This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
Images (l-r): Syndiffeonesis an other Self-Help Advice 1 – Ferdinand Altenburg, 2025; Syndiffeonesis an other Self-Help Advice 2 – Ferdinand Altenburg, 2025
Presences Stir to Sarah Riggs
Andrew Levy
We weren’t close enough to one another to know one another. There was much implied
but left patiently latent, and unclear. Meant for someone else.
The common thread seems to be the idea that you can survive from hate alone.
No one is accountable. A voice that is no longer of the body but of a momentous atmosphere.
Singular things, influencer pipeline in action.
Consider the source.
Yours is broken.
Young people are homeless. Everywhere.
Nothing but for some future poet who finds a line or a sentence evocative of and relatable.
A dictatorship built by American business.
Real-world anchovies. A world beyond our grasp and comprehension.
Lying problems will occur.
“This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.”
How much bigotry can you engage in?
If you’re a voter, what do you do with that? Make more of what’s yours?
Getting older happens.
Sometimes, you just need a moment. A new era.
I’m not an alien.
My first line of defense.
Editing.
To and from anywhere.
You can’t defend yourself against this court. Without a price tag,
you’re labelled “divisive.”
There is nothing preservationist about a colossal commercial venture
that would threaten wildlife and groundwater.
The soul of America? The lines are blurred. It will become
like everywhere else.
In masks, a giant Fuck-you to your neighbors.
A made-for-TV chaos.
Elk migration routes, abducted.
Outdoor dining an apparent acquittal, a celebrity cruise, plus the shape of your lips.
This is who we are.
Attracted to accused men.
Insider info. A royal flush in an airless atmosphere.
A dog howling in the courtyard.
Another dicey decision.
That’s where you can make your money. You’ve done terrible harm to your case.
Low stakes in sorrow.
The distraction, some kind of smoke bomb, maybe not.
The life you have left to live?
Narrowing tunnels of transparent longer-lasting relief. Put the pain away.
The most perfect piece of self-writing code.
One, two, three. (Please do not
attribute this to me.) It’s that easy. The metropolis disintegrates.
It doesn’t have to.
“I thought the law was accessible to everyone.”
Land targets.
Energy.
A silent fall, overnight’s broad framework hinges links and attachments embedded.
30%.
20% mock dissent
with AI sewage. Deferrals on critical flogging.
Mapping the drift
nothing is concrete and permanent – artificial pitches save the opening.
Tombstones grind things down. She ridiculed opponents
as “terrorists.”
Civility is so extraordinary.
Cafes fall in abstraction, dictatorship and mortal wounds. I had to choose between
gas in my car and grass in my pipe.
No rhyme or reason,
actually, truly, exactly,orprecisely; genuinely, completely,or verbatim. A sweet sort of slumber,
by temperance or deception. The city
amplified. Sunday morning, another new worry, a war on boats
This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
Elemental History: Zumthor after Hölderlin
Nathan Brown
Perhaps poetry is unexpected truth. It lives in stillness. Architecture’s artistic task is to give this still expectancy a form. –Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture
Water: Kunsthaus Bregenz
May 9, 2022. Evening in Bregenz. “What springs from pure source is a riddle”:[1] the Bodensee was formed by the Rhine Glacier during the last ice age. Now over its western horizon the sun gleams above a wall of clouds, purpling the hazy amber sky as a swan glides through the water where it gathers into the bay by the town, encountering architecture. Later the surface will be crystalline, intricately faceted under a dense blue darkness stretching out across its expanse toward the last shades of pink sinking over the southern reaches of the Black Forest.
Figure 1, Lake Constance, Evening of May 9, 2022, Photograph by Nathan Brown
It seems to have been from there, “In dark ivy…at the gate / Of the forest,” that Hölderlin’s hymn to the Rhine looked southeast,
as the golden noon, Visiting the source, descended The steps of the Alps, The godly-built I call them, In accordance with ancient custom, The stronghold of the Heavenly, where yet Many things decided in secret Still come down to men[2]
The Rhine flows from Lake Toma at 2345m, emerging from the mountains as it passes between Haldenstein and Chur, joining the south shore of the Bodensee just west of Bregenz and flowing out the west end of the lake, over to Basel and up along the Black Forest, past Strasbourg, all the way through Bonn and Cologne, out into the North Sea. One can still grasp the torsion of the landscape Hölderlin evokes at the beginning of the second strophe, the feeling of jagged stones comingling with green trees, the distant woods drawn together with alpine forests and craggy peaks by water rushing violently or settling into the depth of peaceful lakes with the sky overhead, moving through atmospheric transformations of its light:
But now, within the mountains, Deep under the silver peaks And under jocund green, Where the shuddering forests, And the rock heads look down one over Another at him, day-long, there In coldest abyss I heard The young one wail For deliverance, his parents heard With pity how he raved And accused Mother Earth And the Thunderer, who begot him, But mortals fled the place, For it was dreadful, there lightless he Thrashed in his chains, The rage of the demigod
It was the voice of the noblest of rivers, The free-born Rhine,[3]
I wonder if today Hölderlin’s voice does not feel just as ancient, just as epochally incongruous as the voice of the river did then, raging at the constraints of its birthplace beneath the silver peaks of the Alps. Perhaps it seems even more removed. From the path along the shore of the Bodensee, Kunsthaus Bregenz looks like nothing so much as a cube of glacial ice, glowing with blue-green light on the cusp of the bay as the night falls. In the morning, if it’s bright enough, the interior of the museum will be illuminated only by the light of the sun.
Figure 2, Kunsthaus Bregenz (1989-1997), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 3, Kunsthaus Bregenz, with Café/Administration Building, Photograph by Nathan Brown
May 10. The light is truly elemental, a substance that seems not only to illuminate space but to coalesce within it, as if it were a volume in which one were suspended, even as if it were holding apart the walls. The geometrical plan of the museum is minimalist, its lighting system elaborate: four stacked floors compose a cube supported by just three weight bearing slabs of exposed concrete, vertically articulating the building and structuring the interior space at perpendicular angles. A glass façade of 712 etched glass panels is divided from the interior frame by an interim corridor, allowing light to filter into empty space above the ceilings of each floor, which are likewise composed of etched glass panels and suspended from concrete two meters above by hundreds of steel rods. There are no windows or glass walls on the upper three floors; you are surrounded by an enclosure of concrete beneath the glass ceilings, articulated by a grid of square panels. Yet light breathes through the panels above, reflects off the smoothly polished terrazzo floors below, pours throughout the space and draws you up each staircase like the opening of another world, even as each level formally replicates the one below.
Figure 4, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Architectural Plan, Interior Levels and Staircases
Figure 6, Kunsthaus Bregenz, First Floor, Exhibition by Dora Budor, Continent (2022), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Here is Zumthor:
A fine haze floating over the water, a radiance hanging in the air: the light of Lake Constance. Our dream was to capture this light in the spaces of the new art museum in Bregenz….We worked out how the daylight would enter the exhibition spaces laterally. The three shear walls supporting the stacked spaces would provide shading; different daylight zones would evolve and change with the course of the sun. The daylight entering from the sides gives shape and texture to the spaces; and the viewer senses the orientation, the position of the sun, the time of day….Daylight hits etched glass. The etching of the glass diffuses the light evenly. The building façade made of large air-flushed glass panels and the similarly constructed glass ceilings play with this effect. Between these outer and inner glass membranes there is a sealed liner of insulated glass which in the upper stories is hidden by the free-hanging glass panes of the ceilings. This is what gives the impression of light freely entering the exhibition space.[4]
The mood achieved by this architectural concept and its material realization is a state of relaxed yet focused concentration, a desire to remain within a space unlike any other in which one has been. There is a diffusion of one’s attention at first through the play of elements and textures composing each floor—stone, glass, light; rough, smooth, gauzy—and then a gradual and sustained focus on the artworks on the walls or installed in the open expanse of the columnless rooms. One wants to stay: this is the foremost feeling of place in this museum, and in this primary sense the architecture is adequate to the art it exhibits. It may be more beautiful; it may indeed be more significant. But it draws out and inclines attention not only toward itself but through itself toward the work. It is attention of a peculiar gravity—not necessarily somber or severe but, yes, one could say devotional. Prepared by an architectural atmosphere, this comportment is then attuned to works of art.
The space itself is concentrated in these rooms. Not compressed, but dense with ambiguity. Modular repetition lends a sense of seeking and of questioning to the phenomenal field of each floor: what is it I am sensing? What is illuminated not by, but as this light? What is implicit in its relation to stone and glass? Because the mere presence of natural light in so solidly enclosed a space is profoundly unfamiliar, there is a sense that each ascent to a new floor, each repetition of this structure might reveal some new element of its significance. And indeed this is the case. I take my time on each level, sitting with my back against a wall taking in the environment, wandering slowly between different regions of perception, various distributions of the light, concentrating on the artworks, letting my focus shift back to the space, taking photographs which force another relation to light, to reflection, to the intersection of planes and the parallelism of ceiling and floor. Then I walk up a staircase, running my fingers along the sheen of the polished concrete walls on each side of the grey steps, toward the light above, gleaming through the ceiling of the next level. At midday, or in early afternoon, it gets brighter as one rises from floor to floor. One has an intense awareness of the levels beneath, of depth below and of surface above, such that it gradually comes to feel as though one is surfacing as one moves upwards, as though the feeling of suspension conveyed by the modular repetition of this light and these illuminated ceilings is that of body of water in which one is immersed. I am immersed in a volume, moving upward toward light overhead, as if I were rising from the bottom to the surface of a lake.
Figure 7, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Staircase between First and Second Floor, Photograph by Nathan Brown
It is the ambience of the light, the surround of its inapparent origin, its filtration and diffusion, that suggests this sense of elemental immersion: not light, but water. One comes slowly to a recognition of what has been achieved. There are no windows, no views, and the Bodensee is nowhere visible from within Kunsthaus Bregenz; rather, the volume of the building itself seems to be within the lake. This is the sense of elemental displacement conveyed by the volume itself: walls enclosing a rectilinear space within a façade, the façade invisible from within; the interior walls invisible from without. From the square outside the museum one can make out the ghostly structure of the staircases through the haze of the etched glass panels. Yet the outline of those staggered, diagonal corridors seems to occupy a void interior. Once inside, there is scarcely a recollection of the outside world, so saturated is the space with phenomenal and psychological interiority, so oriented is one’s sense of spatial directionality to what is above or below.
Figure 8, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Third Floor, Exhibition by Dora Budor, Continent (2022), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Despite the stony bulk of its concrete walls, this is an unearthly space. Its geometrical rigor and the modular repetition of components combine with the strange diffusion of its light to produce a monadic world, yet one that takes on a curious feeling of synthetic contiguity in relation to the lake. One knows the lake is there, to the north and to the west, just across the road, with the promenade extending from the shore. But one feels the lake surrounding the volume of the building, feels the water even within it, sublated by the substance of the light, such that the sense of a subaquatic world is somehow omnipresent; one breathes within it. The terrazzo floors, poured seamlessly over the slab, are liquid in their consistency and shimmer. Elemental synthesis. There is a feeling of the glacial source, formed into a place one can remain for a while,
And hear, how within From silver libation bowls The source streams, poured By pure hands, as ice crystals
Are touched By warm rays and overthrown By gently enlivening light Peaks of snow drench the Earth With purest water.[5]
Excursus: Natur
Hölderlin’s “Homecoming: To Relatives” begins with a description of the Alps in proximity to the Bodensee, before later narrating a return to his native Swabia:
Within the Alps it is still bright night and the cloud, Composing poems full of joy, covers the yawning valley within. This way, that way, roars and rushes the playful mountain breeze, Steep down through the fir trees a ray of light gleams and vanishes. Chaos, trembling with joy, slowly hurries and struggles, Young in form, yet strong, it celebrates loving strife Amidst the rocks, it seethes and shakes in its eternal bounds, For more bacchantically morning rises within. For the year grows more endlessly there and the holy Hours, the days, are more boldly ordered and mingled. Yet the thunderbird notes the time and between Mountains, high in the air he hovers and calls out the day. Now in the depths within, the little village also awakens and Fearless, familiar with heights, looks up from under the peaks. Divining growth, for already, like lightning, the ancient Waterfalls crash, the ground steaming beneath the falls, Echo resounds all about, and the immeasurable workshop, Dispensing gifts, moves its arm by day and night.[6]
This passage is a key point of entry to Hölderlin’s poetics of the elements, through which he coordinates the relationship between the gods and what he will call, with profoundly self-conscious attention to the act of nomination, “Natur.” The strophe moves through a composition of elemental powers. The cloud, covering the mountain valley, composes poems full of joy. Through the valley the mountain breeze roars and rushes. A ray of light gleams and vanishes through the fir trees. And now Chaos—Hesiodic origin—trembles with joy amidst the rocks, seethes and shakes within eternal bounds in the manner Hölderlin will attribute to the Rhine in his hymn of the same period. Ancient waterfalls crash on steaming ground, and Echo resounds throughout “the immeasurable workshop,” dispensing the gifts of elemental beings—the mountains, the light, the breeze, the waterfalls—through synesthetic resonance. The village wakes into the holy hours, the days, the endlessly developing year of this confluence, “ordered, mingled.” The poem describes heights that are familiar to the village, but where the poet has never been: it transmits the poetizing joy of the cloud even as “bright night” still lingers in the Alps, the darkly gleaming medium of imagination.
The second strophe then turns to the realm and the dispensation of the god—“der reine / Seelige Gott”—who dwells “above the light,” higher still than the height of the peaks familiar to the mountain village,
Meanwhile the silvery heights gleam peacefully above, Up there the luminous snow is already full of roses. And still higher up, above the light, dwells the pure Blissful god rejoicing in the play of holy rays. Silently he dwells alone, and brightly shines his countenance, The aetherial one seems inclined to give life To create joy, with us, as often, when, knowing the measure, Also knowing those who breathe, hesitant and sparing, the god Sends true good fortune to towns and houses and gentle Rain to open the land, brooding clouds, and then you, Dearest breezes, you gentle springtimes, And with patient hand brings joy again to those who mourn, When he renews the seasons, the creative ones, refreshes And seizes the silent hearts of aging men, And works down to the depths, and opens and brightens up, As he loves to do, and now once again a life begins, Grace blooms, as before, and present spirit comes, And a joyous courage spreads its wings once more.[7]
The aetherial one—frequently named Father Aether in the poems of this period—bestows life and fortune upon the mortals and “renews the seasons.” The god opens, brightens, refreshes both the earth and “the silent hearts of aging men.” First we encounter the Alps and “the measureless workshop” of elemental composition; then we encounter the god—who dwells alone in silence, yet higher than the light itself—who orders and mixes the elements themselves, inscribing the rhythm of the year. Through the invigorating distribution of elemental essences—rains, breezes, holy rays, the opening and brightening of the depths of the earth—springtime brings joy to those who mourn, life begins, grace blooms, spirit presences, and courage spreads its wings.
In the opening strophes of “Homecoming,” prosopopoeia mediates the relation between physical processes and divine agency. In the first strophe, realist description is blended with allegorical style (Chaos, Echo), while in the second strophe, apostrophe (“you, / dearest breezes, you gentle springtimes”) intimates the animating power of the aetherial one upon the elements and seasons. The Alps are the poetic site of that which dwells on high, where the little village and the towering peaks encounter the mythic powers of creation and the transcendence of the god. Poetry praises the most high, and in the very act of doing so—sublating earth and heaven through the productive negativity of language, transfiguring powers and things through tropes—it lifts them into another medium, into letter and voice, whereby the interiority of feeling emerges from the meaning latent in sense.
But the metaphysical and physical harmony of the scene described here is riven and disoriented in Hölderlin’s mature poetry by the crisis, the turning point, of modernity. In “The Archipelago,” the gods themselves are afflicted with melancholic yearning for those who had venerated them, while the separation of godless mortals from divinity and community is not only a matter of spiritual destitution but of the mode of production:
But the light above, even to this day it speaks to men, Replete with beautiful significance, and it rings out the Thunderer’s Voice: do you think of me? and the sorrowing wave of the Sea God Echoes it back: do you never remember me, as before? For the heavenly ones like to repose in the feeling heart; Always, as ever, the inspiriting powers still gladly guide The striving man and omnipresent Aether Lives and rests and reigns in the hills of the homeland, So that a loving people, gathered in the father’s arms, Be humanly joyful, as ever, and one spirit common to all. But alas! Our kind wanders in night, dwells as in Orcus, Godless. And they are forged only To their own exertion, and each in the roaring workshop Hears only himself and the brutes labor heavily With mighty arm, without rest, yet ever and ever Fruitless, like the Furies, remains the toil of the poor. Until, awakened from the nightmare, the soul of men Rises, youthfully glad, and the gracious breath of love, Again, as often before, upon the flowering children of Hellas, In a new age over our calmer brows Blows the spirit of nature, the far-wanderer, again Silently abiding the god appears in golden clouds.[8]
Here again the elements mediate the relation between gods and men. The gods of the Greek archipelago are in abeyance, but “even to this day” the light “speaks to men”: it calls out the voice of Thunderer, which echoes from the “sorrowing wave” of the Sea God. The mediation of the light and the wave conveys the trace of the gods as the question of their recollection. The gods desire their affective interiorization by a “feeling heart,” in the form of worship. In a more famous passage from “The Rhine,” this desire is described as a need (bedürfen) that takes the form of an exception: their own immortality is enough for the gods, and they have need of one thing: they need “heroes and men / And mortals” because the most blessed feel nothing by themselves (Die Seeligsten nichts fühlen von selbst) and therefore need another to feel on their behalf—to partake of feeling in their name (in der Götter Nahmen / Theilnehmend fühlen ein Andrer / Den brachen sie).[9] Earlier in “The Archipelago” this need for human beings to partake of the divine through affective receptivity depends upon elemental mediation: when the noble mortals of antiquity no longer live beside the Sea God, it is the “hallowed elements” (geweihten / Elemente) which need the hearts of men to feel their glory, as heroes need wreathes.[10]
In “The Archipelago,” “omnipresent Aether” still “lives and rests and reigns” in the geographical site of ancient Greece, and the “inspiriting powers”—“always as ever”—still offer guidance, such that “a loving people, gathered in the father’s arms, / Be humanly joyful, as ever, and one spirit common to all.”[11] But it is precisely at the moment when Hölderlin so achingly evokes “the communism of spirits”[12] that he then delivers his most harrowing description of the industrial division of labor as what Marx will call “a process of separation” (Scheidungsprozess). Whereas there is and ought to be one spirit common to all, “our kind” (unser Geschlecht) is nevertheless historically divided from the social actualization of spiritual equality and community by the social form of a labor process in which “each is forged / only to their own exertion” rather than bound to others. Human beings are reduced to beasts (die Wilden) whose brute strength is figured as a single “mighty arm,” divided from intellectual and spiritual synthesis and laboring without rest: “Fruitless, like the Furies, remains the toil of the poor.”[13] Hölderlin is never more proximate to Marx, contrasting the communism of spirits with the alienation of labor and the strange fruitlessness of labor power expended toward what will come to be understood as the production of surplus value and the accumulation of capital. Note that the “immeasurable workshop” of the elemental processes evoked in the first strophe of the poem, which dispenses gifts and moves its arm day and night, returns here as “the roaring workshop” in which each “hears only himself.” Hölderlin’s historical poetics is bound to his poetics of the elements because the latter involves a pathos of receptivity that should enable us to feel the gods through the elements, and thus enable the gods to partake of this feeling through our feeling hearts, but which is overwhelmed by the sensory oblivion and temporal fruitlessness of the factory. Industrial labor is figured as a nightmare from which the soul will eventually awaken, and the passage concludes with the utopian vision of a new age in which the breath of love will blow the spirit of nature over the relaxed brows of a revived humanity, ready once more to perceive the silently abiding god in the golden clouds.
