especially the son (“It was as though someone had placed an ice pack against the back of my neck” [129]–did his father somehow forget that they were in Switzerland together?). “I felt”, the son confesses to his friend, “perhaps as intensely as ever—the unheimlich. Maybe the real son would just come downstairs, maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger” (122).

The portrait that emerges of Thomas as a father (and husband) is not flattering: he seems incapable of establishing a personal relation with his son (and perhaps also his wife? she committed suicide when Max was eight), instead always fleeing from the dilemmas of parenting and grand-parenting (and perhaps marriage?) into “some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references (many of which were probably fictional)”(94)—witness the characterization of his grandchild as a “Hungerkünstler”, some figure from a story by Kafka. At the same time, there are aspects of Thomas’ relationship to his grandchild that are also quite endearing (we hear about him reading a story to her over the phone, and interrupting the reading to play some music by Debussy that fits the tale, 93-94)—and Max acknowledges this (93). The impersonal relationship between father and son—at some point, Max started consistently calling his father Thomas—is driven to a head when Thomas ends up in hospital during Covid, and seems likely to die. Only then, with a nurse holding her iPhone to his father’s ear—listening is once again extremely prominent in these pages–, does Max “as a disembodied voice” (111) allow himself to tell his father about love and forgiveness. Against all expectations, Thomas pulls through—Max receives a call that he is “stable” and that “[h]is vitals are good” (114)–, but Max can’t be sure that his father heard what Max told him over the phone. Somehow incapable of directly asking him, he finds himself “listening for traces” (118) when he goes to see his father after the ordeal, looking for signs that the message actually arrived.

In between these two scenes of listening, and holding them together like a hinge, is the shorter part of the novel, “Hotel Villa Real”. Set in Madrid (familiar to readers of Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station) after Thomas’ passing, it takes place on the evening of a symposium in Thomas’ honor where Transcription’s narrator spoke publicly about how his interview with Thomas—and Thomas’ last, it turns out—came about. Although this talk itself is elided in the novel, the reader gathers that it must have presented some version of what we were told in “Hotel Providence”: the story of how the interviewer travelled to Providence to speak with Thomas on the record; of how he dropped his phone—the recording device he was planning to use—in the partially blocked hotel sink, ruining it; and of how he then proceeded to hold the interview anyway, pretending to record it (the extent to which Thomas was aware of this fact seems unclear in the novel, 59). Somehow, our interviewer was incapable of telling Thomas that he’d ruined his phone. What was published, then—Thomas’ last words—could not possibly have been a transcript of an actual conversation, since there was no recording. They could only have been our interviewer’s reconstruction (and reconstruction from memory, since he did not take notes—he was recording, remember?) of what was said. Our interviewer does not find this problematic, given that all published interviews are heavily edited and do not sound like a transcript of their recording (70); but Rosa, the curator who has organized the event at which he spoke, and (according to Rosa) also Thomas’ son Max who attended the event, appear to be “shocked” (72) by this “confession” (74) and by the fact that what they took to be Thomas’ last words are actually not his last words but someone else’s.

“I’m fine”, the narrator hears himself say in response to these accusations, but Rosa didn’t ask him; it seems he is just trying to reassure himself in the face of his growing feelings of authorial guilt.[2] Thomas, though, Rosa acknowledges, would have loved the situation—“would have loved it. Loved the idea that his last published statement was ‘unstable’” (72).

Listening Is Writing

Based on the novel’s title alone, and then further on the fact that its two major parts consist of interviews (of scenes in which someone is being talked to), it seems fair to characterize Transcription as a novel about listening. This is perhaps especially so given that the middle part accuses the interviewer of having concealed the fact that what he published as the record of an act of listening was in fact a document of writing—in other words, that the middle part of the novel seems to clearly privilege listening over writing.