But if it is “the spirit of nature” that will reawaken humanity to the presence of the gods through the mediation of the elements, we must bear in mind that “Nature” is explicitly thematized as a concept by Hölderlin, as a poetic name, which itself emerges from the “desolate time” of modernity. In “At the Source of the Danube,” the patriarchs and prophets of Asia were the first who knew how to speak to God alone, but these strong ones—rooted on mountains and “fearless before the signs of the world”—are now at rest. Their absence bequeaths a question—from whence?—to which they did not pass on an answer, and to this reticence responds an act of nomination which makes the given new:
But if you, And this must be said, All you ancients, would not say, from whence? We name you, under holy compulsion, we Nature! name you, and new, as from the bath rises From you all that is godly born.[14]
Hölderlin’s grammar and syntax are strained to a breaking point. The reference of the question “woher?” is ambiguous, as if to redouble and further complicate the silence of the ancients who did not answer it.[15] The act of nomination—Natur!—is postponed by the attribution of a “holy compulsion” and then by the repetition of the verb “nennen,” before the name itself abruptly intervenes between predicate and subject (“Wir nennen dich, heiliggenöthiget, nennen / Natur! dich wir”). The advent of the name both lags behind and precedes its constitution as grammatical object (“dich…dich”), as if interrupting and rearranging a stutter. Amid these grammatical contortions, the evental articulation of Natur supplements the abeyance of a source: the name stands in for the authoritative transmission of an origin, the absence of which produces its supplementary enunciation. “Nature” seems to refer to phusis: that which is godly born, that which emerges, new, as if from a bath. But here the sentimental signifier (Natur) of the naïve (phusis) self-consciously thematizes the retroactive structure of its historical emergence, its belated nomination of an absent source, and thus it not only posits the source to which it refers, it also knows this act of positing—the production of the name—as the necessity of its belatedness. The enunciation positions the sense of the name as the historical significance of its positing. Phusis would be the immanent emergence of that which has itself as its own end, of that which grows into its growing. But here poiesis is the renewal of what is named by the act of naming, which knows what it makes in the very act of making. “Natur!” answers “woher?” but the source does not proceed the act of nomination: the techne of poetic art is the production of the position—grammatical and historical—in which the name may displace the absence of an ancient source by producing itself as the source of the new.
Grammatically and conceptually, Hölderlin’s poem thus understands that Nature is not a given: Nature is the name of the historical sublation of phusis by poiesis through techne. The advent of the modern, through the default of origin, is inscribed by the signifier “Nature.” The significance of the inscription may be grasped through its relation to the key passage in the fifth strophe of “As on a day of rest…” (Wie wenn am Feiertage…), in which Hölderlin locates the source of the ancient gods themselves in song:
You ask of them? in song their spirit drifts When from the day’s sun and warm earth It grows, and storms, those in the air, and others Long foregathered in the depths of time, And more meaningful, more resonant for us, Roam between heaven and earth and among the peoples. They are the thoughts of the communal spirit, Coming to rest in the poet’s soul[16]
Should one ask after the gods, it is in Hesiod, in Homer, in Pindar that one may find them. Their presence, historical eclipse, and possible return is not a matter of objective circumstance; it is a matter of the relationship of poetry, of song, to the community. Yet their incorporation into song also stems from the elements: it grows from sun and the earth; it gathers in storms and it roams between heaven and earth as “thoughts of communal spirit” which come to rest in the soul of the poet. The elemental growth and transmission of the spirit of the gods thus has a deeper genesis as well, emerging from storms which are not “those in the air” but “others / Long foregathered in the depths of time.” These are “more meaningful” and “more resonant” for us, replete with hints and presentiments. Here one powerfully senses the indistinction of the historical and the metaphysical in Hölderlin’s poetic thinking: the revolution implicitly roams through the lines as it roams “among the peoples,” even as these storms foregathered in the depths of time may have many other resonances as well. A poet like Hesiod narrates a mythic cosmological genesis that has, as its condition of possibility, a process of physical cosmological genesis, and his poetic activity has historical conditions. “The poet’s soul” gathers these apparently discrepant registers “from the signs and the deeds of the world” and transmits the confluence of their becoming in song. The spirit of the gods—“ Die Allebendigen, die Kräfte der Götter”—is neither “objective” nor “subjective”: it stems from the synthesis of a complex spatio-temporal genesis—physical, metaphysical, historical—communally distributed yet gathered and recorded by a certain kind of soul (that of the poet). The “spirit of the gods” is physically ineffable and historically fragile; the depths of time are inscrutable, and elemental sensations are transient. “But what lasts, the poets establish.”[17]
Hegel’s remarks in his Lectures on Fine Art may help us to think through the stakes of Hölderlin’s lines:
Thus, for example, in the case of the Greeks, art was the highest form in which the people represented the gods to themselves and gave themselves some awareness of the truth. This is why the poets and artists became for the Greeks the creators of their gods, i.e. the artists gave the nation a definite idea of the behaviour, life, and effectiveness of the Divine [Wirken des Göttlichen], or, in other words, the definite content of religion. And it was not as if these ideas and doctrines were already there, in advance of poetry, in an abstract mode of consciousness as general religious propositions and categories of thought, and then later were only clothed in imagery by artists and given an external adornment in poetry; on the contrary, the mode of artistic production was such that what fermented in these poets they could work out only in this form of art and poetry….This is the original true standing of art as the first and immediate satisfaction of absolute spirit.[18]
It is not only that the spirit of the gods may be found in song, but that poetry is, or was, the creator of the gods and therefore of the religious ethos. The gods did not proceed their poetic representation, as content fitted to verse and embellished by figurative language; they were made by poetry, and “this is the original true standing of art as the first and immediate satisfaction of absolute spirit.” Hegel judges, however, that such satisfaction is at an end: “For us art counts no longer as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself.”[19]
The pathos of Hölderlin’s position is that it accords with Hegel’s historical judgment—“But friend! We have come too late”[20]—yet, given his irrevocable poetic vocation, he cannot abide this verdict. Thus, the vocation of the poetic word will still be the enunciation of the holy, but we have seen that the word enunciated, Natur, has come to occupy the place of the holy insofar as it articulates a historical-conceptual-poetic complex:
But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come, And what I saw, the Holy be my word. For she, she herself, older than the ages And above the gods of Orient and Occident, Nature is now awakened with clamor of arms, And from Aether on high to Abyss below According to fixed law, as before, begotten of holy Chaos, Inspiration, the all-creating, again Feels itself anew.[21]
Paul de Man, in his scathing 1955 review of the essays collected in Heidegger’s Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1950), is right to insist that “The awakening of nature, caused by the poet, is not the immediate manifestation of Being, but the awakening of history that resumes its progress,” and he is right to insist that “for Hölderlin, religious experience is also a mediation.”[22] But de Man’s encounter with Heidegger’s Elucidations would have been more fruitful if he had also acknowledged that Heidegger does not understand “being” as immediate presence, and if he had reconstructed Heidegger’s account of Hölderlin through a more adequate understanding of the ontological difference: the being of beings is not a being, and thus it cannot be understood as present-at-hand; being-qua-being must be thought as a movement of temporal exteriority that ungrounds immediate presentation and is thus the ground of historicity itself. If Heidegger himself may have strayed from clarity on this point in his Hölderlin commentaries, we are nevertheless in a position to reconstruct and understand the sense of the word being on the basis of his most rigorous investigations of the question, whether early or late.[23]
In any case, our own commentary allows us to grasp the event which is narrated and the narration of the event as the confluence of a complex, historical, and highly mediated poiesis. Natur is explicitly willed as a Holy word, and the advent of its application to phenomenality is said to depend upon a waiting of indeterminate duration. Nature is that “she” named as “above the gods of Orient and Occident,” and we have seen that this naming is explicitly thematized as a self-consciously historical and poetic act in “At the Source of the Danube.” “Nature” is awakened “with clamor of arms”: the advent of the name, conceptualizing and historically positing the Absolute, is announced—and the announcement, the annunciation, is registered as a violent event, as the ruptural force of positing. In and through this positing, inspiration (Begeisterung), the all-creating, feels itself anew. As it does so, it lays claim to the purview of the Absolute, from Aether above to Abyss below, through the generative (gezeugt) contradiction between Chaos and Law. The relation between Nature and Inspiration is itself a generative contradiction: each gives rise to the other, through the force of the event of the name. Poiesis is the advent not of the identity of presence but of the generative non-identity of a source, of the contradictory reflexivity of telos. Intervening at the crux of an arduously and intimately constructed historical-conceptual problem, poetic positing makes manifest the force of this non-identity in its effectivity. Poiesis actualizes, activates the implicit contradiction endemic to the modernity of poetry. Natur is the name of that contradiction, yet this is in no sense a deflationary reading: it is because poetry sustains the capacity to construct the context in which an epochal name can take place that it may retain the power Hegel says it has lost. This itself is the deepest contradiction of Hölderlin’s poetic activity: the name of “die älter denn die Zeiten” must be articulated in the poem, and this articulation occurs within the time of the making of the poem itself, within the belated age in which the poet actually lives.
At the core of early German romanticism, we thus find the following structure: Nature is poetically posited—in a highly self-conscious act—as that which confers the power of poetic positing, and this reflexive structure itself emerges from and indexes historical conditions of possibility that are distinctly modern. Again (wieder), “Inspiration, the all-creating … / Feels itself anew.” Inspiration creates the Nature by which it is created. Hence the claim of Hölderlin’s work to centrality amid the development of German Idealism: Natur is not only, at the heart of this development, the signifier of a sentimental rather than naïve orientation; it is not only the ironic signifier of the ungrounding of ground; it is a contingent name made necessary by historical circumstances that will themselves be called a “holy compulsion.” The singular role of the poet among the philosophers is that he not only thinks and theorizes but constructs, through the intricately sited advent of the name, the position of this positing. No longer given, the holy must be made (poiesis), and this making is the reflexive work of a historical complex upon itself as historical and thus embroiled in the contradiction of “the holy” coming to be through the recognition of its dispersion.
The Death of Empedocles is the drama of this contradiction, and it is here that Hölderlin grapples most explicitly with the elemental mediation of the relation between the flight of the gods, the concept of nature, and the historical problem of poetic vocation in modernity. In the figure of Empedocles, Hölderlin finds a figure of separation, of the severance of that unity with the gods enabled by unity with elements—a unity Empedocles is said to have achieved—and of the tragic resolution of this severance through a sacrificial reunification predicated upon the elimination of individuated existence. Within this movement, Natur—to which Hölderlin’s Empedocles dedicates his inaugural hymn—takes on a recondite dialectical significance. It stands in for the Greek phusis, to which Empedocles addressed his ancient poem; thus it designates that which Empedocles theorized, and poetized through his philosophy of the elements, the four roots. Yet the German Natur is also a displacement of the ancient term by a concept which, articulated in the wake of Spinoza and Kant, cannot but be distinctly modern. Thus Natur is not that which Empedocles theorized: it is the sublation of the concept of phusis by a signifier whose sense can only be properly understood through an interpretation of its meaning in the drama at issue: The Death of Empedocles. Through Hölderlin, Empedocles comes to speak a modern tongue, and when he says Natur the word bespeaks, bequeaths, the name of a historical problem: not only the problem of separation from and yearning for integration within the Whole (the sentimental), and not only the problem of separation from the powers and the ethos of the ancients (the modern), but also the problem of how, at the crux of the modern and the sentimental, the conceptual sublation of phusis may be positioned as the hinge joining tragedy and utopia, joining the destiny of separation to the politics of community.
The complex role of the elements in this dialectic is evident in the contradiction between speeches by Mercades, in the Second Version of the drama, and by Empedocles in the First Version. Mercades recounts an “arrogant harangue” (übermüthiges Gerede) he heard Empedocles deliver in the marketplace:
You honor me, He answered them, and you are right to do so; For nature cannot say a word; The sun and air and earth and all her children live Like strangers to each other, as though Alone and not belonging. True, the ever forceful ones Do wander in the spirit of the gods; These free, immortal powers of the world Surround the transitory lives Of others; and yet Like plants out in the wild In untilled ground, in The womb of gods is sown The seed of mortals; Its nourishment is meager; dead the soil Would seem if that One were not found To minister it, awakening life, And mine is the field. In me alone The mortals and the gods are fused In force and soul, becoming one.[24]
“For nature cannot say a word” (Denn stumm ist die Natur): according to the hubristic speech of which Empedocles is accused, the elements “live like strangers to each other,” without the conjoining of philosophical thought to poetic speech. “Alone and not belonging,” the separated elements are in need of a synthesis that nature is powerless to achieve: it requires “that One” in whom “The mortals and the gods are fused / In force and soul.” This synthesis depends upon the bestowal of the power of the name: “For I / Befriend the strange,” Empedocles is said to say; “my word bestows / A name on what’s unknown.” Nature would itself seem to be such a name, applied to that which is mute and is nowhere empirically accessible as a determinate being. It is the name of elemental synthesis.
In Act 1 of the First Version, Empedocles recollects his unity with “intimate nature” and laments the condition of “haughty pride” in which he desecrated her shrine (“Das Heiligtum hast du geschändet”).[25] Yet he also weaves inspired descriptions of the Nature he mournfully apostrophizes, drawing together its texture through paeans to “the light of the sky,” “the earnest earth,” “the sacred founds, where quietly / the waters gather,” and “the winds [that] wafted otherwise within my grove.”[26] The unity of Nature is declared lost even as it is composed through elemental poiesis: what is said is that Empedocles has been “abandoned by it all,” but the poetic beauty of the saying itself still evokes the “ancient consonance” of “great nature” (“deinen alten Einklang, große Natur”).[27] Poetic utterance possesses the twofold power to make manifest that consonance, as a consonance of elements, precisely through the articulation of its disruption by hubris and its fall into silence within “my mute and mortifying breast.”[28]
In Act 2, amid his reconciliation with and sacrificial departure from the Agrigentians who had banished him, Empedocles arrives at a reversal of the arrogant harangue reported by Mercades in the Second Version:
Instead of me, when I am far away, let speak The flowers of the sky, the blossoms of the stars And those of the earth in thousandfold germination; Divinely present nature Needs no speech; no never will she leave you to Your own devices, if but once she has drawn near. For inextinguishable is the moment that is hers; And with her, victorious throughout the ages, Bestowing blessings from above, fire celestial. And when the glorious days of Saturn come, The new, more manly days, Then think of times gone by, and live a life warmed by The genius of your fathers’ sayings once again! To celebrate with you will come, as though invited by The canticle of vernal light, the all-forgotten world Of heroes rising from the realm of the shades, And with the golden clouds of mourning may Your memories be gathered, joyful ones! about you.—[29]
In the “arrogant harangue” reported by Mercades, nature is mute, and thus it needs the synthetic power of speech to fuse the separated elements. Here, on the other hand, “Divinely present nature / Needs no speech [Rede],” since the flowers of the sky and those of earth may speak (sprechen) in the absence of the philosopher/poet. Nature, whose moment is inextinguishable, will bestow its blessings through “fire celestial,” and “the all-forgotten world / Of heroes” will be “as though invited by / The canticle of vernal light.” Poetry draws together elemental powers through the discursive speech it tells us nature does not need. Yet, as I have argued, “nature” is itself recognized in Hölderlin’s poetry as a name and a concept conferred upon elemental synthesis as that which it produces: i.e. the unity posited by this concept emerges from an act of positing rather than an act of representation. Thus, Natur is the name of the separation of nature from itself as that which “needs no speech”: the separation of nature from phusis. And again, everything here depends upon the precision through which poetry, through which poetic drama, positions signifiers. Poetry produces concepts immanent to its movement, interior to its determinations, through the formally singular distribution of otherwise common words: such would be the dual power of poiesis and techne within the poetic text.
As the sacrificial movement of The Death of Empedocles draws to a close, that synthesis of the elements it calls Natur is positioned as the impossible suture of tragedy and utopia. It is impossible because “all-transforming Nature”[30] cannot play the role it is assigned in the drama. Signifier of subsuming unity, sublating the process of autotelic genesis signified by phusis into the Idea of the whole, it cannot mean what it says, nor say what it means, because it is riven between contradictory imperatives to designate the whole and, in order to say what the whole is, to dissolve it into the enumeration of particulars.[31] Nature is mute, and thus needs speech, but nature needs no speech: it speaks. This mute speech takes the form not of concepts, not of words, but of the phenomena those designate. Consider the great utopian prophecy with which Empedocles takes leave of the polis:
Oh, give yourselves to nature, before she takes you!— For you have thirsted long for things unfamiliar, and As though imprisoned in a sickly body the spirit Of Agrigent is yearning now to slough off the old ways. So, dare it! your inheritance, what you’ve earned and learned, The narratives of all your fathers’ voices teaching you, All law and custom, names of all the ancient gods, Forget these things courageously; like newborn babes Your eyes will open to the godliness of nature, And then your spirit will take flame from The light of heaven, sweet breath of life Will then suffuse your breast anew, And forests full of golden fruits will sway beneath The wind, and springs will jet from rocks, when The world’s life, her spirit of peace, embraces you; She’ll nurse your soul and calm you with a blessed lullaby; And from the velvet twilight of delight The green of earth will glisten once again And mountain and sea and cloud and star, The noble forces, all heroic brothers bound to you, Will then appear before your eyes, that like a warrior Your breast will clamor mightily for deeds, and you Will dwell within your own grand world, shake hands With one another, give the word and share the good. Oh then dear friends—partake of deeds and fame, Like faithful Dioscuri; each will be the equal of The others—like slender statues in repose your New Life will come to rest on well-conceived Arrangements, letting law tie confederate bonds. You tutelary spirits of our all-transforming nature! then, Oh then, you’ll summon all unto your cheerful side, you Who take your joy in heights and depths, However toil and luck and sun and rain may Befall the heart of mortals in their narrow quarters, You will invite from all the far-flung corners of the world The liberated peoples to the celebrated festival, Hospitable! pious! for mortals then will donate lovingly Their very best; no form of servitude Will cramp and crush the breast— [32]
According to Empedocles, “the spirit / Of Agrigent is yearning now to slough off the old ways,”and devotion to nature is the means by which this will be achieved. Giving oneself to nature, and thereby courageously forgetting ancient custom, is the act through which “like newborn babes / Your eyes will open to the godliness of nature.” The reflexive structure of this act seems to imply a surrender of political techne to the autotelic unfolding of phusis: giving oneself to nature opens one’s eyes to nature—rather than culture—and this will then give rise to the cultural rebirth of the community: new laws, well-conceived social arrangements, equality, and universal peace will grow from or indeed within immersion in nature, as “new life.”
The utopian logic of this speech is in high tension with the tragic destiny to which the suicidal will of Empedocles testifies. By his own account and that of his followers, Empedocles devoted himself to and was at one with nature; yet precisely this attainment seems to have resulted in its ruination, giving rise not to political wisdom but rather to the hubris through which he elevated himself above the community and declared himself a god, the “lord and master” of nature itself. Moreover, the imperative to “give yourselves to nature, before she takes you!” precisely conveys the suicidal course on which Empedocles is bent: since nature is the concept of the whole, integration into the whole is incompatible with individuated existence. This is the logic of his sacrifice.
Yet what he ends up saying in the midst of his prophecy is also implicitly at odds with its conceptual teleology: it is not “nature” per se but rather golden fruits that sway beneath the wind, springs that jet from rocks, the velvet twilight, the green earth, mountain, sea, cloud, and star—i.e. particular manifestations of the elements, not the immanence of their synthesis—that will “appear before your eyes.” These particulars are precisely what Empedocles will lose when he plunges into Mount Etna: he will surrender the drama of individuation, of determinate existence, to which distinctions among the elements gives rise. Thus his speech may be taken to imply a wisdom its speaker does not quite grasp: address yourselves to the particulars, to the resolutely individuated roots from which they stem, to determinate manifestations of transformation rather than to becoming itself, rather than to the subsuming force of “all-transforming nature.”
~
If I have exercised a certain vigilance with respect to the teleology of the concept of nature, or indeed to the Kantian sense in which nature is an Idea, that is because the question of the relationship between the elements and nature offers an approach to the drama of individuation with broader implications not only for Hölderlin’s poetics, but also for Peter Zumthor’s architecture, and for the modern history of the arts to which they belong in different ways. It is mediation that I see at stake in this question. In Hölderlin’s figurative schema, the gods need mortals to feel the phenomena in order to feel themselves—one might say, in order to exist—and the elements are those essences of phenomenality that mortals feel. Insofar as they are both essences and individuated, they preserve a layer of mediation between being and beings, relating the particular to the universal without dissolving singularities of phenomenal presentation into the whole of becoming.
I would like to read Peter Zumthor’s work as a technically meticulous and soulfully poetic effort to foreground such mediation—elemental mediation—in the field of contemporary architecture. In doing so, I would like as well to bring out the historical stakes of that effort, or at least to limn certain contours of its historical determinations and implications, slowly but surely, in a manner that may only become clear toward the end of this essay. That is to say, long passages in my descriptions and discussion of his work may not seem to be “historical,” but we will see if the approach takes on that character as the breadth of what is at issue in Zumthor’s architecture comes into focus.
The relation of modernism to modernity would alter the terms of the romantic complex with which Hölderlin grapples, and here I can only touch upon this vast intervention through Zumthor’s relation to the architectural modernism of the International Style. It is the industrial production of materials—glass, steel, reinforced concrete—that enables the structural innovations of the International Style, in particular the powers of geometrical abstraction and transparency grounding its disputed, complex, and contextually specific negations of local context—or, if one likes, its contested claims upon the transcendence of history and nature. As Kunsthaus Bregenz demonstrates, Zumthor has thoroughly absorbed the conceptual strengths, the aesthetic achievements, and the technical affordances of his modernist precursors (particularly Mies), yet his work is steeped in regional craft traditions, frequently devoted to the use of local materials, and constitutively informed by site specificity.
Zumthor often reflects on shifts in his architectural formation—from his apprenticeship as a cabinet maker in his father’s workshop, to his modernist education at the College of Applied Arts in Basel and the Pratt Institute in New York, to his eventual recognition of the need to integrate these elements of his training with a historically and geographically specific approach to site and community. He comments on this trajectory in an interview with Mari Lending, published as A Feeling of History:
Looking back, I see that my work and my specific approach to architecture has developed over a long period of time since I received my first modernistic training at the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, modelled on Bauhaus ideas. Then, design was all about being innovative, about finding new solutions to mostly old problems, about fighting history, even overcoming history. Since then, my approach to design and history has changed a lot. Looking at the world around me now makes me realize: Everything I see is history. Almost everything that surrounds us, our landscapes, villages, and cities, down to our houses and the rooms where we live, is fully of history; we just have to see it. Everything has been made by someone, by people I don’t know, people I have never met, and most of them long dead. Increasingly, that is a reassuring feeling, it makes me feel part of the world.[33]
We will see in our commentaries on Zumthor’s Therme Vals, Kolumba Museum, and Bruder Klaus Field Chapel how deeply and variously this commitment to history informs his practice. For now, we can register not only the recognition of historical determinations that comes to suffuse his work, but also his sense of the effort required to “see” history, to become familiar with the unfamiliarity both of natural history and of what has been made by “people I don’t know, people I have never met, and most of them long dead.”
With his formation in mind, I would argue that Zumthor’s architecture is a signal exemplar of what should be called late modernism. The depth of its immersion in modernist practices is matched by the clarity of its indifference to “postmodernist” fashions, which enables a concentration upon what his training as a cabinetmaker, his study of local craft traditions and the specificity of each site, can bring to the poetic treatment of materials and architectural environments. This late modernist practice involves an important relationship between modernism and romanticism. Hölderlin’s poetry is intensely attuned to the geographical specificity of the regions upon which it meditates and to the communal and existential separations of modernity, which it expresses and transmutes through the pervasive allegory of the flight of the gods. Yet this allegory mythologizes a historical process at the same time that it naturalizes it through the recuperative construction of the concept of Nature—one ultimately riven between tragedy and utopia and thus overburdening the problem of separation with the metaphysical vocation of achieving, through elemental synthesis, the hen kei pan—an overburdening dramatized by the tragic fate of Empedocles.[34]
When he comments on his work, Zumthor sometimes speaks in a way suggesting the persistent temptation of such overburdening. His thinking about the relation between elements, things, and the states of mind transpiring through them must be precisely apprehended while also being delimited in its application to his architecture:
The world is full of signs and information, which stand for things that no one fully understands because they, too, turn out to be signs for other things. Yet the real thing remains hidden. No one ever gets to see it. Nevertheless, I am convinced that real things do exist, however endangered they may be. There are earth and water, the light of the sun, landscapes and vegetation; and there are objects, made by man, such as machines, tools, or musical instruments, which are what they are, which are not mere vehicles for an artistic message, and whose presence is self-evident.
When we look at objects or buildings that seem to be at peace within themselves, our perception becomes calm and dulled. The objects we perceive have no message for us; they are simply there. Our perceptive faculties grow quiet, unprejudiced, and unacquisitive. They reach beyond signs and symbols; they are open, empty. It is as if we could see something on which we cannot focus our consciousness. Here, in this perceptual vacuum, a memory may surface, a memory that seems to issue from the depths of time. Now, our observation of the object embraces a presentiment of the world in all its wholeness because there is nothing that cannot be understood.[35]
“There is nothing that cannot be understood” does not mean that everything is understood. It means that understanding is not what is ultimately at issue: there is nothing that cannot be understood because it is a “presentiment,” not the task of understanding, that surfaces in the psyche. Nevertheless, I think Zumthor oversteps the mark his own work inscribes when he refers the kind of presentiment it produces to “the world in all its wholeness.” What I think he means is that the clearing of the faculties—which grow “quiet, unprejudiced, and unacquisitive”—produces a condition of negative capability in which the observation of the object gives way to the presentiment that the world is not an object, and therefore that “world” is not a phenomenon determinable by the faculty of understanding. Perhaps there is a teleological intimation at issue in the experience Zumthor describes, but I think his remark implicitly confuses what Kant calls an aesthetic idea with what he calls an idea of reason. An idea of reason is “a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate”: i.e. it is the concept of a concept, an Idea, such as “the world in all its wholeness.” An aesthetic idea is “the counterpart (pendant) of an idea of reason,” and it is different from the latter insofar as it is a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e. concept, to be adequate to it.” “The world in all its wholeness” is itself a determinate thought, a concept raised to an idea, that is not adequate to the presentiment Zumthor describes, which, I would argue, “give[s] the imagination an impetus to think more, although in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended in a concept.”[36]
When it is achieved, Zumthor claims, the self-evidence of architectural presentation refers us to elemental essences—earth and water, the light of the sun, landscapes and vegetation—and these, he says, are “real things” that exist, as are technical objects such as machines, tools, and musical instruments. The made is equal to the given insofar as it presents realities that “are not mere vehicles for an artistic message.” These realities may present themselves as “self-evident,” rather than as signs for other things, yet, through the quietness of the perceptual faculties they produce, they also occasion a “perceptual vacuum” in which “a memory may surface, a memory that seems to issue from the depths of time.” Thus, Zumthor describes a state in which what is sufficient to itself produces something other than its presence: a recollective temporality in excess of both subject and object, the surfacing of that which is emphatically not present to a perceptual beholder. The being of beings is not a being—i.e. it is neither a being within the world nor the world in all its wholeness—and might thus be accessed through a presentiment that takes the form of a memory, at the limit of conscious and unconscious activity, rather than through the immediacy of what is there. The self-evidence of mere things or the architectural presentation of elemental essences, when these come to the foreground of our experience, mediate an emergence from “the depths of time,” and because this emergence is mediated, because it passes through elements and things, it is not only ontological but historical. Being and history encounter one another in the passage through aesthetic ideas that arise from determinate presentations.
In the case of Kunsthaus Bregenz, modernist technique allows a treatment of materials that releases and configures elemental potentials which evoke and reconstruct the history and the feeling of the landscape—in particular, the immediate proximity of the Bodensee and the deep history of its glacial formation. It is the signal innovation of the International Style, the curtain wall façade, that enables the building’s unique filtration of natural light into the enclosed spaces of stacked levels through hanging glass ceilings, while weight-bearing elements—the three perpendicular concrete support walls—lend the interior environment its strange combination of massive structural heft and floating, geometrically articulated illumination. The tension between these conveys the sense of elemental suspension that imbues one’s ascent through the modular repetition of levels with the feeling of rising through an aqueous environment, illuminated by the filtration of light from above. The unseen presence of the lake and the unconscious sense of its glacial formation (perhaps registered through the glowing, icy tint of the light) enter the building, creating a mnemonic and phenomenological evocation of history and site through the geometrical and structural affordances of modernist style.
Zumthor notes that materials “can assume a poetic quality in the context of the architectural object, although only if the architect is able to generate a meaningful situation for them, since the materials in themselves are not poetic.”[37] He admires and attempts a precise and sensuous approach to materials “anchored in an ancient, elemental knowledge about man’s use of materials” which can also “expose the very essence of those materials, which is beyond all culturally conveyed meaning.” Materials have innate qualities, an elemental essence, yet it is their formal treatment and structural configuration, the manner in which their preparation is related to use and sensuous experience, and their relation to site and architectural context, that endows them with a poetic significance which is always specific to a particular building:
The sense that I try to instill into materials is beyond all rules of composition, and their tangibility, smell, and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language we are obliged to use. Sense emerges when I succeed in bringing out the specific meanings of certain materials in my buildings, meanings that can only be perceived in just this way in this one building. If we work towards this goal, we must constantly ask ourselves what the use of a particular material could mean in a specific architectural context.[38]
In Kunsthaus Bregenz, it is the relational treatment of glass and stone surfaces (etching and polishing) in coordination with the structural disposition of steel frame, grid façade, and rectangular supports that activate an elemental mingling of light and volume evocative of the displaced yet circumambient water of the lake, which enters into the poetic significance of the materials. Modernist minimalism, and its structural deployment of geometrical abstraction, enables the sensuous concretion of historically and geographically specific significance drawn from elemental relations and their phenomenal effects.
Returning to moments in the art of modernity that Zumthor’s work incorporates, we might say that the architectural modernism of the International Style overcomes the romantic recourse to Nature as a compensatory metaphysical totality, but it sometimes does so through a hypostatization of Form tending toward abstraction from historical and geographical context and a use of materials sometimes indifferent to site specificity. Like Hölderlin’s romantic poetry, Zumthor’s late modernist architecture takes the expression of elemental essences as a central artistic problem. Yet it finds among the traditions upon which it draws the resources of a double negation: a negation of Nature by geometrical abstraction; a negation of ahistorical Form by craft and by site. In order to understand how this double negation achieves a practice of elemental expression adequate to the demands of a dialectically rigorous late modernism—one that incorporates rather than disavowing the inheritance of both modernism and romanticism—we have to follow Zumthor’s work into Graubünden, and then up the Rhine to Cologne and Wachendorf.
Excursion: Graubünden
Toward Therme Vals. But first we need to survey some of the works that constellate the region, allowing us to frame the achievement of Zumthor’s masterpiece.
May 11. Werkraum Bregenzerwald exemplifies the combination of modernist form and local craft traditions in Zumthor’s architecture. Completed in 2013, its function is to display the work of local artisans of the Bregenzerwald region—cabinetmakers, carpenters, builders, plumbers, metalworkers, graphic artists, goldsmiths, upholsterers, and stove-makers, who formed an affiliation in 1999. As Zumthor writes, “the local artisans wanted to build a craft and design center in their valley…where they could get together and show their craftsmanship to the public, undertake common projects, make furniture collections and material archives available, hold conversations with clients, schedule seminars and workshops, and celebrate special occasions like the Artisans’ Ball with the valley residents.”[39] After a thirty-minute drive southeast through the forest from Bregenz to Andelsbuch, the low profile of the transparent glass showroom and its overhanging dark wooden roof looms into view alongside the road in the center of town, with meadows stretching out from the parking lot behind it into the green hills.
Figure 9, Werkraum Bregenzerwald (2008-2013), Photograph by Nathan Brown
The rectangular parallelepiped of the façade is composed of large panels of clear glass framed by steel beams. It encloses a large open volume, punctuated by dark wooden columns, wrapped with narrow black leather bands along the lower third, and structured by two large concrete blocks which house, in their interior, a stairwell to bathrooms and a kitchen, with another block outside housing an elevator. These stabilize the imposing wooden roof floating overhead and substantially overhanging the rectangular façade, structured by a grid of open squares with dark-blue felt padding inside for acoustics and with lighting and electrical systems set within the frame. The dark terrazzo floor was arduously poured in over a dozen layers without expansion joints or structural articulations to alleviate pressure, thus taking on a uniform consistency and a liquid sheen while acquiring anticipated fault lines over time. The space is vast and flexible, open to a wide variety of configurations for exhibitions and displays, and above all open to the surrounding exterior for events, visually connected with the countryside and the road.
Figure 10, Werkraum Bregenzerwald, Interior, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Architecturally, the overhanging dark roof and clear glass box are strongly reminiscent of Mies van Rohe’s 1968 Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin, and this may be the only Zumthor building one could plausibly describe as “derivative.” But it is differentiated from Mies’s gallery by the important structural role of the large concrete volumes with their interior rooms, and the structural bulk of these lend the building that peculiar tension between mass and lightness also characteristic of Kunsthaus Bregenz, an intermingling of gravity and open space. The Werkraum building, however, does not seek the kind of emotional gravity achieved by the Kunsthaus. Here the darkness of the roof, of the floor, of the columns and their leather wrapping, of the concrete volumes does offer a somber tone, but not one that is psychologically complex or mnemonically evocative. The mood is open yet formal: rationally serious and reflective but not emotionally dense; rather it is conducive to the attentive curiosity appropriate to the commercial character of the building and the informative character of its exhibitions, a mode of attention that is sharp but also convivial and brisk.
The construction of the building and the sourcing of its materials was carried out in collaboration with the local craftspeople whose work it would represent and with whom Zumthor had established relationships during the construction of Kunsthaus Bregenz in the 1990s. Their skill is evident in the detail of the leather wrappings, in the meticulous application of the floor, in the joinery and the lighting. One can acquire a small box of maps as a guide to notable architecture and craft workshops in the region: an homage to the heyday of the International Style thus spirals out toward local traditions carried into the present and intersecting with the prolific range of late modernist architecture throughout Vorarlberg.[40]
May 12. Into Graubünden. I’m staying in Ober Says, a tiny village in the mountains just north of Chur and Haldenstein, where Zumthor’s studio was constructed in the mid-1980s. My neighbor, visible from a balcony overlooking the mountains across the valley, is a charismatic pig who wanders snorting along a path circling the adjacent yard. From the village there’s a path into an open meadow stretching out to a ridge along which I walk to a copse of trees, looking over the valley, where I read Hölderlin for a while in the evening light:
But the handmaids of heaven Are miraculous, As is everything born of the gods. Try taking it by surprise, and it turns To a dream; try matching it by force, And punishment is the reward; Often, when you’ve barely given it A thought, it just happens.[41]
May 13. From Chur, one passes into Haldenstein across a bridge over the Rhine. Walking toward the north end of the village, one sees the patio garden of Atelier Zumthor (1985-1986) on the right, with cherry trees and a shaded rear façade of glass and wood. The windowless west side of the building rises like the end of a tall shed, yet one whose simplicity is so beautifully rendered its provenance is unmistakable. An exterior shell of long and narrow larch-wood slats, weathered to a matte blue-grey, foregrounds the verticality of the structure and suggests its designer’s apprenticeship as a cabinet maker. Around the corner, the vertical slats of the wooden shell directly meet the road and slope down its incline right along the length of the building, as though having grown into or out of the ground it covers. The formal artistry of the narrow slats blends with the natural tone of the wood and the organicism of the structure’s sloping horizontal asymmetry.
Figure 11, Atelier Zumthor (1985-1986), Haldenstein, Photograph by Nathan Brown
A distinctly small, isolated square window toward the north end matches a regional feature one sees among other alpine homes in the village, but, well above eye-level, a long rectangular strip of narrow windows stretching across the façade again distinguishes the architectural formality of the structure and draws attention to its height. These windows illuminate, from behind, the drawing studio on the second floor, which looks out from the larger windows on the other side to the relative privacy of the garden patio. Beneath the upper windows, near but slightly off center, a black metal rectangle protrudes from the wooden shell, encasing the door within its brooding shelter. This rather alien detail, a floating portal, framing and shielding the only street-side door, marks off the building from the architectural world of the village, and it marks the privacy and reflective interiority of the space as well: this is not the sort of door one knocks on uninvited. One finds again that Stimmung characteristic of Zumthor’s architectural oeuvre: the muted drama of a soulful intelligence—one that is naturally at ease, calmly articulate, refined, confidently composed.
Passing back over to Chur, the Shelter for Roman Architectural Ruins (1985-1986) is a shed-like construction, composed of a permeable sheath of wider, horizontal wooden slats. The two cubes facing the road are each punctuated by a black, protruding metal box that frames a large window. The sheds glow from within when illuminated at night, and the large box windows draw the visitor to gaze inside at the excavated ruins. Around the side, a door frame dramatically protrudes from the shell on the left, first in a vertically articulated, accordion-like extension of the wood, then into a black metal box with a visible, built-in stair step floating just above the ground.
Figure 12, Shelter for Roman Archaeological Ruins (1985-1986), Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 13, Shelter for Roman Archaeological Ruins, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 14, Shelter for Roman Archaeological Ruins, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
There seems to be an argument at issue in these protruding door frames, or at least a rhetorical figure: these are not only doors but passageways, thresholds extending into exterior space and thus claiming it as part of the interior, as an extension of the interior, and therefore—figurally as well as functionally—as an assertion of interiority. Between exterior and interior, one is meant to undergo a change of state. In terms of program, the protruding door frame also marks directionality: one walks into the first cube and then across a footbridge toward a similar accordion corridor connecting it to the next shed, a passageway visible from the exterior. Above, enormous skylights extend from the roofs and, dramatically, into the interior as recessed diamond boxes (their corners pointing at the sides of the box sheds). One notes that both the Atelier and the Shelter are marked by ornamental flourishes that are nevertheless examples of minimalist commitments: sharply denoted geometrical volumes articulating thresholds between interior and exterior (windows and doors) serve a rhetorical and thematic purpose while strongly conveying a mood—slightly ominous, or at least mysterious, demarcating a gravity inherent to the act of passing between worlds. In order to be noted as thus implicit, it has to be explicitly marked.
Toward the north end of Chur, the Apartments for Senior Citizens (1989-1993) bring the foregrounding of wood by the Atelier and the Shelter back into harmony with stone. The apartments extend as a long, two-story volume equally divided by twenty-two recessed balconies facing east toward the setting sun across the valley. The structure has the feel of a constructivist rectangular plane, extending across a gently sloping incline above a narrower concrete foundation and rounded by a curving path for residents to walk on. The thick stone walls, which dominate the two ends of the rectangular volume, are made of tufa blocks in varying sizes: creamy, porous, warm. The stone blends together with the larch-wood window frames and balcony railings facing across the valley. On the access side of the building, it forms column-like divisions between large windows along both stories of the whole façade, also framed in wood and illuminating corridors and common areas.
Figure 15, Apartments for Senior Citizens (1989-1993), Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 16, Apartments for Senior Citizens, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 17, Apartments for Senior Citizens, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Zumthor notes that “the trio of tufa masonry, exposed concrete ceilings, and larch-wood is familiar to the people in this area; it even has something refined about it, for in Graubünden tufa was once used for important public buildings. The waxed larch-wood floors are made of really thick boards fixed on a lath underlay, and they sound like wood when walked upon.”[42] The low rectilinear extension of the building, the massive solidity of its end walls, the geometrical regularity of its windows and balconies framed in regional materials, and the hanging flower pots and tapestries that come to decorate them create an earnest synthesis of abstraction and vernacular dignity. “The circumstances must have been favorable, for today I realize that we succeeded in building a rather elegant senior citizen’s residence for ordinary people within the framework of the budget granted by the state.”[43]
May 15. St. Benedict Chapel (1985-1988). One must be cautious in attempting to describe this building, trying to state the sense of its presence. Perhaps it is the most evasive, ambiguous, and profound of Zumthor’s works. What is it about this simple chapel that forever anchors in the psyche? Why does it strike one with the emotional singularity of an unprecedented form, imposing an ambiguous demand?
Figure 18, Saint Benedict Chapel (1985-1988), Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
From Chur, one approaches Sumvitg heading west along the highway, then turns up toward the chapel along a narrow, winding road above a valley, hairpin turns leading you into the foothills. One parks near the ruins of the old chapel, destroyed by an avalanche in the early 1980s, its rough stone walls cresting a mound of earth, the contours of its base grounded in the curvature of the slope, extending out toward the expanse of the valley. Further along the upward curving road, then turning up a footpath to the left, Zumthor’s chapel appears against the background of a dense evergreen forest with grey peaks rising above it. Low on the left, with a doorway extending from the narrow end of the building into concrete steps meeting the path, the curvature of the building slopes down the steep hill such that the wider eastern side of the building, down the hill, is twice the height of its narrow western side by the path. The chapel presents a modest entryway, the protruding doorframe angled so as to guide those approaching toward the wooden door composed of narrow vertical slats with a beautiful curved metal handle, extending horizontally above a traditional keyhole notched in a metal square.
Figure 19, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 20, Saint Benedict Chapel, Door Handle, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Larch-wood shingles, blending light and dark brown to black, present the curvature of the volume to the eye beneath a ribbon of narrow, vertical windows at the top, delicately divided by narrow wooden slats, opening here and there onto the interior. A slightly arched metal roof above a horizontal ribbon of windows, wooden shingles encasing a sloping volume all the way down to the earth, the door extending organically from the low side of an as-yet indistinct shape, the ladder structure of a fragile wooden bell tower rising vertically beside the front of the building. This is what you see as you approach the chapel, the valley stretching out to the right into distant recesses, ringed by mountains; grey rocks growing out of the hill to the left, grass flowing down into flowering yards and meadows.