Certainly, the novel sets itself up to be read in this way. In the novel’s first six pages, leading up to the narrator dropping his phone in the sink, we move from (on the train) “I put in my earbuds and began to listen to a talk, recorded in Paris in 1973” (4) to (arriving in Providence) “I still had my earbuds in and I was listening to walking directions” (5), and (checking into the hotel room) “I … turned on the TV and opened the blinds and half listened to the news” (6), to (talking to his daughter Eva on the phone) “‘Yeah,” she said, maybe listening” (8). In addition, the novel notes in these opening pages that “I could hear what sounded like live piano music, but saw no piano” (6); when the narrator needs to call Thomas, he asks himself: “Why was I more nervous about briefly encountering his disembodied voice than spending hours with his embodied one? ‘You should write that down’, Eva said in my head” (7). Such references to listening continue throughout the novel. Everything in the novel appears to be about listening, then, a listening that is not so much made impossible by the destruction of the phone on page 9 but emphatically solicited at this point—as a listening beyond technological recording.

If this is going to be a novel about listening, well, now that we’ve gotten the phone out of the way, the game is really on… Let’s listen. (By contrast, when Max in the third part of the novel actually records his father, he “was only half listening—I’d let my device do the listening”, 124-125).

Recalling Lerner’s navigation of his work between poetry and the novel elsewhere, one might suggest that if the novel is typically thought to offer prose to be read, with poetry giving us song to be listened to, here a novel announces itself perhaps not quite as a song but as prose to be listened to—as something more poetic than a novel.

The move that Lerner makes at that precise moment in Transcription is interesting, and marked (for good measure) by two white lines—and three stars. I quote from page 9:

I somehow knocked the phone into the water.

***

For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged. [my emphasis]

The message couldn’t be any clearer: if this is going to be a novel about listening, Transcription is telling us, it is not the kind that is going to pitch “writing” against “listening”, as Rosa—who is not a writer herself–in the middle part of the novel seems to do, thus guilt-tripping our interviewer/ narrator. Instead, the moment when the phone is knocked into the water is also the moment when “writing” (“For the duration of this sentence”) explicitly appears on the page, as if to help out. You can find moves like this all over Lerner’s oeuvre; you wouldn’t be wrong to characterize them as one of his signature gestures. Another one arrives on page 26, for example, when Thomas offers the narrator coffee (which he does not want or need), and he takes “a fictional sip” (my emphasis). That could mean he’s pretending to sip the coffee, of course; at the same time, however, the coffee is indeed entirely fictional—it is written coffee, a pipe that is not a pipe, as a Belgian surrealist artist already playfully told us long ago. Later, on page 38, when Thomas asks about his daughter, our interviewer responds: “I call her Eva in this book” (my emphasis). Transcription emphatically does not pitch writing against listening, then, but seems to advocate for a close connection of the two. How to write as a listener? Are we perhaps, as listeners, “always already” writing? (I will return to this Derridean locution, “always already”, and the process of deconstruction that it marks, below.)

If all of the previous references to listening were fairly casual (but rich in variation—we are listening, half listening, maybe listening, listening to a voice in our head, et cetera), once Thomas enters into the conversation things frequently get technical. For a filmmaker, i.e. someone who is primarily working in a visual medium, he turns out to be quite obsessed by sounds and voices. As a way to get WWII out of the way in the conversation, he wants to start with his “sound memory” (but what memory is ever “sound”?) of hearing “Hitler’s voice” (36) on the radio in 1934; he recalls it as “rising and rising in pitch”, as if it were “eternally ascending”, impossibly so—like a “Shepard tone”, as Thomas correctly explains (37). From the get-go, and here some may find support for our interviewer’s argument that there is nothing wrong with him having reconstructed his conversation with Thomas from memory, Thomas insists that the interview is not going to be about being “literal”: “We practice literature, not law” (37), as he puts it. (It’s worth noting on this count that Thomas’ son, Max, practices law and that he is thus taking some distance from his son, and situating himself more closely to his doppelgänger, our interviewer/ narrator.) “We begin with the voices” (38), Thomas insists—the voices that are there in the ether, in the air. Some of these, we hear; but Thomas is even more interested in the ones we can’t hear—“there is always music playing that we cannot hear” (39). “Do we have ears to hear?” he asks. “[S]ometimes we listen without them. … There is listening beyond the cochlear, yes?” (39)

One assumes that the interview has already started at this point—the narrator is pretending to be recording—but as far as Thomas is concerned they are still recording onto the “long stretch of black leader” (40), the starting part of a recording tape that doesn’t record. “We remain in the black leader part of the interview” (40), he insists, until they’ve come up with the first question—something that suits the narrator, who would in fact prefer this initial evening conversation to be “the leader” (44) with the real interview following the next day, after he’s gotten himself a new phone. But much that is important to Transcription is already being shared in this part of the interview (it includes, for example the first version of the confusing conversation about “Switzerland”, 43)–and of course all of it appears, mysteriously transcribed, in Lerner’s novel. How can we have a record of what could not have been recorded on this long stretch of black leader? How could this miracle have been brought about?[3]

There are only two conclusions we can draw, within the limits of the fiction at least: either the narrator was bullshitting about dropping his phone in the sink, and the interview took place as planned, was recorded and then dutifully transcribed (and this is why we have the first part of Transcription); or he did indeed drop the phone in the sink, and everything we are reading is transcription from memory, and perhaps thereby approaching “fiction”—which is, let us not forget, the overall form or category in which the interview is presented to us here (as part of “a novel”). But in that case the questions come quickly: does an interview become “fiction” simply because it was not technologically captured, and transcribed from memory? But if such an interview is similar, as the narrator argues, to actually published interviews which are always heavily edited, why do interviews that were technologically captured but heavily edited not enter into the realm of fiction? What, exactly, does or does not constitute the fictional in these cases? And where, exactly, do we locate what we might call “authorship” in them? (An author is considered to have been at work in the first case; but in the second, we talk about editing rather than authoring. As an author who also works as an editor, I admit to having been occasionally confused on this count myself, in particular with texts that need a lot of work. Am I editing them? Am I writing? Editorial mediation vanishes; writerly mediation is marked.)

Once the “interview” is over, the narrator wonders “what I’d do if he [Thomas] asked to see a transcript” (54). Transcription then offers, as a closing reflection and further turn of the screw, the account of our narrator’s breakdown in college, when he suffered from “auditory hallucinations” (56): surely not the most reassuring thing to find out about someone who has just conducted an interview without recording or note-taking. The narrator tells us that Thomas helped him with these hallucinations. But how so? As one may suspect from someone interested in voices audible and inaudible floating in the ether, Thomas helped not by trying to get rid of the hallucinations but by engaging the narrator in an auditory experiment designed to prove that everyone has auditory hallucinations, that all listening is, effectively, a kind of writing—that there is no objective listening or that there is no outside-writing, no outside-the text. Like a psychoanalyst, who does not aim to cure you out of your weirdness but instead starts from the assumption that everyone is weird and that some—their patients—just find that fact harder to handle than others, Thomas starts from the baseline that everyone hallucinates when they listen (and that some just find that fact harder to handle than others). “You see”, Thomas says after having had the narrator hear voices in “a MIDI file” (56) in which they have effectively become inaudible to the human ear, “we all hear phantom voices. It is a question of the right conditions. Or the wrong ones. Unconscious inference, our brain guessing, making us hear what it thinks is likely there. We hear as if. We are together, erring” (57). This is, clearly, the Thomas who loves being “unstable”; it is also the Thomas who keeps insisting in the novel on the social aspect of things, which is tied for him to politics (doing things together). Hearing voices, the narrator is not having a pathological breakdown; he is, rather, tapping into the ether, as we all do. The laughing he hears “in the rustling of dried leaves” (55) (likely another one of the novel’s references to Kafka [68, 95]—in this case to “The Cares of a Family Man” in which the laughter of a creature called Odradek sounds like the “rustling of fallen leaves” [Kafka 428]) is there, as far as Thomas is concerned. Nothing to worry about—you are fine. I don’t know if this is good mentoring, but the narrator does note that he was “helped” by it: helped by the demonstration of the fact that all listening is writing.