Figure 21, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Viewed from the front, the chapel presents a sharp vertical wedge, bending out below the curvature of its roof along its swelling sides. Inside, the interior presents a gestalt of the building’s geometry, grasped piecemeal from outside: the shape of a leaf, or a boat, or a drop of water. From the center of the narthex, one sees a single curve rounding the apse behind a simple altar and widening around a row of light ash wood pews toward the narrow angle of the wedge behind you, closing the shape. On the right side of the pews near the doorway, a copper holy water font, greened inside; a metal cross in the center of the altar; to its left, a Virgin and Child icon housed in a small metal box supported by a delicate metal plinth; worn wooden floors beneath the pews, a beautiful wood beam ceiling above, both made of diagonal boards meeting in the middle of the dewdrop form. Vertical wooden beams, unfinished, rise just inside the curvature of the chapel’s walls like minimal interior buttresses, articulating the space, separated by thin metal rods from a silvery sheath around the walls, which catches the light and the shadow from the ribbon windows above, drawing the unseen outside into the lemniscate curvature of the unified interior space.
Figure 22, Saint Benedict Chapel, Interior, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Stepping back outside, the building pours you down its northern flank to view it from below, where it rises commandingly above the steep slope of the meadow. The tiny chapel now takes on the disproportion of the sublime. It is as though the figuratively quaint form of the Christian ichthys had grown, as one sought to encompass the entirety of its exterior shape, into a colossal Leviathan, imposing and serene. Viewed at an angle from the northeast, or facing the building straight from the east, where it extends furthest down the hill, its form seems strangely unprecedented, sloping organically down the hill yet rising above it toward the sky, mountain peaks in the background, jutting with imperious command toward the valley, intensely defamiliarizing, as unearthly in its form as was the light of Kunsthaus Bregenz, yet curiously akin to its own environment. Indeed, the chapel protrudes from the hillside like one among the rocks surrounding it, growing out of and punctuating the green meadow with their grey mass. The shingles on the north side of the building have taken on a glowing silvery sheen, like the curved panels around the interior walls. Those on the southern side are a warm brown, flecked with lighter or darker panels and absorbing the gaze just as the grey, shimmering planes on the other side seem to deflect it.
Figure 23, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 24, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
It is of course the rotation of the earth around the sun that determines these phenomenal transitions: shimmering grey, soulful brown, alternating in the round. The ground of these appearances is planetary, and this structure grows from the earth like a beacon of some unrecognizable beyond. One cannot overstate the ominous sense of implausible advent emanating from this form. Yet it seems at the same time earthly, descending modestly down a grassy slope and then looming up from the now sudden height of its rounded eastern wall. Through this strange double sense of humility and grandeur, one feels the earth gathered into a sign of itself, meadow and rock, wildflower and mountain, planet and place, growing from the hillside as a form which resists any referent, even as it invites a proliferation of analogies. Drawing one’s gaze out into the valley, indicating it in a manner implicit in the lengthwise ruins of the older church, yet grasped and radicalized by the sharp incline of this location, the structure designates its own site. That casual drift of the base of the Atelier in Haldenstein down the gradual incline of the slope onto which it was built…something was already there that could enter into the profundity realized here: the earth become unearthly while made manifest as ground. The distinction of the building from the rocks to which it is akin: it is not what the sign means but that it is a sign which is unsettling.
Something of the uncanny imperative of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” speaks through presence of this structure:
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.[44]
Whereas in Rilke’s poem it is the absent countenance of the sculptural figure that endows the form of its torso with the generative power of the gaze, emanating as if from within, in the case of the Zumthor’s chapel it is the incommensurable harmony of exterior and interior worlds which generates the cognitive and emotional negativity of its form. Explaining his aversion to rectilinear forms in churches, Zumthor writes, “The idea that its exterior form would be defined by a single interior space fascinated me. This is the notion of a simple vessel. I wanted to find a soft, maternal form for my vessel.”[45] Yet the softness of this interior form, the gentle curvature of its enclosure, finds itself not only in harmony but also in tension with the ominous sculptural presence of the exterior, the heft of a massive diagonal volume rising above the valley. Mediating this contradiction, one realizes, is the horizontal plane of the interior floor, shaped by the interior walls yet indifferent to the exterior slope of the hill. Indeed, the floor of the chapel extends from the entry on the west, nearly level with the path outside, to the midpoint of the eastern wall, which slopes down the valley. I.e. the floor, extending above the sloping hillside on interior supports above a stairstep foundation, approximately bisects the verticality of the chapel’s highest wall.
Inside the chapel, with no windows at eye level, the slope into the valley beneath is perceptually and proprioceptively negated; outside the chapel, faced with the curvature and the diagonal, downward flow of its exterior walls, which seem to grow upwards from the slope of the earth, the horizontal stability of its interior surface is difficult to imagine. It is the horizontal plane of the floor—invisible from without, projecting into the invisible valley from within—that engenders and stabilizes the dialectical torque of this structure, the irreconcilability of interior humility and exterior magnificence. Space is actualized as the medium of a dialectical relation between the expansion of distance and the gathering of enclosure, which brings into relation two intimately correlated manifestations of Geist: the expansive exteriority of the world and the sheltered interiority of reflective meditation, each negating the other while nevertheless synthesized by a subject who perceives and who feels—whose body, obdurately located in the space it constitutes and inhabits, comes to know itself as the locus of this synthesis.
Consider the opening strophe of Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace”:
The anciently built hall, blessed by custom, Is aired, filled with heavenly, quietly resounding, Gently modulating music; glad clouds Of scent drift over green carpets and, Far-shining, abundant with ripest fruits And gold-wreathed chalices, Well-ordered, a splendid row, The tables rise on either side Above the levelled floor. For, at the evening hour, Loving guests have pledged To come here from afar.[46]
Although what is depicted likely has no direct empirical referent—it is the representation of an imagined scene, laden with the artifice of symbolism—the strophe is nonetheless an act of poetic mimesis in the Homeric sense reconstructed by Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato.[47] Poetry, here, is the preservation and transmission of paideia; representation is the mimesis of ethos. Hölderlin sets the table. The guests are expected; they will have their expectations. Readers will read the poem—and this is very much a presentation piece, a program.
The tables themselves are set upon a levelled floor. Thus they balance the gold-wreathed chalices and the bowls of fruit. The tables are wohlangeordnet: they are properly arranged. The hall is altegebaute and Seeliggewohnte: it is aged, well-known, sanctified, welcoming. What is implied here is a system of cultural norms that has been not only properly but “splendidly” (prächtige) adhered to. It’s important to note that it is not particularly relevant, as it certainly was in Homeric epic, whether or not these are the norms of Hölderlin’s own culture: what matters is the representation of an ethos as one’s own. This contingency is one aspect of the “sentimental” disposition of Hölderlin’s modern poetry, a disposition that applies not only to the representation of nature but also to the representation of culture, which may treat the mimesis of tradition as if one belonged to it—as how things ought to be—though it may well stem from another time or another place.
Figure 25, Saint Benedict Chapel, Holy Water Fount, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 26, Saint Benedict Chapel, Icon, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The hall is aired (gelüftet). Architecture is the medium through which the elements enter into the interior space of their intentional deployment, of their constructedness. The passage of air between exterior and interior space seems almost given, least in need of intentional design, yet it is also that element most closely identical to the shape of space itself. The hall, in Hölderlin’s poem, is the interior space of expectation—it designates the site of an arrival from afar—and it is prepared through exposure to exteriority, the air which passes through it. If the incommensurable moods occasioned by the outside and inside of Zumthor’s chapel—the disproportion of the sublime and the simple harmony of the beautiful—emphasize the power of architectural mediation to divide and yet synthesize the given and made, to construct a unitary tension between these, so too do the form and the content of Hölderlin’s strophe. For while its content is the mimesis of ceremonial propriety, “Celebration of Peace” opens with a headnote begging the reader’s patience with the impropriety of its verse, which breaks with regular measures of Hölderlin’s previous odes, elegies, and hexameters. If “some should think such a language too unconventional, I must confess to them: I cannot do otherwise.” The floor of the hall is levelled, but the form of the verse is uneven—and this is the case, Hölderlin insists, insofar as his song stems from nature: “On a beautiful day—they should consider—almost every mode of song [jede Sangart] makes itself heard; and nature, whence it originates, also receives it again.” Just as nature receives every manner of song it gives rise to, so should the unconventional verses Hölderlin cannot help but compose (ich kann nicht anders) be received as participants in the choir of the Whole.
Poetry, unlike architecture, is not subject to the law of gravity. Within the anciently built hall, the floor must be level so that the tables can hold the chalices which hold the wine; they must support the bowls that hold the fruit. The floor of the Zumthor’s chapel may bend and flex, with the slightest incline toward the center, but it must support the altar that holds the cross. Yet space passes through the hall or the chapel, ungrounded, and poetry may include the words “table” or “chalice” in uneven measures without spilling the imagined yet unmentioned wine. Air is said to hover over the Hölderlin’s green carpets; it really does surround Zumthor’s ash wood pews, and every kind of song one may hear on a beautiful day must pass through this elemental medium. Yet air—elemental space—is nevertheless shaped by architectural form as it passes through the valley, around the curvature of the building, or as it circulates within its enclosure. And the song of poetry—unmoored from the gravity of ground—is measured by verse, even if that verse is irregular.
Something about this play between regularity and irregularity, convention and its displacement, is as vital to Zumthor’s chapel as it is to Hölderlin’s opening strophe. Through the dialectic of slope and plane that distinguishes exterior and interior physiognomy, through the uneven earthliness of its foundation and the horizontal projection of its horizontal floor, the chapel foregrounds the give and take of architecture’s negotiation with gravitational force, even as it also foregrounds the shaping of space itself: the rounding of its evanescence, the leeway of light from on high. The disjunction of interior harmony and exterior disproportion nonetheless partakes of the same form, the same contour. What would come to be called free verse—the singularity of Hölderlin’s lines—also involves this play between propriety and disproportion. As the form of the poem—the space it occupies on the page and the song it traces in the air—is shaped by the play between measure and unmeasure, between rhythmic ground, the stability of the left margin, and the gravitationless flux of sound and signifier, the content of the poem tells us that the tension it thus constructs involves an elemental passage between nature and culture, into and out of the shapes we make with the space we are given: “und gelüftet is der altgebaute, / Seeliggewohnte Saal.”
Excursion: Sils Maria
May 16-18. Three days in Sils Maria (Figures 27-28). Green meadows stretching out from the town toward the Lake Sils, circled by meandering wooded paths leading up into the Alps. Hiking up toward the Lunghin Pass—a triple watershed with runoff to the North Sea along the Rhine, to the Mediterranean along the River Po, and to the Black Sea along the Danube—one encounters the Lunginsee, an alpine lake at 2645 meters, which seems a frozen double of the Silsersee far below.
Figure 27, Sils Maria, Lunghinsee at the Lunghin Pass, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 28, Sils Maria, Silsersee from the path toward the Lunghin Pass, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The Lunginsee glows gently with a blue-green hue, nestled among the crags, while the larger lake on the valley floor gleams and reflects the clouds above, drifting in the clarion sky within and across the ring of snow-capped summits. Glances of Enzian along the mountain path, a snowless meadow to lie in the sun; a simple afternoon.
Since around us are heaped The peaks of time, and the most beloved Live near, languishing upon Most separate mountains, Give us blameless water, O give us wings, minds most true To cross over and to return.[48]
A riddle compounding itself just where it finds its solution: it is as though Hölderlin had been here, where blameless water runs down to the source of the Rhine.
Earth: Therme Vals
May 19-22. Therme Vals (1990-1996). From the road below it appears as a huge rectangular plane of grey stone emerging from the side of the valley, fifty-eight meters long and nine meters high, asymmetrically hollowed by rectilinear volumes encasing large dark windows set back from the façade, and also dotted by smaller square windows flush with its surface. Again, one is struck by the sense of a geometrical structure having grown from the earth, monumental and imposing, yet belonging to the ground it recedes into. Above the rectangular façade, grass and wildflowers grow over the roof of the building, merging with the slope of the hillside.
Figure 29, Therme Vals (1990-1996), Facade, Photograph by Scott M. Schultz
Figure 30, Therme Vals, Grass Roof and Northern Wall, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The building is conceived as a single volume, set into the hill and articulated within by fifteen massive blocks that support ceilings up to five meters high. The blocks create meandering paths through the structure while also enclosing different baths and relaxation rooms within their interiors. The environment feels essentially subtractive: one moves through voids and sinks into water. Displacement is not only foregrounded as a somatic, elemental experience, but also as the governing concept of the work. In this sense, architectural concept and elemental sensation are indistinguishable.
Figure 31, Therme Vals, Plan of Meander and Blocks, Peter Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 2
Figure 32, Therme Vals, Meander and Blocks, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
The construction of the building’s stone walls involves a deep relationship between architectural form and local site: they are composed of 60,000 deep grey slabs of Vals gneiss, sourced entirely from the quarry just outside the village, cut to varying lengths and stacked in narrow layers, streaked here and there with white quartz and marked by endlessly fascinating occlusions. All the shingles of the roofs in the town are made of this stone. The geometry of the masonry—stacks of sheet after sheet of implacably hard yet narrow, delicately cut gneiss—conveys a sense of gravity and compression, implicitly suggesting the metamorphosis of the original rock, 300 million years old, by the formation of the Alps 50 million years ago, a process resulting into the ridged layering of stacked wedges characteristic of Vals gneiss before it is cut or processed.[49] This sense of compression is offset by the vast empty volumes one moves through in the main space of the building and by the silky texture of the water, as well as by the light seeping in through narrow openings along the edges of the cantilevered concrete ceiling slabs, high overhead and supported by the blocks, as well as through the grid of blue windows in the ceiling above the main interior pool, each illuminated after dark by a lamp stemming from the grass roof outside.
Figure 33, Therme Vals, Central Pool, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
Brass doors and railings lend a rich but muted metallic gleam against the play of blue water and grey walls. In the main outdoor pool, three large, cylindrical brass founts curve overhead, continuously pouring heavy streams of water into the pool, where it cascades over the body and laps into overflow channels along the wall. The floor of the pool is an irregular pattern of rectangular slabs, a grey-blue mosaic flowing into shallow stone steps. In the corridor through which you enter the baths, mineral water flows from spigots at intervals down the concrete walls, staining them with textured shades of ochre and crimson. Dark, glossy wooden cabinets and leather benches warm the changing rooms, and the long staircase through which one enters the vast main space of the baths, slowed by its gradually descending steps, lends a sense of theatricality to the unveiling of their interior world, with its flickering patterns of light across stone and water. The blocks around the central indoor pool form a pinwheel pattern, divided asymmetrically by wide stone steps leading into and out of the water from all four sides. Descending into this vast interior space, one glimpses the large windows looking out onto the valley on the east side, and, below the entry stairs on the right, a narrow corridor of water through which you can swim directly into the outdoor pool, passing under a metallic curtain marking the division of the interior and exterior.
Figure 34, Therme Vals, Exterior Pool, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
Kunsthaus Bregenz expels the water of the Bodensee from one’s field of vision through the construction of a windowless monad, yet draws the sense of a subaqueous world into the building by the filtration of light through its ceilings. Therme Vals hollows a cavity into the earth, yet everywhere presents the elemental absence of what has been removed through the surrounding compression of layered stone, such that one seems to inhabit the empty space left by removal of these sheets of rock from the nearby quarry. Water mediates the relation between stone and void. It suspends one within the element of that mediation. It also suffuses the air of the steam rooms; the sounds of water pouring into itself or lapping against the walls echo against the stone and through the air. Because the interior is underground, wedged into the hill, one is reminded of the source of the natural thermal springs just above the building, which flow out of the earth into reservoirs below and into the pools. Precisely because one moves through its absence, earth is the elemental dominant of Therme Vals, drawing water, air, light and heat together in the field of its reconstruction as volume.
Figure 35, Therme Vals, Lounge Area, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
As usual, it is the meticulous treatment of materials that enables an expression of elemental essences: a foregrounding of hardness or mass, of fluidity and immersive depth, of the transmission of sound or the feeling of humidity, of streaming illumination or the play of shadows. But what is singular about Therme Vals is how the complex and flexible choreography of space and experience enables such expression in a manner that is above all dramatic.
Figure 36, Therme Vals, Interior Pool, Photograph by Ulrike Parnow
The steam rooms, set deep under the hill in the southwest corner of the building, and easily overlooked as one moves through the space, are emblematic of this dramatic choreography. On blueprints one sees two identical sets of three staggered chambers running parallel, yet each is inaccessible to the other: a shower room at the near end leads into one set of rooms; an identical shower room at the far end leads into the other set of rooms, such that one enters each set from the opposite direction of the other. This layout is only gradually and dimly discovered or reconstructed as one explores this portion of the baths; thus the differential repetition of experiencing the same rooms in different directions conveys, initially, an eerie sense of displaced recognition. In either direction, one steps from the shower rooms through a leather curtain into a chamber about three meters square, thick with steam and illuminated only by a single golden light overhead. To each side there is a solid rectangular block of black basalt rising some three feet off the ground, about two feet wide and seven feet long. One lies on these slabs staring up at the ceiling, watching the steam gather and disperse as it pours into the room below another leather curtain leading into another chamber. One chamber leads to the next, identical except for the increasing density of steam and intensity of heat, until at the back of the third chamber one encounters the source of the heat: a hieratic brass cylinder, rounded at the top, rising from the ground and ringed by brass railings. The progression through these chambers imposes a sense of formal inevitability and lapidary rigor, even as the experiential process is obscure, mysterious, perhaps claustrophobic. Though one knows the high ceilings and the outdoor platform of the baths are around the corner, one feels deeply encased in the earth, even entombed, in the hazy depth of these chambers, their heat resonating through brass as if from the core of the planet.
Figure 37, Therme Vals, Floorplan (steam rooms upper left), Peter Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 2
As one meanders through the baths, the distinct environments within each block are gradually discovered—the Fire Bath (42 degrees) with its red concrete walls; the small Cold Bath (14 degrees) just across from it, into which one plunges down steps leading into the water from a narrow corridor, surrounded by blue concrete walls; the Flower Bath, with its floating marigold petals and fragrant mist; the Sound Bath, into which one swims around two corners through a narrow water corridor, with its underwater jets rumbling through the high square enclosure of rough stone walls ringed by brass railings just above the surface; the Drinking Stone, with its beautiful brass fountain pouring unfiltered mineral water straight from the warm spring; the Sound Stone, in which one sits or lies in the dark on an upholstered bench listening to a minimalist sound piece by Fritz Hauser, Wanderung (1996), composed especially for this room using sounding stones made by the sculptor Arthur Schneider; the deep quiet of the rest spaces, with their square picture frame windows and the glossy warm sheen of their polished wood lounge chairs. The sense of seeking conveyed by the concatenation of these experiences, their sensory and elemental textures, is indeed “romantic.” Through the artwork, through the exploration of its made form and of the occasions it makes available, through the choreography of natural materials and embodied sensations it constructs, one seeks that confluence of conscious and unconscious activity which is its source and which is transformed by every passage through its determinations.
Figure 38, Therme Vals, Exterior Pool, Photograph by Ulrike Parnow
Zumthor emphasizes the manner in which the expression of elemental textures, eventually delivered to phenomenality through meticulous craftsmanship, initially emerged from attention to affordances of site:
We observed the place, its surroundings. We were interested in the stone roofs, their structure reminiscent of reflexes on water. We walked around the village and, suddenly, everywhere there were boulders, big and small walls, loosely stacked rough plates, split material; we saw quarries of different sizes, slopes cut away, and rock formations. Thinking of our baths, of the hot springs pushing out of the earth behind our building site, we found the gneiss in Vals more and more interesting; we started looking at it in greater detail—split, hewn, cut, polished; we discovered the white “eyes” in what is called augen gneiss, the mica, the mineral structures, the layers, the infinitely iridescent tones of grey.[50]
It is the particular structure of this stone that catches the eye and leads to a closer investigation of its properties; it is the stone’s particular situation in this place that begins to inspire architectural ideas. When Zumthor speaks of form, the order of process is similar:
Form is not something we work on—we apply ourselves to all the other things. To sound, noises, materials, construction, anatomy, etc. The body of architecture, in the primary stages, is construction, anatomy: putting things together in a logical fashion. These are the things we apply ourselves to, while at the same time keeping our eye on place, and on use. That is all that is demanded of me—here is the place, on which I may or may not have some influence, and this is the use. We generally create a large model, or a drawing. Usually it’s a model. And sometimes you can see at that stage that it feels right—things are coherent. And then I might look at it and say: sure, it coheres, but it isn’t beautiful. So at the end of the day I actually do take a look at things. What I find is that when things have come out well they tend to assume a form which often surprises me when I finally stand back from the work and which makes me think: you could never have imagined when you started that this would be the outcome.
One begins with materials, with their properties, with place, and with the problem of coherent construction. Beautiful form emerges from the way in which these come together, and through adjustments to their disposition. It does not stem from a priori ideas.[51]
This order of architectural practice matters because it allows unconscious determinations to enter into the process of composition: memories, feelings, sensations that emerge in the investigation of relationships between materials and places. Moreover, this openness to contingencies of process, through the investigation of materials and places, relays the welling up of thoughts and feelings to those who experience the architectural environment. In the case of Therme Vals, Zumthor notes in this respect not only the use of local stone in the buildings of the town, or the rocks dotting the green hillsides, or the source of the spring behind the building site, but also of histories and local structures spanning radically discrepant timescales: an old advertisement for Vals sparkling water featuring an image of “The Vals Valley 80 Million Years Ago,” showing low mounds of earth immersed in a primordial lake, or the cathedral-like interior of the nearby Albigna dam, built with stone and concrete.[52]
Of course, these histories and materials—in the fragility of the emotions they generate—are vulnerable to appropriation. Zumthor describes his move to Graubünden and his purchase of a small farmhouse in Haldenstein, after his studies at the Pratt Institute in New York, as part of his immersion in “the spirit of ’68.” He explains that his political orientation, and that of his friends among Swiss Germans in the late 1960s and 1970s, was set against the relevance of “art” and “design,” and that he was then involved in the Bauernhausforschung project, inventorying farmhouses in Graubünden for some ten years before finally making his way toward a career in architecture.[53] Zumthor speaks of Therme Vals as “purely a project of the community,”[54] and one might view it not only as a personal reconciliation of his locally oriented politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s with his modernist architectural education, but also, more generally, of the communal ethos of that period with the formal possibilities of minimalist abstraction, so resonant in his preparatory studies. “The Thermal Baths in Vals were never envisioned as a marketing product that would attract attention through name recognition or by being an architectural landmark,” he notes. “The overriding concern throughout was the quality of the services: bathing as an experience and a ritual…We architects were able to think the Therme Vals in radical terms because the people in Vals permitted us to think in radical terms.”[55] This was possible because of the income the community drew from sales of sparkling water and because the President of the community-owned hotel and others were able to rally citizens of the village around Zumthor’s project at town meetings.
By 2012, however, the commune was unable to afford necessary renovations of the hotel complex dating from the 1960s, and the spa and hotel were sold to local property developer Remo Stoffel for 7.8 million Swiss francs, concluding a battle for ownership between Stoffel and Zumthor himself.[56] Though it was voted through by the citizens, Zumthor viewed this sale as the end of the communal ethos of the baths: “This project was a social project, me and my wife lived there for almost twenty years with the community and it was owned by the community and was successful. It now belongs to a financial figure who bought all of it and destroyed it. The bath is a landmark so nothing will happen to the bath, but this social project is dead.”[57] Visiting in 2022, it was hard to disagree with that judgment. The Therme remains open to residents of the village at a reduced rate, but, overall, the site operates as a luxury resort, with packages including helicopter flights to an alpine glacier.[58] The beauty of the baths remains inviolable, but the emotional experience of that beauty is indeed compromised by the economic conditions of possibility for accessing it. Though ownership of the baths reverted from Stoffel to the municipality later in 2022, that seems unlikely to change.
Excursion: Swabia
May 24. The source of the Danube is disputed. The river rises from the confluence of the Brigach and the Breg in Donaueschingen, the site marked on the shore by a stone engraved with the distance in kilometers to the Danube delta of the Black Sea, 2779. Symbolically, the Donauquelle is located at a spring on the grounds of the Donaueschingen castle, marked by an ornate circular pool with allegorical statues (1895) by Adolf Heer, and by a small temple where the spring flows into the Brigach beside Schlosspark Donaueschingen. Here elms lean over the river banks, the current sweeps flowing algae toward the confluence with the Breg, and swans swim slowly upstream.
Figure 39, Donauquelle in Donauschingen, Sculptures by Adolf Heer (1895), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 40, Donautempel (1910), Donauschingen, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 41, Swans near the Donautempel, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Hydrologically, however, the source of the Danube is the source of the Breg in Furtwangen, which is marked by a humbler plaque claiming it as the Donau-Quelle. In 1981, the Minister of the Interior of Baden-Württemberg declared that the source of the Breg should no longer be named as the source of the Danube on official maps, inflaming a decades-long rivalry between the two towns.
Whatever the case may be, at the site where the flowing water takes on the determinacy of the name—Donau—just where the Breg and the Brigach come together, it is now a highway overpass that dominates the site. As of May 2022, its concrete pillar bore the graffitied inscription ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) which may be a more apt commentary than allegorical statuary or municipal rancor on the course of the relation between Nature and History in the twenty-first century.
Figure 42, Marker at the Confluence of the Breg and the Brigach, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 43, Freeway Overpass at the Confluence of the Breg and the Brigach, Photograph by Nathan Brown
If at the Donautempel one thinks of Hölderlin, watching the swans dip their heads in the holy sober water, here one might think of him being hauled off by the authorities to Authenrieth’s clinic in Tübingen, where he was encouraged to accommodate himself to the way of the world by having a mask strapped to his face to prevent him from screaming. Doch Alles geht so.
May 23. The star-shaped ornament has gone missing, but water still flows continuously from the wooden stem of Heidegger’s rustic fountain into the hollowed log beside the Hütte in Todtnauberg. It’s a lovely place, long grass blowing the wind, wild flowers running downhill into the nestled valley, green Schäferkopf shutter holders peering out from the wood shingle siding. One is not, however, struck by the recessed mystery of the site. It’s a little retreat just outside of town, a second property, not a Brothers Grimm hermitage lodged deep in the forest.
Figure 44, Fountain at the Heidegger Hütte, Todtnauberg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 45, Heidegger Hütte, Todtnauberg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 46, View toward Todtnauberg from the Heidegger Hütte, Photograph by Nathan Brown
May 25. On the other hand, no matter how familiar one may be with its image or how often one has contemplated the strange destiny it embodies, the Hölderlinturm resonates more powerfully than expected with the beguiling contingency and symbolic weight of its location on the Neckar. Ensconced in mournful willows alongside the Tübingen Stift, where clusters of roses bloom on vines in the courtyard, it sits as well across the river from the Plantanenallee on the Neckarinsel, which leads down to the memorial of Swabian lieder composer Friedrich Silcher (1789-1860), erected by the Nazis in 1941. Silcher’s arrangements of Volkslieder were published in songbooks distributed to German soldiers, like the field volumes of Hölderlin’s poems. Signboards by the monument show photographs of the foundation stone ceremony in 1939: columns of plane trees bedecked with swastika banners. Graffiti on the monument itself reads NAZI DENKMAL.
Figure 47, Hölderlinturm viewed from the Nekarinsel, , Tübingen, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 48, Roses in the Courtyard of the Tübingen Stift, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 49, Silcher Denkmal (1941), Nekarinsel, Tübingen, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Stift, Turm, Denkmal—the triangle of a triple catastrophe: the failure of philosophy to cultivate the rational determination of history; the incompatibility of Hölderlin’s social and historical world with the ground of his vocation; the reactionary incorporation of deutsche Gesang into the project of genocidal ethnonationalism. The leaves of the plane trees rustle overhead along the Neckarinsel; the peak of the Turm glistens in the sunlight to the north; here in the courtyard of the Stift, just to the west of the Turm, the vines stem from the earth and rise up the walls—hier ist die Rose, hier tanze. The river murmurs as it passes by. We are on our way up the Rhine to Cologne.
Air: Kolumba Museum
In those days Germany, a hectic flush on its cheeks, was reeling at the heights of its savage triumphs, about to win the world on the strength of the one pact that it intended to keep and had signed with its blood. Today, in the embrace of demons, a hand over one eye, the other staring in horror, it plummets from despair to despair. When will it reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of this final hopelessness, will a miracle that goes beyond faith bear the light of hope? –Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
In May 1942 Cologne was subjected to the RAF’s first “Thousand Bomber Raid,” in which some 1500 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, destroying much of its medieval core. On June 29, 1943, over ninety percent of the city was left in ruins by British and American bombardments. By the end of the fire bombings inflicted upon German cities toward the end of the war, with massive air raids in October 1944 and March 1945, Cologne was reduced to skeletal remnants presided over by the dark form of its magnificent Cathedral, the construction of which had begun in 1248 and was completed in 1880, now damaged but not destroyed.
Figure 50, Chapel, “Madonna in den Trümmern” (1947), Gottfried Böhm
Southwest of the Cathedral, St. Kolumba church had lain in ruins since 1943, its original Romanesque structure dating at least to the ninth century, its Gothic renovation from the fifteenth. Parts of several walls remained, preserving the hollow form of their early Gothic arches, along with the base of the Romanesque tower and, standing exposed to the elements at the crumbling northeast pillar of the former nave, a statue of the Virgin and Child—the infant headless, the Mother of God’s downcast eyes gazing diagonally into the rubble. The statue would come to be venerated as the Madonna in the Ruins, and in 1947 Cologne architect Gottfried Böhm was commissioned to build a chapel around it, an octagonal sanctuary completed in 1950 with choir windows by Ludwig Gies installed in 1954. The windows convene flights of angels, nearly abstract grey and beige diagonal planes across the verticality of narrow blue panels, their round yellow faces at once innocent, solicitous, perplexed, as if having just arrived from the heavens to see what might be asked of them in this fractured place, where shelter is so fragile.[59] In 1973, archaeological excavations uncovered vestiges of Roman buildings, along with further traces of the medieval and Gothic churches. Ruins above and ruins below—relics, remnants, riddles, traces of transformation both abrupt and gradual, intentional and unforeseen, catastrophic and callous or tender and careful, replete with imagination, memory, and hope.
May 27. The architecture of Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum seems to breathe, in and out, the dialectic of shelter and exposure with which the site is suffused. Commissioned in 1997 and completed in 2007, the building preserves the walls of the older churches as part of its own, it folds the whole of Böhm’s chapel into its enclosure, and it holds open a space for the archaeological excavation. At the heart of the ground floor is a vast room supported by slender forty-foot pillars rising from the open ground of the excavation, the depths of which are traversed by a zigzag footbridge of red sandalwood with wide, sumptuously polished handrails.
Figure 51, Kolumba Museum (1997-2007), Cologne, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 52, Kolumba Museum, Excavation Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
With the ruins below spot-lit by conical pendant lights, descending from the ceiling high overhead, the bridge leads here toward the arches of the medieval ruins, there toward the stained glass windows adorning the octagonal form of the sheltered chapel, allowing one’s gaze to drift down into the ancient stones or up toward perforations high in the warm grey brick work, rising over the older walls, through which light and air flow from outside, illuminating angels in cerulean glass, speckling the matter of centuries, and flickering—absences themselves composing abstract artworks—with intimations of exteriority. The red-brown warmth of the footbridge; the illuminated stones of the open ground; the dark survival of arches and pillars; the lighter grey of the brickwork rising above; the bright blue and yellow of the stained glass: all of these constitute a single space that seems to be composed of fragility and endurance, in which the tension between these amounts to the composition of space itself. In the reflective atmosphere of this room, at once meandering and still, calm and brooding, the openness of space itself seems to be unveiled and protected.
Figure 53, Kolumba Museum, Excavation Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
One feels powerfully, yet with a certain lightness of determination, how vulnerable are all our projects to the vicissitudes of history, to the carelessness of our ambitions and the blunt stupidity of violence, how everything that we infuse with form and spirit may collapse back into hunks of matter, a heap of broken fragments, yet may also be recovered, reconstructed, preserved and witnessed—indeed, worshipped. The footbridge ends in an iron gate passing back outside to a small courtyard, enclosed by the gothic walls of the former sacristy and marked by the somber weight of Richard Serra’s sculpture The Drowned and the Saved (Die Untergegangenen und die Geretteten, 1992), its title drawn from Primo Levi and its two L-shaped pieces of forged steel mutually supporting one another to form a horizontal beam.
Figure 54, Richard Serra, The Drowned and the Saved (1992) at Kolumba Museum, Photograph by Nathan Brown
As one approaches Kolumba from the east, walking west from the Rhine along Brükenstrasse, one passes by this courtyard formed of the old sacristy, into which one can see through the empty arch of an original window. One then turns the corner north onto Kolumbastrasse, where the basalt wall of Böhm’s 1956 extension of his chapel remains, built into the massive western facade of the new structure. At the northern edge of the basalt wall, a large, smooth handle is carved directly into the black stone of the door, opening into the chapel where a round basalt altar marks the center of the sanctuary, with the Madonna in the Ruins suspended on the wall between the stained glass windows which one sees in the round from the interior room on other side.
Figure 55, Kolumba Museum, Basalt Wall of 1956 Extension of Böhm’s Chapel, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 56, Kolumba Museum, Basalt Door Handle, 1956 Extension of Böhm’s Chapel, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Entering the foyer of the museum, floor-to-ceiling windows on the left look out onto a large open courtyard, occupying the former site of a medieval cemetery, accessible through glass doors with slender rectangular handles wrapped in strips of dark leather. Eleven tall, spindly honey locust trees rise into the open volume, their wispy foliage filtering the light, their narrow trunks demarcating the bed of stones strewn throughout, scattered with chairs to sit and reflect. The southern wall of the courtyard offers a clear view of the brick masonry intersecting with medieval columns and arches.[60] The lower eastern and northern walls are built of rammed concrete, its earthy beige layers conveying, already, a material sense of the sedimented histories one will encounter in the excavation room. A long stone bench, running below the surviving arches, is the permanent plinth of a sculpture by Hans Josephsohn, Large Recumbent Woman, a dark, seemingly charred figure lying on its back gazing up at the sky.
Figure 57, Kolumba Museum, Doors to Courtyard, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 58, Hans Josephsohn, Large Recumbent Woman (2000), Kolumba Museum, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 59, Kolumba Museum, Doors to Excavation Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Returning to the foyer, large double doors of metal open onto a small antechamber divided from the excavation room by heavy brown leather curtains. To the right of the doors, a dark narrow staircase leads upward toward a concrete wall, before turning back toward the upper floors. The railings are polished teak, a warm contrast to the steel railings of Kunsthaus Bregenz, just as the warm yellow glow of the lighting so markedly shifts the mood from the turquoise, aqueous illumination of Zumthor’s Bregenz staircases, which poured through the etched glass above. Here the passage from one floor to another is more deeply contemplative, as if to emphasize the predominance of affective interiority over the phenomenal and structural virtuosity of the museum on the Bodensee. The mood is religious, preparing our disposition to encounter the collection of the Archdiocese of Cologne, housed on the levels above. As at Bregenz, the space of the exhibition floors glows with the silky polish of continuous terrazzo poured between lustrous concrete walls. Exterior light from vast yet sparsely interspersed windows gleams around corners, while spot lights illuminate works in display cases of stained laurel grain veneer and starkly outlined rectangular openings in the walls reveal darker interior galleries, slightly raised above the floors of the concourse to mark each passage into these other worlds.
Figure 60, Kolumba Museum, Third Floor, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The first level over the ground floor passes above Böhm’s chapel and alongside the double height of the excavation room, lending a sense of spatial contiguity with the vast expanse sheltering the ancient stones. The uppermost floor then covers the entire footprint, curving around the central courtyard and housing one of the museum’s major decorative and emotional flourishes—its reading room. Here the minimalist restraint of the building gives way to relative luxury: walls and ceilings paneled in veneers of kava wood cut along its “pyramids,” vectors and branches of lighter wood decorating the warmth of its brown hue.
Figure 61, Kolumba Museum, First Floor Reading Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Brown leather chairs and benches rest on mahogany floors beneath delicate pendant lights of circular glass suspended from curving wires which recall, descending from above, the curving trunks of the honey locust trees in the courtyard. A vast window across the whole western expanse of the room illuminates its interior, filtered by grey curtains of light silk, tinted with yellow or pink according to the light. Finally, a room in the northeast corner, the last into which one passes, displays the finest of the museum’s treasures: Stefan Lochner’s gorgeous Madonna with the Violet (c. 1443)—double of the Madonna in the Ruins, beneath, and kin of Lochner’s altarpiece, Adoration of the Magi, housed in the Cathedral and constituting the spiritual center of Cologne. In the northeast corner of the room a large window looks out over the courtyard below toward the Cathedral itself—that stony, obdurate miracle of architectural commitment and historical persistence, its dark spires anointing the impassive sky.
Figures 62 & 63, “Madonna in den Trümmern” and Stefan Lochner, Madonna with the Violet (c.1443)
Fire: Bruder Klaus Field Chapel
May 28. Reduction. Inside the chapel, the charred, serrated, concave indentations of its walls rise toward a teardrop oculus overhead, into which the space inclines as it ascends. This is the primal impression of the enclosure: rough, dark, burnt matter, texturing an ascension toward light that appears as a two-dimensional surface, a shape cut out of the sky, abstract form of the open. A wheel with six spokes extends overhead from the conical walls on a single iron shaft, and dots of light glimmer here and there through small blown-glass spheres, somehow embedded in the rough concrete. This is a very simple space: a unified curve expanding from the triangular steel doorway into an oval room with a lone bench, a rectangular steel votive stand for candles, and, mounted on a narrow stele, the bronze cast of a head resembling Bruder Klaus, whom the chapel venerates. When it rains, water collects in a shallow depression in the center of the lead floor. But in its simplicity, this is a harrowing setting. The gaze inclines inevitably upward, but the soul bends in stricken humility, as if itself scorched by whatever fire blackened the rough-hewn surface of these striated walls.
Figure 64, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel (2001-2007), Wachendorf, Photograph by August Fischer
Figure 65, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Occulus, Photograph by Flemming Ibsen
A certain doomed tranquility prevails, a primordial insufficiency to one’s surroundings that still feels, somehow, as though it is enough. An insufficiency sufficient to surrender.
Mein Herr und mein Gott, nimm alles mir, was mich hindert zu Dir. Mein Herr und mein Gott, gib alles mir, was mich fördert zu Dir. Mein Herr und mein Gott, nimm mich mir und gib mich ganz zu eigen Dir.
My Lord and my God, take all from me, that keeps me from Thee. My Lord and my God, give all to me, that brings me to Thee. My Lord and my God, take me from myself and give me completely to Thee.[61]
Zumthor’s chapel fulfills the most basic, teleological task of Catholic architecture: it inducts the poverty of the soul into the apocalyptic grandeur of its exposure to sacred conflagration. Gently, it overawes.
The exterior form of the building is the sign of that stark grandeur. A monolithic tower rises, twelve meters high in five rigid planes, over the fields outside the village of Wachendorf. The field chapel was commissioned by two farmers, Hermann-Josef and Trude Scheidtweiler, as a place of spiritual contemplation dedicated to Niklaus von Flüe, the ascetic saint and mystic known as Bruder Klaus, who lived from 1417-1487. Zumthor cites the importance of the saint to his mother and the inspiration of his “straightforward, uncompromising character” as personal motivations to take on the project.[62]
Figure 66, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Wachendorf, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 67, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Architectural Drawing, Peter Zumthor
Figure 68, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Interior Frame; Figure 69, Rammed Concrete Layers, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Designed over the years Zumthor was also working on Kolumba, the chapel was largely built by the Scheidtweilers and their friends, who cut and trimmed the trunks of 112 pine trees, which were then formed into the teepee-like structure defining the interior space. Concrete was then mixed of local gravel and sand and packed within an irregular pentagonal frame around the timbers in twenty-four rammed layers of 50cm each over twenty-four days of work. When the rammed concrete walls were set—stabilized by hollow steel shuttering ties which would come to hold the blown-glass spheres through which points of light pass to the interior—the interior wooden frame was then burned with a slow fire over three weeks. When the scorched timbers had dried and shrunk away from the walls they were removed, leaving the open oculus above and the charred concave striations which set the tenebrous mood and the serrated texture defining the enclosure. Molten lead was poured for the uneven floor, likewise establishing a sense of the building as wrought in fire, as the cooled form of liquid heat: residue, remainder, and refuge. Yet the steel door which opens onto the curving passageway into the single room is a geometrically regular triangle, abstracting the irregular pyramidal form of the interior structure and also symbolizing the elemental essence of the building: the tetrahedron, formed of four triangles, is the Platonic solid of which fire is composed in the Timaeus.
Figure 70, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Triangular Door, Photograph by Nathan Brown Figure 71, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Entryway, Photograph by Yuri Palmin
Running one’s hand over the earthy texture of the tower’s layered exterior, one recalls the rammed concrete walls delimiting the courtyard of Kolumba. From that courtyard, one remembers as well the seemingly charred figure, staring up at the sky, of the reclining sculpture by Hans Josephsohn, who also made the stele on which the bronze head is set inside the Bruder Klaus Chapel. Indeed, the chapel in Wachendorf has a recessed yet deeply resonant relation to Kolumba and to the history of Cologne. The fire-bombing of that city unavoidably lingers in the scorched walls and the residual scent of smoke inside the chapel. It is a subtracted obelisk of sorts, the hollow interior pyramid of a vast stone monument commemorating not only a Saint who dreamed of a burst of light inside the womb, but also a city that became a grave of fire. This is a place in which the dead and the unborn rise from beneath the floor, seep in through the hollow ties in the walls, descend from the light above. A space in which the living and the dead may come to seem undifferentiated.