Mosaic Authorship, Stone Tablets, and Impeded Speech

It is hard to avoid—and Transcription invites—the associations between a novel that revolves around listening and the sacred, religious (and, if we want to cast the net a bit more widely, spiritual) texts that reveal themselves to be the records of acts of listening, that come about in response to dictation, in which the interviewer/ writer is effectively no more than a medium, but a medium that does not mediate, that merely relays to us, without intervention, the divine word of the one interviewed or listened to, the one doing the dictating (the dictator, if you will… more on the politics of all this later).

How does Transcription operate within these associations? Consider, for example, the first five books of the Bible—the so-called Pentateuch—which were, or so it is believed, dictated by God to Moses. Moses supposedly merely transcribed what God told him, but of course—and especially because this transcription takes place long before the invention of recording devices such as the iPhone—this opens up the entire, and much discussed, question of Mosaic authorship, and the extent to which Moses may have intervened in the words that were passed down to him from God. With Moses and God, we’re not even in the black leader portion of the tape; we’re in a blackness way before that. Transcription presents to us a kind of Mosaic authorship, activating the uncertain borderline between listening and writing not so much with respect to God, but with respect to his stand-in in the novel: the mentor and flawed father (wasn’t God a flawed father as well? Which all-powerful being allows his son to die on the cross?) who survives Covid against all odds—the great artist Thomas.

The association between our interviewer/ narrator and Moses was, for me, immediately evoked by Transcription’s cover, which features what appears to be a stone tablet in the shape of an iPhone. The stone tablets are another famous instance (within the Pentateuch, as a mise-en-abîme) of Moses transcribing God’s dictates—God’s “Ten Commandments”, his “law”. Thomas, of course, does not want to be God, and situates himself on the side of literature rather than law, a position that is perhaps suggested in the Bible itself given that Moses, angered by his people’s worshipping of the golden calf, smashes the first version of the tablets to pieces (and the second version of the law that the Bible offers is not identical to the first, even if God states that “I will write upon the tables the words that were on the first tables, which you broke” [Ex. 34:1]!). Perhaps the entire problem is captured by the fact that Moses, when God initially selects him as his spokesman, argues that the role should go to his brother Aaron instead because he is a bad speaker—“slow of speech and tongue” (Ex. 4:10) and “of uncircumcised lips” (Ex. 6:12), perhaps an indication of a speech impediment, like a stutter or a cleft palate. (The equivalent of this speech impediment in Transcription would be the interviewer/ narrator’s auditory hallucinations. All of us are impeded in our speech, none of our speech is clear. Not even mine, in this text.) Moses is not who you want to choose as your communicator—unless, of course, that is the entire point: that there is something unstable in the divine law, an instability that is to be embraced. Law is always delivered as impeded speech, and thus it begins to approximate literature. It is Thomas who talks about his granddaughter, Emmie, “bowed over her so-called tablet … as if in prayer” (47). Transcription in this context tells us, with respect to the sacred text, that while it may present itself as the record of an act of listening, it is always already a document of writing, with Moses not so much as the vanishing medium but very much as the mediator—it’s a novel that foregrounds mediation (“For the duration of this sentence”, “a fictional sip”, “I call her Eva in this book”, et cetera). Could it be that the Bible does so as well? What may be the consequences of such an insight? From such a point of view, it seems the stone tablet becomes, as Thomas puts it in a discussion about “icon painting”, “a secular detail” (46) rather than a sacred dictate—although “secular detail” is not quite the right name for what Transcription is either. For that, we will have to dig more into the fictioning that the novel does.

The bigger point here then becomes that the word of God, or, in the case of Transcription, the word of Thomas, can never be accessed as such, because all acts of listening are already acts of writing—we cannot listen objectively, there is no listening-outside of writing (as I put it before, evoking Derrida: Transcription’s narrator does so himself when he points out, considering whether the wine he drinks at Thomas’ house is medicine or poison, that there is “a third option”, and that it might be both [34]—this was, of course, exactly Derrida’s point about the pharmakon in his reading of Plato [who is referenced in Transcription two pages later, 36]; more broadly, however, Transcription’s point about listening-as-writing is Derrida’s argument about speech and writing in his Grammatology).[4] From such a perspective, Rosa’s objections to our interviewer/ narrator reconstructing his interview with Thomas from memory—her guilt-tripping him over his authorship—appear naïve, more precisely they appear to be naively invested in the idea, the phantasy, that one could ever really access the word of God/ Thomas. Listening, Transcription argues, never works in this way: it is always already writing. Rosa seems to criticize our interviewer/ narrator’s authorship in favor of some kind of direct access to Thomas’ speech, but really what she is trying to access in this way is just some bigger Author, whose words also could never be directly taken in (because to listen is always already to mediate). Transcription is a meticulously construed criticism of this kind of attitude, which Lerner already discussed in Hatred of Poetry (people hate poetry, he argued there, because it can never realize the virtual, ideal, Platonic Poetry that they want; and so the metaphysians are always left disappointed…). Rosa suffers from a metaphysical affliction, a wanting to get beyond writing to access Thomas/ God directly, immediately. But there is no outside of mediation, Transcription tells us: even a transcription is a form of scription, after all. The mediator never truly vanishes. Instead, it’s authors everywhere.[5]

Political Fiction

This is not to say that Transcription is not rethinking the author and authorship, as no doubt we should in a time when “authoritarianism” has become the political keyword of the present.[6] For while Transcription argues that there is no listening that is not always already writing, it also emphatically makes the reverse point: that writing really is a form of listening. The writer, in Transcription, is emphatically a listener, and most of Transcription’s record is really the record of an act of listening. The novel does not make this point naively, by indulging in the phantasy that there could be a listening without writing; but it makes it nevertheless, in response to an understanding of writing as law-making, dictating, commanding—in short, against an authoritarian understanding of the practice. It seems abundantly clear that Transcription’s narrator wants to present himself as a listener, a listener who is then—due to the ruination of his iPhone—solicited into a listening beyond technological recording, a situation in which (“For the duration of this sentence”), writing will come to his aid to help him deliver a reconstruction from memory (a record) of a conversation, of Thomas’/ God’s speech. On the one hand, this marks an investment in writing; but it’s an investment in a writing that operates in the service of listening, with the author being recast as a “transcriber”, as perhaps more of a poet in relation to a song than as a novelist in relation to prose. Transcription appears to be an activity that takes place somewhere in between the prose of the novel and the song of poetry, a writing-as-listening and listening-as-writing that, as an emphatically social activity, always taking place in the realm of the more-than-one, is arguably also sharply political in a time of the increasingly loud dictates of authoritarianism. Under such contemporary conditions, authorship should be rethought—and Transcription is a novel that takes on this task.[7] As such, and perhaps in spite of appearances, this slim fiction is intensely political, as all of Lerner’s other work.

This becomes perhaps most clear with respect to the notion of fiction that the novel articulates, and that—in the time of fake news and bitterly fought contestations about historical facts—is embedded in these political concerns.[8] Indeed, the transcriber is, perhaps contrary to the naïve understanding of the word, a kind of fictioner. But in what sense?

The key passage for this is likely the narrator’s account of his visit with Anisa–the best friend of his college girlfriend, and to whom he becomes unexpectedly close after he and his girlfriend break up–to the Natural History Museum on the Harvard campus. The museum has a “dimly lit gallery dedicated to the [glass] flowers”, “botanical models made by glass artists—a father and son—from Dresden a century ago” (20). Transcription ends with multiple references to these flowers, including in an epigraph following the narrative’s end, so the novel makes it clear that this is an important passage. There is, of course, the reference to the father-son relationship that is worth noting; in addition, we are dealing here with something very fragile, a fact that is perhaps further underlined by the artists being from Dresden, a city heavily bombed by the allied forces during WWII (overall, this scene evokes the work of W.G. Sebald [perhaps in particular his work On the Natural History of Destruction] who is, in addition to Kluge, a reference in Transcription; Sebald is one of those authors who, as a novelist, rethought writing as listening, offering fiction as a record of acts of listening that are often multiple and embedded within each other—see, for example, Sebald’s prose work Austerlitz, which presents itself as extended record of an act of listening). Finally, however, and most importantly, the narrator’s experience of seeing the flowers leads into a reflection on fiction:

I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually, I’d call this “fiction”. (21)

In between organic and artificial, duck and rabbit, nature and culture, the given and the constructed—let’s add: student and son, medicine and poison, and, of course listening and writing. This is where we are with the fragile, glass flowers, so delicate that around them, visitors are asked “to keep our voices low” (20); this is where we are with Transcription as well, in between the given and the constructed. The interview is supposed to give us the given, but Transcription delivers the message that all interviews are constructed; in fact, all listening constructs, it writes.