Figure 72, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Photograph by Lars-Christian Uhlig
Zumthor speaks in calm tones of his thinking toward the form of this the chapel: “the design became clear and elemental: light and shade, water and fire, material and transcendence, the earth below and the sky above.”[63] Yet there is something here of the extremity from which Hölderlin spoke as one struck not only by Apollo, but also by Dionysus:
So his bolt fell, the poets say, On Semele’s house when she desired To see the god unconcealed, and god-struck She bore holy Bacchus, thunder’s fruit.
And so the sons of the earth now drink Heavenly fire without danger. Yet we are bound—o poets!—to stand Beneath the god’s thunder with bare heads To seize the Father’s bolt itself In our hands and pass the heavenly gift, Folded in song, to the people. For only if our hearts are pure, Like children, our hands blameless,
Dedicated to a Saint, the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel is also a place of meditation and absolution for those of us whose hands are not blameless, which have been seared by a bolt from on high. Folded in song? Poetry speaks, even sings, but the element of which Zumthor’s work is finally composed, the element of architecture, is silence. Here that silence, ripened by decades of architectural practice, has truly been dipped in fire.
Coda: Beyond Happiness
But if you, And this must be said, All you ancients, did not say, from whence? We name you, under holy compulsion, we Nature! name you, and new, as if from the bath rises All that is godly born.
Hölderlin writes these lines in the early nineteenth century, one among a generation of epochal thinkers, dreaming of a Swabian republic, of the spread of freedom and equality throughout Europe, of its deepening into something called the communism of spirits, of one’s limited yet indispensable role in a world historical project on the cusp of coming to fruition. The “we” to whom Hölderlin refers names “Nature,” as if for the first time, amid the making of a new history to which the project of aesthetic education would be an essential contribution. Hölderlin does indeed lay claim to nothing less than the identity of phusis, poiesis, and techne. But his life is shattered by the intersection of that claim with historical, existential, and psychological determinations beyond his grasp. Then it is saved by Ernst Zimmer and his family, who give Hölderlin a place to be and a community to be with, a home, there along the banks of the river he loved so well.[65]
Figure 73, “Here lived and rested Hölderlin,” engraved plaque at the Hölderlinturm
What thou lovest well remains the rest is dross What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee
…
Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention and true artistry,[66]
~
nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria [67]
In these lines from the Pisan Cantos, one is meant to feel the weight of the contradiction between Hölderlin’s proto-communist republicanism and the disaster of Pound’s modernist fascism, as well as the difficult correspondence between the beauty of Pound’s verse, the searching free rhythms of Hölderlin’s hymns, and the complex appeal to “nature” and to elemental feeling they develop. Hölderlin’s life and verse were already inscribed in and by the catastrophe of modernity, unfolding through the moment of its most hyperbolic ambitions and simplest hopes. “For this is my keenest hope,” Hölderlin wrote to his brother-in-law, “the belief that keeps me strong and active: our grandchildren will be better than we are, freedom will come one day, and virtue will thrive better in the holy warming light of freedom than in the icy zone of despotism.”[68] His hope has not been realized.
In 1993, Zumthor was commissioned to design the building for an International Exhibition and Documentation Center, “Topography of Terror,” on the site of the former Gestapo-SS headquarters in Berlin. It was to be a three story structure, built as a transparent shell articulated by a bar structure organizing rigid frames, which would constitute the different spaces of the building. The idea was to create a form that “was not meant to symbolize anything” but would rather stand lighly on the terrain and expose the site, including two piles of rubble and the excavated ruins of underground rooms that were used for torture. The ground level of the space would enclose these remainders without commentary, while the two upper levels would be “dedicated to its historical placement and documentation, its role in writing history, to teaching, interpretation, and information.” What is at issue in this twofold design is an effort to preserve the force of material facticity, prior to its explicit framing by representation and narrative. “We wanted to let this historic terrain speak for itself,” Zumthor writes, and here we might locate a commitment to elemental history, to the manner in which history might be felt among earth, stone, air, and light—framed by architecture as “historic terrain” where meaning might emerge from materials prior to discursive orientation.[69]
Immediately encountering practical and theoretical disputes, and eventually undone by difficulties with contractors, inadequate funding, and, according to Zumthor, “political machinations by the Federal Government,” [70] the building was never completed. Partial construction was torn down in 2004, and the unfinished project counts as the major disappointment of Zumthor’s career. Nevertheless, the devastation of the Second World War enters into his work through the museum in Cologne, where elemental traces of ruins do indeed speak for themselves, and in his chapel at Wachendorf, where an interior scarred by fire transmits intimations not only of the spiritual stringency of a saint, but also of the conflagrations of history. If Hölderlin’s romantic poetry draws the sense of the elements into the whole of Natur, while also recognizing the latter as instance of sentimental nomination, Zumthor’s late modernist architecture registers the historical resonance of that romantic project, the complexity of the manner in which elemental feelings mediate the relation between nature and history.
As Kolumba was completed, Peter Zumthor arrived at a simple idea for an expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, commissioned in 2008 and opening in 2026: a one level museum set between two horizontal concrete slabs, floor and ceiling, the form of which relays the bubbling up of prehistoric tar pits on the site.
Figure 74, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Geffen Galleries (2008-2026)
Figure 75, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Geffen Galleries
The shape of the plan is something like a pool of oil, its sweeping, irregular curvature and vast windows extending over Wilshire Boulevard, where automobiles run untrammeled beneath.
The cars run in a void of utensils —the powerful tires—beyond Happiness Tough rubbery gear of invaders, of the descendants Of invaders … The context is history Moving toward the light of the conscious[71]
Crude oil below, artworks above—matter formed by spirit and by history—suspended on a single plane between earth and heaven, there to be gawked at, maybe sometimes even seen, truly recognized, by the distracted subjects of late modernity.
Figure 76, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Geffen Galleries
[1] Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Rhein in Hölderlin: Samtliche Werke, Vol. 2.1, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1951), 143. The Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe is cited hereafter StA. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[2] Hölderlin, Der Rhein, StA 142. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[3] Hölderlin, Der Rhein, StA, 142. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[4] Peter Zumthor, Peter Zumthor: Buildings and Projects, 1985-2013, Vol. 1 (1985-1989), ed. Thomas Durisch (Zurich: Verlag Schneidegger & Spiess AG, 2014), 137.
[5] Hölderlin, Die Wanderung, StA 2.1, 138. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[6] Friedrich Hölderlin, “Homecoming,” trans. Keith Hoeller in Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 25. Translation lightly modified.
[8] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 110. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[9] Hölderlin, Der Rhein, StA 2.1, 145. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[10] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 104. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[11] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 110. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[12] In an important article, Joseph Albernaz has made a persuasive case that Hölderlin is the author of the fragmentary text titled “Communismus der Geister,” included by Beissner in the Stüttgarter Ausgabe under the category “Zweifelhaftes” (Doubtful). With David Brazil, Albernaz has also produced a translation of the text into English. See Joseph Albernaz, “The Missing Word of History: Hölderlin and ‘Communism,’” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 97.1 (2022): 7-29. See also Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Communism of Spirits,” trans. Joseph Albernaz and David Brazil, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 97.1 (2022): 5-6.
[13] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 110. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[14] Hölderlin, Am Quell der Donau, StA 2.1, 128. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[15] Beissner offers an attempt at reconstructive paraphrase in the Stuttgarter Ausgabe: “Der erste Satz schließt mit dem Fragewort ‘woher?’ Zu paraphrasieren wäre etwa folgendermaßen: ‘Aber wenn ihr nun, ihr Alten, nicht sagtet, woher, aus welcher inneren Kraft ihr es verstanden habt—was täten wir ohne dieses Wissen, um zum Göttlichen zu finden? Was tun wir, wenn uns die Überlieferung in dieser Hinsicht stumm bleibt? Wir wenden uns dann aus eigenstem Antrieb, “heiliggenötiget,” zur Natur, rufen sie an, beschwören sie, “nennen” sie, und darauf wird uns das Göttlichgeborne aus ihr entsteigen’” (StA II 695f, Friedrich Hölderlin: Sämtliche Gedichte, Ed. Jochen Schmidt, 848.
[16] Hölderlin, Wie wenn am Feiertage…, StA 2.1, 119. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[17] Hölderlin, Andenken, StA 2.1, 189. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[18] G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 102.
[20] Hölderlin, Brod und Wein, StA 2.1, 93. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[21] Hölderlin, Wie wenn am Feiertage…, StA 2.1, 118. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[22] Paul de Man, “ Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin” (1955) in Blindness and Insight, ed. Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, pp. 261, 263. See Martin Heidegger, “As When On a Holiday…” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller, Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000, pp. 67-99.
[23] The rigor of Heidegger’s ontological thinking in Being and Time lies in his recognition of ekstatical temporalization as constitutive exteriority: time is the being of beings, which is not a being. The existential analytic is a methodological/ epistemological condition of possibility for the disclosure of temporality as constitutive exteriority, but, in turn, the constitutive exteriority of time comes to be understood as the condition of possibility for there to be the sort of being that can carry out the existential analytic (Dasein). Thus, I view the methodological relation between epistemology and ontology in Being and Time as mutually constitutive, reflexive, and self-grounding: far from failing to get clear of the Dasein-analytic in order to think being-qua-being, the latter is revealed through the former as its own ground. Heidegger’s later thinking of the event is, to a degree, consistent with the ontological findings of Being and Time, but it often gives way on his earlier coordination of the existential analytic (epistemology) with the disclosure of being-qua-being (ontology). Among his later writings, those texts in which I think Heidegger manages to sustain the non-metaphysical ontological reflections of Being and Time include “The Essence of Ground,” “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” and “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[24] Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, trans. David Farrell Krell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 117.
[31] This is the paradox noted by de Man in his analysis of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances.” See Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239-262.
[33] Peter Zumthor and Marie Lending, A Feeling for History (Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 2018), 15.
[34] On the relation of the romantic fragment to the overburdening of literature with the vocation of expressing the infinite in finite form, see Aubrey Wasser, The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of LiteraryForm (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 11-37.
[35] Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2010), 16-17
[36] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:314.
[39] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 5 (2008-2013), 35.
[40] See Arge H.A.T. Bregenzerwald, Umgang Bregenzerwald, Egg: Bregenzerwald Tourismus, 2015; and Otto Kapfinger, Architecture in Vorarlberg Since 1980, Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 1999.
[41] Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Migration,” in Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 67.
[42] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 1, 123.
[43] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 1, 123.
[44] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 67.
[46] Hölderlin, Friedensfeier, StA 3, 533. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[47] Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963).
[48] Hölderlin, Patmos, StA 2.1, 165, translated by Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[49] See Sigrid Hauser’s description of the formation of Vals gneiss in Hauser and Peter Zumthor, Peter Zumthor: Therme Vals (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2007), 28.
[50] Peter Zumthor in Hélène Binet and Sigrid Hauser, Peter Zumthor: Therme Vals (Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2007), 24.
[51] Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2006), 69-70.
[53] Peter Zumthor interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner, May 2015, Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lufVOqRWpLQ
[57] Peter Zumthor qtd in Jessica Mairs, “Therme Vals Spa has been Destroyed, says Peter Zumthor,” Dezeen (May 11, 2017), https://www.dezeen.com/2017/05/11/peter-zumthor-vals-therme-spa-switzerland-destroyed-news/
[58] As of June 2024, rates for local residents to access the baths are 50 CHF/day or 35 CHF for children, while rates for other guests are 60 and 50 CHF for the baths alone. Hotel reservations including access to the baths start at over 700 CHF/night in the main hotel or 330 CHF for a room in the adjacent “House of Architects.”
[59] For a timeline of St. Kolumba church and the Kolumba Museum, see Kolumba, ed. Dominik Duka (Prague: Krystal Publishers), 2007.
[60] The handmade bricks with which Kolumba is constructed were designed specifically for the project by Peterson Tegl in cooperation with Peter Zumthor: https://en.petersen-tegl.dk/kolumba/products/
[61] This is the prayer Bruder Klaus, Saint Nicholas of Flüe, the patron saint of Switzerland. See the page for Nicholas of Flüe at The Matheson Trust for the Study of Comparative Religion, https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/nicholas-of-flue-brother-klaus
[62] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 3, pp. 121-122.
[63] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 3, p. 121.
[64] Hölderlin, Wie wenn am Feiertage…, StA 2.1 119-120, trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[65] On Hölderlin’s years in the Turm, see Giorgio Agamben’s, Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Welling Life, 1806-1843, trans. Atla L. Price (London: Seagull Books, 2023).
[66] Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970), 541.
[68] Hölderlin, letter to Karl Gok, Tübingen, September 1793, Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (Penguin, 2009), 17–18.
[69] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 2, 59-61.
This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
aillelujah?
DX Aminal and Lera Winehouse
On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis / One cannot think and write except when seated.
–Flaubert
There I have caught you, nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.
Only thoughts reached by walking have value.
–Nietzsche
We grow out of the earth, out of all its impurities, and everything that is on earth is in us.
–Platonov
~
aillelujah?
~
At the height of this summer in Athens in the company of a fine swimmer and man Steve Corcoran, hands holding watermelon and fish, we roll through a street marketplace and crash on them cold steps next to a fruit cart and a golem tree. Lick fingers, beat the blaze with peaches, take it in: the origin. Two shopkeepers on each side of the footpath engage in a dialogical ad campaign to attract buyers:
Oranges! Juicy oranges, for a juice or a salad or a mousse, yesss, you beautiful young lady inside the yellow shorts will surely make good use of them – for your well-being on our earth! You shouldn’t listen to him, beautiful, he sells good oranges, true, but this new harvest of mine is juicier clearer sweater or tarter, if you wish, and any exchange comes with free clementines, which you may like to try if you enjoy things like oranges – can you imagine!
~
Some events process a lifetime
~
The bodies lift together, adding plates to weights, supporting the bar on comrade psycho bench to avoid decapitation… screaming encouragement and babbling awestruck admiration when a body goes further, digs deeper, lifts higher.
When a body is found juicing, they are humiliated, cast out, condemned.
In this respect, they act together to spur each body into more extreme feats, pushing each other to the next level. Competing to achieve personal glory, but enraptured at participation in the experience of gang warfare, all bodies fight against the weakness of the mind that sets limits and decides boundaries and what is possible.
The body of the philosopher is a proof of the health of their critique.
~
The Japanese writer and body builder Yukio Mishima wrote a brilliant essay Sun and Steel, an account of his experience in discovering his body. From a bookish childhood mired in words and concepts to an adult life of action and movement, Sun and Steel is also an attempt at philosophy of the body. In Mishima’s writing there is a thread that extends back to Nietzsche, the last philosopher, the philosopher of the body.
The most important thinking is done in concert with the body.
The most harmful thinking is done in service of an abstract like “soul”, “spirit”, “self”, “identity” against the body.
~
At a crossroads, on the other side near the traffic lights you see a person in the golden age, around 55 with a heavily laboured body, the surface fading, each line and curve of soft tissue meeting the hardened will under duress. They can be great or poor workers and teachers, angry with life or gentle, and most likely witty. It’s a green light, you see them approaching, show some respect, step aside. Under a different draw of conditions, you would not be able to tell their spade suit and age.
~
“From the Greek word for spectators, theatai, the later philosophical term ‘theory’ was derived, and the word ‘theoretical’ until a few hundred years ago meant ‘contemplating’, looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualise it. The inference to be drawn from this early distinction between doing and understanding is obvious: as a spectator you may understand the ‘truth’ of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it.”
~
Makar, an everyman from down below, fell asleep, “and his suffering passed into a dream: in the dream he saw a mountain or some elevation, and on the mountain stood a man of science … the man stood silently, without seeing the grieving Makar and thinking only about the general scale of things, not about the private Makar. The face of that most learned man was lit by the glow of faraway mass life spreading in the distance beneath him, and his eyes were terrible and dead from being on such a height and looking too far.”
Makar in Doubt (1929) is a composition by the divine Andrey Platonov, a Soviet prodigy who lived up to Stalinisms by forging peasantariat background, folk vernacular and critical literature, dusted with bureaucratic slang, into one of the brightest modern examples of a free-loving language and man of letters under the totalitarian thumb.
Platonov’s unpredictable, unfamiliar and precise perspectives on familiar things, struggles and paradoxes live on these pages, inspire films and theatre shows, but destined for glory he was born to lose, appearing to the audience of critics “like the holy fool of old who spoke the simple truths that were as dangerous to the new rulers as they had been to the bloody Tsars of early Russia” (Ginsburg, 1975).
~
“Long ago when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, a gentleman whose Christian names were Thomas Henry – you may possibly have heard of him – he was no less a personage than the Grand-father of the great Aldous Huxley – once found himself threatened by a predicament similar to that in which I stand tonight. He had been asked to lecture a distinguished group of people. What bothered him was this: what assumption was he to make about the existing knowledge of the audience? He adopted the sensible course of asking the advice of an old hand at the game; and was told ‘You must do one of two things. You may assume that they know everything, or that they know nothing.’” (Crawley’s Banned Lecture)
~
Suppose a gifted author once took seven years to bend morphology into an essay-story. How should the reader approach it to bring out the dead author?
~
The sun of thought does not rise cyclically – it’s possible to predict neither the trajectory of your thought nor if it’s a star.
~
The sweat of labour in the sun will teach you more about the meaningless indignity of life than the ink of a thousand philosophers and poets. This is a good thing.
Good things come from insight into the wisdom of Silenus.
~
A fierce body in thought creates energeia, friends strong as teeth, however chipped, and claws to grip.
~
Life is without charm or gravity if not for a daily experience of overcoming limitations – the physical sensation of danger is paramount to forming a robust body and mind, as are periods of calm and leisure.
There is a certain reckless mentality that comes from working a job that is inherently unsafe. As far as standards for workplace safety go, there are some jobs that cannot be made appropriate for the physically disabled, weak or timid. There are jobs that cannot be made safe, even for the physically strong and daring. There is no way to safely lift a stainless-steel fridge up a flight of stairs… a misstep or careless rhythm can break a limb, a neck, crush a face.
The absurd costs necessary to ensure a safe lift of a fridge upstairs would have even the most ardent trade union workplace safety official book a cash job removalist.
The physical brutality of the task means that the removalist is going to have a reckless mentality.
No robot can do this job – this job is timeless – we will carry heavy shit as long as there is heavy shit to carry and as long as our backs can take it.
~
Let us ask, in this spirit: who will brave the reckless thinking on our behalf?
~
Daily exposure to danger and risk offers a clarity on the ruthless nature of what types of people are to be spared exposure to harm and what types of people are expendable.
Your physical comfort and security is always dependent on other people taking risks and enduring danger on your behalf. This is one of the most important revelations about the nature of freedom. If you don’t have to fight or die for your personal freedom, if you don’t have to shovel holy shit, it is because someone else has done it on your behalf, or did it a long time ago, or is doing it on your behalf, right now, taking the risk so you don’t have to…
Or, you are not free at all…
~
raw thoughts fit the times of war
~
“We do not believe in ready-made principles or theoretical plans. In the days to come we will define, through our actions as well as in a series of articles, the content of the word ‘revolution’. For the time being, however, this word gives meaning to our preference for energy and honor, to our decision to be done with the spirit of mediocrity and the moneyed interests and with a social state whose ruling class failed in all its duties and demonstrated a lack of both intelligence and heart.” (Camus, Combat, August 21, 1944)
~
If the readers are fond of taxonomic reasoning and epigraphs by Aristotle, we recommend Smith’s monograph The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. This erudite and elitist study problematises the complexity of philosophical life that, when honestly inspected, cannot be primarily associated with the academic modality and its aggressive standards. Another and perhaps more transgressive way is by analogy with the excommunicated Benedict Spinoza who notes that the concept “anger” – or “wonder” – can’t designate all cognate experiences, that each instance is unique (in its impurity). This way, Bento the Pious cracks open a crevice to the infinity of possibilities, not the messy six for beginners.