Still, writing as a construction does not stand on the other side of the given—“fiction” has something to do with seeing the constructed in the given, and drawing out the given in the constructed. In that sense, it is not law, dictation, or commandment (which are all construction). It listens as it writes (it draws out the given, but the given can never be given). The suggestion appears to be that it is this kind of listening that prevents writing from becoming a lie, such as the lies that Anisa tells the narrator about the life of his ex-girlfriend in New York (50 and further). What we get in the novel, rather, is a plea for the transformative, reality-adjacent practice of fictioning through a writing-practice that is listening-based and transcribes the world between the given and the constructed.[9]

In that sense, Transcription is, like the Hotel Arbez with which it ends, “a complex space. Non-euclidean” (128). As Max eventually explains to the interviewer/ narrator, who must have been there even if he appears to have some difficulty remembering it, the Hotel Arbez is:

            The one that’s famous because different parts of the hotel are on different sides of the border. The lower half of the stairs are in France, but, beginning on the seventh step—

            You’re in Switzerland. Right. Jesus.

            And during the German occupation, the Nazi soldiers could enter the French side of the hotel, but not ascend to the upper rooms, where Max Arbez helped shelter Jews and members of the Resistance. A kind of impossible staircase. Remember we went up, ascended to Switzerland? (128)

Transcription’s fictioning is in between things, the way in which the Hotel Arbez is in between Switzerland and France—and it’s that in-betweenness that enables Max Arbez, one of the Max’s after which Thomas’ son is named (the others are Horkheimer “and my mother’s favorite uncle”; but one may want to throw in here Sebald as well, who preferred to go by Max) to shelter Jews from the Nazis. The return of the phrase “impossible staircase” is interesting as well, because Thomas had used it in part one of the novel to refer to how, in his “sound memory” of Hitler’s speech, his voice appeared to be “eternally ascending, an impossible staircase” (37). “This is a wondrous but terrible fact of our wiring,” Thomas commented then, “how clockwise movement across the pitch class creates this impression” (37). Terrible in the case of Hitler; wondrous in the case of the Hotel Arbez; here too, “it is a question of the right conditions. Or the wrong ones” (57). A fact of our wiring, to be sure—something that “our brains will allow” (37). But also an effect of our writing, our fictioning, our transcription.

This is, perhaps, the closest indication we get of how Transcription, the kind of literature it practices, can save—but not in the way that the sacred text saves. Transcription saves not as a Holy Writ that delivers dictates; it does not save as authoritarianism. Instead, it saves as a writing-listening and listening-writing that exposes the phantasy of all such law-like commandments. The fact that it always inevitably writes does not mean that it lies. Rather, as a construction, Transcription fictions: it highlights the mediator not simply to expose the constructed in the given, but to offer a version of the constructed that can deliver the given, like a glass flower. Delicate and fragile, it asks you to keep your voice low as you approach, so you can listen–which is also to say write–all the better.

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where he directed the MA Aesthetics and Politics program for over a decade. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and translations, as well as seven books on contemporary comparative fiction and political and aesthetic philosophy. His most recent books are Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), Being Vulnerable (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), and Post-Exceptionalism: Art after Political Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). His books Silent Music (co-written with the composer Michael Pisaro-Liu) and Secular Detectives and are forthcoming with Bloomsbury and the University of Nebraska Press respectively.

References

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.

Coetzee, J.M. and Mariana Dimópulos. Speaking in Tongues. New York: Liveright, 2025.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

—. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Hölling, Hannah B. Revisions: Zen for Film. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015.

Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1971.

Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011.

—. 10:04. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.

—. The Hatred of Poetry. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

—. “The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the Problem of Historical Memory”. Harper’s Magazine December 2023, accessible: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/12/the-hofmann-wobble-wikipedia-and-the-problem-of-historical-memory/.

—. Transcription. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2026.

The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. Meridian: New York: 1974.

Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

—. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003.

Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.  

[1] My impression is that Lerner very carefully sets up this situation as an effect of repeated structural elements in both part one and part three of Transcription; and then also by leaving certain elements within that structure empty, by playing with the fact that fiction does not have to fill in every detail. I appreciated this set-up even more after reading J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos’s reflections on this aspect of fiction in the context of their discussion on translation in Speaking in Tongues.

[2] It is probably significant that this guilt about authorship arrives in Madrid, where, in Leaving the Atocha Station, “Adam”—a stand-in for Lerner—“arrives” as an experimental writer. It is, in Lerner’s fiction, the “adamic” birthplace of Lerner’s fictional self as a writer; it is, now, also the place where his authorship is drawn into question.

[3] I am reminded of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, which was made some time between 1962 and 1964. For this project, Paik ran transparent empty film leader through a projector, allowing it to collect traces, scratches, dust as the film was played. As Hannah Hölling in her work on the film has pointed out, Zen for Film cannot be seen in the same condition twice, as it is forever and irreparably changing each time it is projected. The film, it is worth noting, was inspired by John Cage’s 4’33’’ composition (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence), which was in turn inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Painting [three panel]”. The link to Cage highlights the connections between Paik’s film—a work of visual art—and the practice of listening to which 4’33’’ drew attention. Like Transcription, all of these works highlight that we see and listen more attentively when we are working “in the leader”, in other words, in a certain kind of silence. I want to thank my student Lukas Mackinney for bringing Paik’s project to my attention in this context.

[4] The other reference that seems relevant here is to Derrida’s student, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, and his work on what he calls (after Edmund Husserl) “tertiary retentions”, i.e. technologies—like writing or the iPhone—through which speech is recorded. One of Stiegler’s points is that such tertiary retentions do not simply post-date speech but in fact precede it: as children, we start speaking in worlds that are always already recording; in fact, children record before they start speaking. Transcription’s variant of this is that there is no listening without writing, that writing always already pre-dates listening and is operative within it.

[5] This position counters, for example, what Walter Benjamin at the end of his famous essay “The Task of the Translator”, writes about “the Holy Writ”. Benjamin posits there that it is “unconditionally translatable” because it is supposed to be “‘the true language’ in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning” (82). The position is peculiar, because it insists on the medium—language—in its immediacy—without the mediation of meaning. Language as pure means. This is Benjamin’s understanding of “sacred writings” and their purity. In Transcription, Lerner counters such phantasies of purity or immediacy. I bring up Benjamin on this count because Transcription includes several references to his work. 

[6] I want to acknowledge Martín Plot’s thinking about “the author” (versus “the actor”) in the work of Hannah Arendt, and the relevance of this distinction for our theorization of “authoritarianism”. I am tempted to capture such a thought under the title “Authors Against Authoritarianism”.

[7] This is not to say that under different conditions, turning human beings into mere recording devices could not also work against authoritarianism: witness the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where humans are turned into living recordings of great works of literature that are being burnt, for an example of precisely this situation.

[8] That Lerner is interested in these questions is clear elsewhere in his work, for example in his story “The Hofmann Wobble”, which presents us with an author who is using and abusing Wikipedia to rewrite history and promote ideological positions. Transcription signals that it is situated in this vein of thinking when it evokes “the wobble” in its third section (129) to capture Max’s state of mind in his relation to his father.

[9] In Lerner’s 10:04 (Lerner 2014, 244), this idea is expressed through reference to a story that Lerner finds in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, and that is attributed there to Walter Benjamin, who likely found it somewhere else, namely about how after the arrival of the Messiah, the world will be exactly as it is now, just a little different. The idea returns in Transcription in other ways as well. “It was as though everything in the house had shifted a few millimeters”, Max says in Transcription when he encounters his father after he has survived Covid. “He wasn’t much changed, and yet he was utterly changed” (116).