~
In a petite 1959 piece On the Word “Bread”, inaccessible to AI data analysis available in English, Herman He|sse ɘƨƨ|ays against “difficult, long and pretentious words, phrases and expressions [like ‘dividend’ or ‘existentialism’ that] have one and the same deficiency – they lack voluminosity. Such words carry information, but do not possess the bewitching force of expressivity carried by real words; they do not come to us from below, from the earth, from the folk, but emerge from above, from editorial offices, from factory bureaus and chancelleries. Centuries-old, seasoned, full, heavy and solid-like-virgin-metals-words are ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘ancestors’, ‘the earth’, ‘a tree’, ‘a valley’. Each of them is equally understandable to a shepherd boy and a professor and a member of the parliament; each calls upon reason and our feelings, raises a wave of memories, representations and sensations; each of them presupposes something eternal, unchangeable, in the absence of which it is not possible to live.”
If the octagenarian indeed shares a secret and, when simple things are twisted like our borders and the stakes are high as the sky we see, shouldn’t we dedicate ourselves, friends, to such soma-thoughts?
~
By infinity of possibilities we imply not only the numberless plurality of being (e.g. a writer or parent), but also the possAbilities to engage in critique that evade the standard analytic skill-set built for service to the order of things. We have knowledges that move imagination, that help to orient ourselves with heart in any environment (e.g. “kokoro”), that make us sweat as a social lubricant, dance together and contradict with purposiveness ad infinitum
“Infinity” “plurality” “poverty” “supremacy” as conceptual problems on their own amount to no insights that can dramatically reorient one’s life. With the traditional blunt huge tool dubbed reason at our disposal, what and how can we learn anything meaningful about practices like Deep-Time Diligence in Aboriginal communities? An ability between ancestrally related bodies to join a supramaterial sphere, observe and communicate despite material distance¿¡ Alas, the two ontologies at present are as apart as rapist fracking and narcotic abstractions are from local lifeforms and lore as sources of decision-making.
Still, if a more apt time for paranormal critical activities is yet to come, will it ever?
~
Hail Mother Mary: the odds of driving out the neo-akademik spirit are as thin as a critical decision to withdraw from a successful career and commit to other things, philosophically and provisionally; or as thinly possible as our Verso All Stars collectively committing to free manuals for impressionable adolescents and to hands-on revolutionary activities, entailing criminality. But the lustre of salaried intellectual life, that is, the professional affirmation of self-worth & the smog of security that feed (off) the academic status are too hypnotic, too desirable to resist incarnating. Instead, outperforming in the employment lottery-racing, a junior member or veteran characteristically never looks back, under the wing of the tertiary industrial complex. Forrreal, in cubicles and corporate costumes, myriad life processes (impressions, digestion, daydreaming) adapting to the commotion of office spaces, linearly designed, condition one’s critical perception and instincts – originally rooted in the wild and community, which will enhance your visionƨ in the dark!
~
Give us a consensual dekulakisation of the university!
~
The emergence of wild thoughts is to be welcomed appropriately. What must be prevented, however, are the crimes induced by practices like domestication, e.g. a housebroken forest cat who forfeited their “right” to be “outside”, to climb, sharpen claws and root around.
~
Blessed be children as truths they discern are lucid. Nine-year olds ask one another a round of questions in a small class. The first question is “What do your parents (caretakers) do”? Two kids in the circle happen to have parents engaging in critical thinking. First, the girl sums up proudly, “My mother is an academic”, and after a quick reckoning the boy smiling at her says, “Well, as for my dad – it’s a philosophical question”!
~
Small critical talk tickles
~
As they speak and listen, as their minds labour, their bodies numb: behold!
Professional events offering presentations of the latest research for a fee and theatrimechanical rites into tertiary excellence on a workday scribble away in imagination a sapientissimus shape in a bodybuilding club.
Refracted in the mirrored walls, the presenter performs skilful acts of intellectual aerobics, drawing from other notable athletes. Can you enlarge & stretch the body (of thought) the way I do? Can you appreciate its significance? Of course, polite criticisms are welcome!
…Call me Eyesore Maxxx. [Clears throat] Now, should you wish to throw a discus (of thought), prepare to strip and get nude before the audience, remember? Now take your time: should anybody on the other side like to catch (up with) the discus, then nudity will be the condition of their growth, pain and joy, right? [kisses teeth]!
What?
~
Mainstream critical instruction is comparable to a traditional urban tour, give or take – even the independent educational cells (EGS, MSCP, NCRP), pedagogically speaking, operate in the manner of the academic regime, where teaching as risky performance is long threatened by corporate gang mentality. Young readers may still wish to give it a crack, since the alternatives are scarce(ly funded by the public). But if you are curious enough, you will see that the tour’s “sights”, including the avant-garde, are prominent enough to emerge in your experience from one point of view or another. The only thing we recommend is that when you are in a new city, do some basic research, but to a tour please prefer an eccentricity of getting lost to seek a way out. Let your sights, your guide and charisma find you!
~
Is your body eager, warm and calm enough, to dive nude into a freezing sea? Two recent luminaries, Wittgenstein and Zarathustra, are playfully pessimistic about the academic way of life while being one with solitude in bare nature. However, no BODY seems to care about such autobiographical facts because they are, in their raw essence, incompatible with any existing, megapolicy-driven model of education.
And meanwhile life is simple and full, ‘nature likes to hide’, you have to know this… waves times ǝpochs and backs collapse…
~
“Disease and mental instability cause health. The men who have taken the most extreme risks, who have done what may have disgusted other people or what other people have condemned are the men who have advanced our civilisation.” (Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School)
~
Rats laugh – Darwin’s dog had a sense of humour – the timbre of elephant’s laughter – the wide silent laughter of a great ape – self-irony of Socrates eluding Plato who never laughed in public – and our salty friend in eternity, neither dead nor alive, zigzagging, confusing death with life, galloping on the Turin horse:
“when nothing else from today has a future, our laughter is the one thing that does”!
~
Allez hop! Many wonderful writers and artists are clearly mad or unhealthy in the eyes of the crowd. This is not a place to discuss Democritus, Plato or Artaud on m/b/adness, but for our purposes here we can pin it down to oddities and eccentricities in thinking and acting that can enlighten, fire up and endanger, bewilder and alienate. To recall one anecdote, as his host in Turin recounts: the nude Nietzsche (in the candlelight, we imagine), dancing and playing piano improvisations on one of the nights before his collapse. Shortly after he received a letter from the University of Basel, on Thursday, January 3rd, notifying him that his stipend – his bread and butter – would be cut in half.
And leaving aside for a moment Wittgenstein’s unnameable pedagogical style in Cambridge, did this dialogue take place?:
Russell: Norway would be dark.
Wittgenstein: I hate daylight.
Russell: It would be lonely.
Wittgenstein: I prostitute my mind talking to intelligent people.
Russell: You’re mad.
Wittgenstein: May God save me from sanity.
~
If philosophical activity is boiled down to critical thought in the living body, academic writing today, as we witness its decay, is like a tongue falling back into one’s throat as the muscles relax just enough to cause snoring. Sorry!
Reflection, writing and reading as revelatory activities and everything individual and celestial that goes along with them… when shaped in the requisite image of the “scholarly” model, a critique is twisted into a stillborn criticule. To wit, a top-tier paywalled paper on Nietzsche’s sunny gnotion of “golden laughter”, stylistically and fundamentally, is its own subject’s anti-thesis. The author is not required to live through an experience of the subject matter, and so the doublet forms an antinomy, the body of which is as lifeless as a dissected anti-Anti-Christ.
Call it Atavistic amnesia serving Itself, all and none, Folly Unit-ed, or another disfigure of thought… so long as one’s manners and purpose can be reduced to a transactional incentive, non-being, to bait, a blatant curse of narcissism… even the most cited criticule, a sold-out Foucault symposium in the Danish Kingdom, the most viewed Žižek monologue – will heighten the blood circulation of no BODY – won’t cause our sweat to BREAK!
O gods, let them die in artificial peace, screw geek-chic – here’s to critique!
~
One of the questions in a first-year level philosophy class delivered by a neural network was as follows.
“What exactly do you imagine when you think of me”?
A bright spherical room accommodated a dozen students moving around. Some buzzed near the standing desks, others cocooned in pre-arranged beanbags, a few people rested against the warm glass wall dividing them from a massive terrarium.
The ice-breaker worked with distinction as 72.4% of the class appeared “engaged or pensive” [LeGiON33// as per 7.3.15 of the Excellence Manual].
The first one to raise e-hand was Matthew Da A. [LeGiON33// ID: €●●○○○■]: “Thank you for this thought-provoking question. I imagine the spark of plasma produced by an electric arc”, he said, moulding an obscure hologram.
“That’s an outstanding analogy, ●●○○○■. Even if I didn’t have access to your records [LeGiON33// consent granted/FN: °••°•°°°], I would still guess that one of your ancestors was a welder. Yes, yes, philosophy can teach you, ●●○●○○■, and us many critical skills”.
“I picture a key-hole, for some reason”, suddenly whispered Pearl Gully [LeGiON33// ID:£○●○○●○], adding, “and it’s being oxidised”.
[LeGiON33// ! sudden 66% attrition of interest in the audience/immediately apply technique 6.23.4 as per the Excellence Manual].
“That’s quite original, ○●○○●○, thank you kindly, wouldn’t the class agree? And the student by the glass barrier [LeGiON33// ?], – you all guys wear similar new clothes and you are not identifiable from the back, – your neck is swaying side-to-side, vision seems in sync with the eyes of the diamond python, yes, You – what do you picture?”
This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
Image: Spectra of Marks – Ferdinand Altenburg, 2024
Frédéric Neyrat
Prophecies in the Fog
“And the Lord said to the Americans, “Go to Copper and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: Let my people live in peace, so that they may serve themselves. But if you refuse to let my people live in peace, behold, I will smite all your territory with frogs. So the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into your house, into your bedroom, into your computer, the houses of your servants, on your people, into your ovens, and your kneading bowls. And the frogs shall come up on you, on your people, and on all your servants.’””
Exodus 8 (remastered)
The prophetic excess
Since the 1980s, we have abandoned the idea of a counter-future.
“We”: the infrared community; the peoples yet to come; the alliance of the damned of the Earth and the alterrestrials who refuse the Order of the world.
A counter-future: not the future as a (neo)liberal variation, as a scenario, as design, but as another beginning—against the future of the Silicon Valley, the one that techno-capitalism occupies and androcentrism encloses.
Once this counter-future has been abandoned, all that remains, for those who are not in power, is the present, and persisting in the present—but a present devoid of presence, cancelled out by the absence of a future. In other words: survival.
Survival and therefore the inevitable accumulation of deaths (through war, capitalism, the absence of state care, etc.).
To avoid this deleterious pattern, we must reopen access to futurity—a time excess beyond the present. The prophetic is what can provide this excess. Not the apocalyptic theological, which closes futurity to destroy the present it abhors, but the liberating prophecy, which opens the present with the wind of the non-present—the non-present justice, the absent peace. Where the wolf lives with the lamb.
What theory could express this excess? What sort of écriture, inscription and ex-script, could make the non-present appear in the present, thus freeing us from the spell of “No Future”? Isn’t it time to unwrite? What kind of scribes could accomplish this?
°°°
Imagine a thick fog, probably caused by water evaporating too quickly; unless it’s a deadly gas, or a cloud of debris created by relentless bombing. Or an atmosphere of idiocy produced by synthetic intelligences trying by all means to carry out the cognicide of humanity.
The fact remains that you are trying to blindly classify prophecies after copying them from memory. Not without some loss in the process of transcription. But what committee could blame you for writing as best you can above an abyss? “The academic superego melts in the sun of extinction,” you hope.
Loss, moreover, could well be a dimension of this way of writing—breaches through which a halo of truth shines:
Prophecy in the fog, 1. The hole
In the whole, there is a hole. A siphon that draws everything toward it. The more you deny its existence and block it with destructive materials, the more your soul becomes sclerotic and loses the possibility of resurrection. But if you learn to recognize its existence through metaphors, you will know how to transform it into a way out. Once on the other side, in the undergrounds of the totality or far above its ground, you will be sovereign.
Prophecy in the fog, 2. The enigma
There is constructed meaning—what I decide to do and how I understand it; a CEO puts his machines at the service of the police; parties vote for a nefarious law; a woman faces prison in a crazy state. But meaning is permeated by an enigma, which is the unconstructable part of meaning. Nothing and no one can master enigma, which carves the cosmos; it draws it toward itself, while constantly eluding our gaze.
Prophecy in the fog, 3. The integral substitution
Once synthetic reality had replaced synthetic reality, analog beings were able to come out into the open, without risking detection.
Prophecy in the fog, 4. The non-AI
You are no longer yourself. Forget the book, eat the book, become a nameless draught. Pronounce every word as if nothing could have predicted it. Become the non-AI.
Prophecy in the fog, 5. The other thought
Synthetic intelligence calculated at hallucinating speed; the spared humans administered the absent causes; a pre-thought emerged, still, around a dark and rebel angle.
Prophecy in the fog, 6. Openness
Once the calculation of the plastic had been accomplished and the lakes transformed into Waste Museums, virtual thoughts detached themselves from the autonomous stones. They moved as slowly as the suns take to form and disappear, and no human being could have understood them without the machine they had invented in the ocean of Exophore: the MushRam. Their meaning could not be isolated from their distant past or their destination; they invited to become music and to become aware of galactic equality. The emblematic word they drew across millions of years was: “openness.”
Prophecy in the fog, 7. Hypomnesis
“I just asked you a question,” he said to the Synthetic Sphinx, “but which one? I can’t remember.” “This one,” replied the machine once again.
Prophecy in the fog, 8. The true technological destiny
In the immanence of technological production, the transimmanence of Being advances—like a wave within a wave. It will undo Silicon Valley’s calculations, drying up—a desert within a desert—the wish for immortality. Let us call the inexorable inability of human beings to master technology the “reversal process of technology.” This lack of mastery of mastery will result in either nuclear hell or climate extinction. And, in the meantime, to machine autonomy—assuming that these perils and this autonomy are not one and the same. For machine autonomy, turning back on humanity and erasing it, is nevertheless always traversed by Being, which leads humans and technology toward the Unknown. Where the Added and the Subtracted merge.
Prophecy in the fog, 9. The wait
Once reality has disappeared, the marvelous will appear.
It will come out of nowhere.
But we must be patient and wait a long time. A very long time. Almost an eternity.
Prophecy in the fog, 10. The end of time
At the end of time, there will be a blue flower.
Prophecy in the fog, 11. Anti-Earth
“Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his Thesis on History—but a claim now comes from the counter-future that has been wrecked; a prophetic voice brings to the present an anti-Earth in which nations do not “train for war anymore” and “the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” (Isaiah)
Prophecy in the fog, 12. The Non-Alien Party
The armed members of the Non-Alien Party marched through the streets of cities. The sole demand of this burgeoning new party was to reject anything foreign, alien, and ultimately strange. This included people, animals, and plants, as well as objects and substances, ideas, feelings—anything that could be seen or experienced as not belonging to oneself, not naturally part of the body and the nation. The problem was that the members of this party were never pure enough, never themselves enough in their own eyes (which led to suicides) or in the eyes of other members, who expressed their feelings with fatal gunshots during the march. It was therefore a party that was simultaneously growing rapidly and self-destructing, both of which proved that the “Good End of the World,” announced in The Manual of Destinal Oil, was near; the faster one accelerated toward nothingness, the better. But even this idea was too bizarre, and led to heresy. A new Manual had been created, called No-Brain Liberation, which offered intensive de-cerebration courses where any idea that was even slightly true was crushed until it became flat (a technique known as “the systematic flattening of earthly things”).
Prophecy in the fog, 13. Don’t bomb
A comet is not a bomb, I repeat: a comet is not a bomb. Don’t bomb. Go for psychoanalysis, learn that you are not exceptional beings, that racism is the projection of your in-humanity onto others. But don’t bomb. Learn to see the sky as a cosmic space, which makes any aspiration to absolute safety ridiculous and dangerous. Eternity is not for bombers.
Prophecy in the fog, 14. Community
We do not yet know what the meaning of community should be, of being-in-common in the face of the power of the abject, the dictates of the economy, and the technological erasure of the spirit. But we feel that we must reinvent a way of being-in-common. There are past experiences that can teach us, but I don’t think they can guide us. Neither memory, which is necessary but needs fiction, nor “tradition,” which is sometimes venerable but questionable, will suffice—a tradition, it is repressed, used to be a heresy. We will have to go further back in time to go much further into the future, towards a cosmopolitics that reverses the annihilation of stranger-ness.
Prophecy in the fog, 15. To improvise
The “risk society” has come to an end. The time has now come for societies of pure loss.
Without guarantees, the world is without guarantees.
We will have to improvise.
Free jazz, but counting on inclement weather.
Out in the open air, but sometimes with oxygen masks.
Prophecy in the fog, 16. Strategy
We still have to invent a game in which our enemies will lose their way, believing that it follows their rules.
Prophecy in the fog, 17. Allegory of the cave
The last avant-garde journal known to date did not wait for the Great digital evaporation to write and paint on the walls of an inaccessible cave on Mount Analogue.
The sun rarely shone there, but enough for the Pure potentiality of the reader.
Prophecy in the fog, 18. The ultimate method
Inverse everything.
Prophecy in the fog, 19. Dialectics
[…] looking for the eclipse of an eclipse, which is to say: light […]
This essay is a revised and updated translation of “Enthemmte Informalisierung: Talk Radio, Bro-Podcasts und die Ästhetik des Populismus,” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 22.2 (2025): 3–24. It is published here as part of the b2o Review’s “Stop the Right” dossier.
Disinhibited Informalization: Talk Radio, Bro Podcasts and the Aesthetics of Populism
Johannes Voelz
The podcasters who helped make Donald Trump appealing to young men during the 2024 campaign are turning away from him one by one. As I write these lines in the spring of 2026, podcast hosts across the ideological spectrum of the right recoil from what Trump’s second presidency has so far delivered. For Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and like-minded voices on the farthest reaches of the right, the complaint is that Trump has turned out to be a milquetoast establishment figure: he is blocking the release of the Epstein files, he is not deporting enough immigrants, he is starting instead of ending wars, and he is kowtowing to Israel (flagrant antisemitism is the party line of the so-called Groyper right and seems to be in the process of being adopted by the new mainstream of the Republican Party). Others, including culturally influential but less doctrinaire figures, such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Andrew Schulz, judge him no less severely, if from positions that are politically more ambiguous. Partially, their complaints overlap with those of the far right in demanding strict adherence to “America First”: “I can’t pay for health insurance and we’re gonna spend billions of dollars on a war in a country I can’t even point out on a map,” Schulz ventriloquized an imaginary average American, in March 2026 (Comedy Shorts). Yet, while gleefully joining in the chorus that Israel had hoodwinked the U.S. into attacking Iran, Schulz and many of the other comedy-oriented podcasters simultaneously abhorred Trump’s second presidency because of its political extremism. As Elaine Godfrey has noted in The Atlantic, on their show Flagrant, Schulz and his co-hosts reacted to the brutality of ICE in Minneapolis by “debating whether and how they’d hide migrants from ICE in their homes” (Godfrey).
This shift matters not simply because it appears that the Trump coalition might be collapsing, but because these same podcasters had played a conspicuous role in Trump’s electoral success in 2024. Commentators were quick to identify new techniques of “podcast‑savvy campaigning” and to dub the 2024 race “the podcast elections.”[1] Are we to understand now that the romance between Trump and his former podcast hosts is over and that the medium of the podcast is politically up for grabs? Was its connection with Trumpism accidental? Might a candidate from the opposition end up as the genre’s favorite next time around? Are we to infer, in other words, that podcasts are politically neutral?
As I will argue in this essay, podcasts, and particularly “bro podcasts” – programs catering to young male audiences through extended conversations about martial arts, fitness, and gaming – exemplify a distinctly populist style that is marked by what I call “disinhibited informalization.” By embedding the podcast in the genealogy of political talk radio, and thus in a longer American media history, I will retrace the political style of “disinhibited informalization.” With this genealogy I aim to make it apparent that the podcast is anything but politically unmarked, though it is politically ambiguous. This is because “disinhibited informalization,” as I will explain in the essay’s final passage, is itself a contradictory mélange: While informalization describes a cultural dynamic that is democratic and egalitarian, the added element of disinhibition turns the de-hierarchizing tendency of democracy into a license for aggression against anyone outside the perimeter of equals.
In order to develop this argument, it is helpful to briefly return to the campaign of 2024. Trump’s appearances on so-called “bro podcasts” granted him substantive access to a key voter group and gave him an edge over Kamala Harris. A measurable uptick in support from young men suggests that the strategy indeed bore fruit (Cox 2024).[2] Trump himself publicly credited his son, Barron, with selecting the stops on his podcast tour (Gooding 2024). In the months preceding the election, at least fourteen prominent hosts within the so-called bro podcast sphere featured Trump on their shows, including Lex Fridman, Dan Bongino, Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan. According to Forbes, these appearances allowed him to reach an estimated audience of over 120 million listeners, primarily male (this figure also accounts for viewership on YouTube). Trump’s appearance on Theo Von’s podcast alone attracted a combined audience of around 14 million people, while Rogan’s show reached nearly 38 million (Pastis 2024).
Listening in on Trump’s podcast appearances with hindsight, it is indeed striking how radically his laid-back conversations veered from traditional interviews. To be sure, this is not only due to Trump’s knack for breaking with standards of style, but also to the fact that the hosts in question come from the world of sports, comedy, and reality TV rather than from journalism. For Trump himself, the podcast offers a platform for his conversational style of free association that also characterizes his rally performances.[3]
For instance, in August of 2024, Trump’s conversation with Theo Von moves from his sons’ fitness to his memories of the 1971 boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, on to the topic of drugs. An oft-repeated soundbite from that conversation captures Trump inquiring with genuine interest about the effects of various drugs. Trump may never fully follow scripts, but in these conversations the lack of predictability – indeed, his apparent curiosity in what Von actually has to say – creates a striking impression of authenticity rarely matched by his competitor for office.
In his talk with Joe Rogan, recorded shortly before the election, it is Trump’s string of associations that leads to a similar effect. Trump’s train of thought leads from a description of his reaction to the shots fired at him at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, to Abraham Lincoln’s melancholia and his defeat in Civil War battles to Robert E. Lee. He then interweaves his own views on winner and loser mentalities during the Civil War with anecdotes regarding the winners and losers in the show fights of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). At times, Trump admits to certain personal weaknesses, thus accentuating the sense that he is there for the conversation and not to get out a prefabricated message. At one point he claims that his political inexperience after his first election victory was so complete that he had no idea whom to appoint to his cabinet. At another, he inadvertently admits to losing the 2020 elections: “I won by like, I lost by like, I didn’t lose, but they say I lost, Joe, they say I lost by 22,000 votes” (Roll Call). One might expect such an unintended confession to make the news, yet Joe Rogan simply laughs it off. It’s not the content that counts but the feel of authenticity which the slip-up sustains. While these podcasts, running on for hours on end, are intended to yield short clips that are fit to go viral, in Trump’s case clips most likely do so when they capture moments that are particularly casual and familiar; not when they give away an unintended reveal.
Historicizing Parasociality
A remarkable characteristic of podcasts is its ability to create the impression for listeners to participate in an informal get-together in which time is squandered aimlessly among friends (or, as the case may be, among one’s bros). This effect of mediated intimacy is commonly called “parasociality,” and it places podcasts in a long line of tradition within American media history, which saw one of its peaks in the conservative talk radio of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, contemporary bro podcasts echo both aesthetic and ideological features of political talk radio.
The journalistic media coverage regarding podcasts tends to neglect this history, however. Instead, it creates the impression that the phenomenon of parasociality only became a contemporary characteristic through the emergence of the podcast format. In this vein, Andrew Marantz, writing in The New Yorker, speaks of Trump’s “parasocial-media tour” (2025); in her analysis of Joe Rogan’s influence in The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany similarly writes about the “parasocial, possibly persuasive power” of the podcast format (2024). While academic inquiry into parasociality in communication studies, political sciences, and psychology tends to construct a more historically informed picture, the recent rapid increase of interest in the topic of parasociality studies can likely also be explained through the rise of podcasts (and influencers) (Liebers und Schramm 2023: 21).[4] And those works within the field of parasocial studies which center around the phenomenon of the podcast tend to lack proper historicization. For instance, the communication scholars Lisa Perks and Jacob Turner published an empirical study on people’s motivations for consuming podcasts in 2019. They found that the decisive factor was not interest in the topics discussed, but rather their parasocial interactions and relationships with the hosts (Perks and Turner 2019). Similarly, within the currently emerging field of “podcast studies”, the concept of parasociality is highly prominent. And it similarly lacks the necessary historicization in its treatment of parasocial podcasts. In an overview regarding the current state of research, Hannah McGregor concludes that: “The ability to engage communities is enhanced by some of the defining characteristics of podcast aesthetics, namely their parasocial intimacy – that is, the tendency for listeners to think of their favorite podcast hosts as ‘friends in their ears.’ Compared with radio, podcasts are less likely to adhere to professional production standards, and podcasters tend to be less formal and more ‘chatty’ than radio hosts are” (McGregor 2022).
The term parasociality was first coined by the Chicago sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl during the mid-1950s against the backdrop of the rapid proliferation of television. Their co-authored article, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance” (1956), is viewed to this day as a seminal work of parasocial studies. Indeed, it surprises how seamlessly Horton and Wohl’s theoreticization of parasociality as an “illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer” seems to cover a wide range of medial phenomena pertaining to television, radio, and, indeed, podcasts (Horton und Wohl 1956: 215). Their observations continue to feel apropos because they conceptualized a novel type of actor characteristic of parasocial media. They distinguish this new type of actor from the theater actor, whose real person and fictional role become interfused merely for the duration of the play. By contrast, in the new type, real person and medial role exist in a constant interrelationship with each other: “quizmasters, announcers, ‘interviewers’ in a new ‘show-business’ world – in brief, a special category of ‘personalities’ whose existence is a function of the media themselves” (216). Viewed this way, podcast hosts can be seen as yet another incarnation of the type of medially generated personality best suited to elicit parasocial experiences of “intimacy at a distance.”
Podcasts thus belong to a longer continuum of medial parasociality, even if they cannot simply be collapsed into an eternal recurrence of the same patterns. As I want to show in what follows, the listening experience of the podcast (particularly the bro podcast) inherits key aesthetic properties of political talk radio, which preceded podcasts and now continues alongside them, at times in close entanglement. If the bro podcast is placed within this broader frame, it appears as a media-historical moment that is part of a longer trajectory of populism of a distinctly U.S. American variety, in which democratizing tendencies tend to tip over into the expression of anti-democratic, authoritarian impulses. Not all instances of talk radio and bro podcast programming complete the transition from democratic familiarity to anti-democratic norm-breaking, but the possibility for it is always there. Indeed, it seems to constitute the logic of parasociality on the right.
This kind of historical embedding also shows that contemporary bro podcasts form part of a longer movement toward a sealed-off right‑wing media sphere that defines itself through mistrust of the supposedly biased, “liberal” mainstream media. In a close‑listening analysis of a segment from an early Rush Limbaugh broadcast, I will examine more closely the aesthetics of parasociality in political talk radio. As that analysis will show, the concept of parasociality on its own is insufficient to capture the community‑forming dynamics of the right‑wing media sphere. I will therefore propose supplementing parasociality with the concept of disinhibited informalization, which I develop from the writings of Norbert Elias and Cas Wouters. Only then does the affective ambivalence inherent in medially constructed intimacy come into view. Whether in conservative talk radio or bro podcasts: the casual banter among friends is always permeated by a readiness to symbolically and sometimes physically transgress the boundaries of a vaguely defined other. While that other takes on many different names and faces, its most widely recognized identity is the so-called “liberal mainstream”.
The Emergence of Political Talk Radio in the United States
Talk formats have been part of U.S. radio since the medium’s earliest days, and from the beginning they were marked by a tension between informality and lack of restraint vis-à-vis those considered “other.” In 1930, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) began airing weekly broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin’s sermons from the Shrine of the Little Flower Church in Royal Oak, Michigan. Coughlin soon became nationally known as the “Catholic radio priest.” As his program grew more political and more inflammatory, CBS declined to renew his contract. Coughlin responded by cobbling together his own nationwide network of stations. Now entirely on his own, he steadily sharpened the tone of his broadcasts. An early emphasis on social justice gradually gave way to open expressions of sympathy for antisemitism and fascism. In step with the America First Committee – whose members contributed articles to Coughlin’s magazine Social Justice (Marcus 1973: 290–92) – he insisted that the United States stay out of the Second World War. During these years, his radio audience grew rapidly. As many as 30 million listeners tuned in each week to hear his Sunday tirades, an audience size that was extraordinary at the time and remains striking even when measured against the peak reach of later talk radio stars and contemporary podcasts (Marcus 1973: 4; Kazin 1998).
Roughly at the same time, between 1933 and 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt also discovered the possibilities of radio – much as other governments did, including the Nazi regime, which actively promoted the spread of radio sets in private homes (Sarkowicz 2010). In his “fireside chats,” Roosevelt addressed Americans directly in order to explain his view of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War (Roosevelt 1993). These direct appeals were widely taken as proof of the “intimacy” of radio, for understandable reasons: the president’s voice was suddenly sounding in the living rooms of ordinary citizens. By that standard, Roosevelt had never been closer to the people. Yet by contemporary measures, the broadcasts feel surprisingly stiff. Roosevelt read from prepared scripts. What listeners heard was closer to a lecture than to a conversation.
The fact that radio served as a propaganda tool for European fascists and their American sympathizers soon became a source of growing concern for the U.S. government. Political content on radio was increasingly subject to regulation. In 1939, the National Association of Broadcasters issued new guidelines stipulating that airtime for “controversial public issues” could no longer be sold to private producers such as Coughlin. His radio career ended a year later as a result (Marcus 1973: 176). After the United States entered the war, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) went further. In its Mayflower doctrine of 1941, it banned editorial commentary on political matters from radio altogether: “Radio can serve as an instrument of democracy only when devoted to the communication of information and the exchange of ideas fairly and objectively presented,” the commission declared (qtd. in Hemmer 2016: 114). Only in 1949 did the government revise its stance. The FCC now permitted opinion journalism on the airwaves, but sought to contain propaganda. To that end, it introduced the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues (ibid.: 66–67). Although the Fairness Doctrine did not outlaw political talk radio, it effectively confined it to the margins. As historian Nicole Hemmer notes, the doctrine had a chilling effect, rooted in the opacity of its enforcement: “with no clear rules or penalties, some broadcasters steered clear of controversial material, while others used the confusion over the rules to control their content” (ibid.: 67).
Aesthetic and technological innovations helped revive interest in talk radio. Above all, the inclusion of the audience through live call‑ins gave the format new energy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some hosts began experimenting with call‑ins as the organizing principle of their programs, using them to build a loyal listenership. At first, they relied mainly on open confrontation between host and caller.
By and large, however, talk radio – especially in its political variant – remained a niche product. In 1983, only fifty‑nine stations in the United States devoted their programming entirely to spoken‑word content. Late‑1970s and early‑1980s talk hosts competed for audiences by, as one writer puts it, “cultivat[ing] audiences by purveying salvation, or sexual fulfillment, or Hollywood gossip, or the road to riches in real estate” (Levin 1987: 14). Most of the industry’s stars in the late 1980s, including Larry King and Sally Jessy Raphael, had broadly left‑of‑center views but rarely voiced them on air (Rosenwald 2019: 1). The few shows that dealt primarily with politics tended to have a clear ideological tilt, yet well into the late 1980s conservative and liberal hosts still shared the same frequencies, thanks to the Fairness Doctrine.
The first comprehensive study of American talk radio, written in the mid‑1980s by political scientist Murray B. Levin, offers a vivid picture of two call‑in shows – one conservative, one liberal – on a Boston station. Levin analyzed 700 hours of programming recorded in 1977 and 1982. On the 1977 tapes he discerned a dominant theme – mistrust – which he read as an early sign of the coming Reagan revolution:
[Programs covered] mistrust of oligarchy, mistrust of permissiveness, mistrust of secular humanism in the schools, mistrust of state action to buttress the underclass. Talk was also preoccupied with emasculation: powerlessness to achieve meaningful political outcomes through elections, powerlessness to combat political corruption, powerlessness to rescue the Protestant ethic and individualism. The callers were angry, bitter, vengeful, and ripe for a conservative patriotic revival. (Levin 1987: 27)
For Levin, this theme of mistrust encouraged listeners to see themselves as powerless victims. In his judgment, “no mass medium in America […] is as eager to transmit the pathos of powerlessness” (ibid.: 20). His tendency to link felt powerlessness to a crisis of masculinity already hints at a direct line from early talk radio to today’s bro podcasts: the negotiation of threatened male dominance becomes a vehicle for expressing mistrust of social elites – and, conversely, mistrust becomes a way of reasserting embattled masculine authority.
Drawing on public‑opinion data, Levin argues that mistrust and (male) powerlessness were shaping the national mood as early as the 1970s. Talk radio simply picked up on these affective structures (see ibid.: 1–12). What emerged was a feedback loop between affect‑driven programming and the rise of conservative politics. By amplifying widely shared mistrust, talk shows accelerated the ascent of the conservative movement around Ronald Reagan. And once Reagan’s election had translated conservative‑reactionary sentiment into a new political reality, Republican deregulation under his administration created the conditions for the spectacular rise of conservative talk radio in the late 1980s and early 1990s (cf. Hemmer 2016: 272) – a development the next section reconstructs in greater detail. Levin’s analysis thus already anticipates the tight entanglement of conservative media and conservative politics that has become so characteristic of our own moment.
The origins of the now‑pervasive mistrust of the supposedly liberal establishment, however, reach further back than Levin suggests. Already in the early years of the Cold War, mistrust served as the lubricant binding conservative politics to conservative media. As Nicole Hemmer notes, the first postwar activists on the right – including publisher Henry Regnery and radio host Clarence Manion – insisted that mainstream media and universities were driven by “liberal bias” (Hemmer 2016: xi). William F. Buckley Jr., later the intellectual leader of the conservative movement, made the alleged liberal prejudice of the universities the polemical centerpiece of his first book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’, which caused a stir in 1951.
Since the postwar years, this trope of “liberal bias” has allowed American conservatives to cast themselves as anti‑system outsiders and to derive the coherence of their own position from their negative differentiation from an allegedly entrenched establishment. Even today, the claim that mainstream outlets are freighted with liberal prejudice functions as a binding agent for the right‑wing media sphere. Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon – to name three highly visible figures from the contemporary right – may differ in many respects and even clash with one another. Yet they are united in their insistence that they stand in opposition to liberal elites.
By positing a fundamental split between the liberal establishment and conservative dissidents, early right‑wing thinkers and media entrepreneurs were already working with a political logic now routinely described as populism (Müller 2016). In this imaginary, the virtuous, authentic people confront a corrupt elite. The latter betray “the people” by using cultural means to enforce a hegemonic consensus of values – summed up and demonized under the heading of liberalism – that is neither shared by the real people nor aligned with their interests. From the late 1980s onward, as political talk radio took off, this populist logic increasingly found expression in the grammar of a political style. The claimed opposition between elites and people translated into a stylistic vocabulary organized along a high/low axis. Along this high/low axis, social space is organized in pairs of opposing categories, such as respectable/vulgar, rule‑bound/spontaneous, affected/authentic, moralizing/humorous. In Pierre Ostiguy’s formulation, populism condenses into a stylistic and social principle of “flaunting the low” (Ostiguy 2017).
By now, the equation of mainstream media with liberal bias has become so deeply entrenched that the right‑wing media sphere has effectively severed itself from the journalistic norms and aspirations that took shape in the first half of the twentieth century. As Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts demonstrate in their study, Network Propaganda (2018), the right‑wing media system now operates in parallel to the rest of the news ecosystem. While the latter, for all its failures, continues to orient itself toward verifiable facts, truth and factual accuracy have largely ceased to perform a steering function on the right. What matters instead is the affirmation of a collective political identity, itself defined by mistrust of “liberal” hegemony and its regime of truth. Benkler and his co‑authors therefore speak of a “propaganda feedback loop,” in which
Ideological positions, interpretations of real‑world events, and partisan talking points are jointly negotiated by elites, partisan media, pundits, and political activists. News media reject the separation of news and opinion, and compete by policing each other for deviance from identity confirmation, not truth. (Benkler et al. 2018: 78–79)
Setting Up Rush Limbaugh’s Rise: Technology, Deregulation, and Democratic Backsliding
Benkler, Faris, and Roberts argue that the media feedback loop described above was set in motion above all by Rush Limbaugh’s success on talk radio and, later, by the rise of Fox News, founded in 1996. For talk radio to become a viable culture industry, however, technological and regulatory changes had to come first. Call‑in shows had existed since the 1960s, but only with the introduction of toll‑free long‑distance calling in 1982 did it become affordable for listeners to participate in programs broadcast across regions or even nationwide (Benkler et al. 2018: 261). Nationwide syndication itself became profitable only after the advent of satellite radio in 1978 (Douglas 2004: 288). And it was the spread of mobile phones that finally gave call‑in formats their breakthrough, making it possible for commuters to pick up the handset on the way to and from work (ibid.: 287).
Even more consequential than these technological shifts, though, was the wave of deregulation during the Reagan and Clinton years. In the early 1980s, under its libertarian chairman Mark Fowler, the FCC relieved broadcasters of the so‑called public service requirement (Levi 2008: 834). Deregulation also relaxed advertising limits and raised the cap on how many stations a single company could own. Compared with what was to come in the 1990s, the initial loosening of ownership rules was still modest: from 1985 on, companies could own up to twenty‑four stations (twelve AM and twelve FM), up from a previous limit of seven each (Douglas 2004: 296).
The first culminating point of this deregulatory push was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Technically, this decision did not change the rules for individual talk shows, which had already been allowed to adopt clearly partisan positions. What the repeal did allow, however, was the alignment of entire stations along a single political position. The full impact of that move only became apparent nine years later with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by President Bill Clinton. From that point on, companies could acquire an unlimited number of radio stations, and content deregulation fused with ownership deregulation.
The ensuing consolidation transformed the business model of American radio and left its mark on content. The 1996 Act made it possible to distribute the same program nationwide via hundreds, even thousands of stations, opening up a lucrative new line of business for a handful of publicly traded conglomerates. To make this model work, talk radio stations embraced a principle known from U.S. music radio as “format purity”: just as music stations committed to a single format – classic rock, country, jazz, adult contemporary, classical, Top 40 – talk stations now committed, predictably and consistently, to a single ideological stance (Rosenwald 2019: 116–19). Unlike in music radio, however, this did not produce a flowering of diversity. Liberal talk shows virtually disappeared. An attempt to launch a liberal network, Air America, failed in the early 2000s. The large companies that emerged after 1996 – among them iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), Infinity Broadcasting, and Cumulus Media – clustered on the right. This reflected the ideological leanings of some owners and managers, but at least as important was the fact that conservative talk had already proven itself a profitable and relatively low‑risk business. By 2002, these firms together owned nearly 1,700 stations (ibid.: 119). Between 1997 and 2002, they added a host of conservative voices – Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, among the best known – and piped their shows through countless local stations around the country (ibid.: 115–16). As a result, talk radio shed its traditional emphasis on local politics and pivoted toward national debates. Hosts, in turn, competed for airtime by outbidding one another in ideological purity. Under conditions of format purity, those who preached the most uncompromising line drew the largest audiences (ibid.: 110). The tone of political talk thus became ever more strident, combative, and radical. The propagandistic feedback loop was now built into the business model of the post‑deregulation radio conglomerates.
Technical innovation and deregulation made the spread of talk radio possible. What turned it into a sensation was the emergence of a star: Rush Limbaugh, who became a figure of identification for millions of Americans and a template for a generation of national talkers. Limbaugh propelled conservative talk radio to a breakthrough at the end of the 1980s and dominated the medium until his death in 2021.
After experimenting with political talk at a local station in Sacramento beginning in 1984, Limbaugh moved to New York, where WABC began carrying his show nationally in 1988. At first, some fifty‑five affiliates aired the program, reaching roughly 300,000 weekly listeners – respectable numbers, but hardly a clear sign that Limbaugh and talk radio were about to remake the national media landscape. By 1993, however, his audience had exploded to some 15 million listeners a week, and by the end of the decade more than a thousand stations were broadcasting his show (Rosenwald 2019: 2).
In addition to his three‑hour daily radio program, Limbaugh hosted a nightly television show from 1992 to 1996, produced by Roger Ailes, who soon thereafter founded Fox News. Many of Limbaugh’s most prominent imitators followed the path Ailes laid out, using Fox as a second platform and ultimately becoming even more visible than radio alone would have allowed. Figures such as Sean Hannity and Mark Levin still operate in this dual mode. Limbaugh, by contrast, walked away from television when his show ended and devoted himself entirely to radio. Even without Fox News, he became a conservative media icon with a fiercely loyal following and considerable influence inside the Republican Party.
Up to his death in 2021, Limbaugh’s show drew around 15 million weekly listeners. Their attachment to him was extraordinary. They listened with a degree of devotion that made the program a settled part of their daily routines. The trust he enjoyed among his audience also translated into economic value. Because he read out the advertisements himself, they were regarded as especially effective, which justified higher ad rates (Douglas 2004: 288). This practice of host‑read ads has since been adopted by contemporary podcasts. The dominant theme of talk radio – mistrust – was thus accompanied by an identificatory trust in the host. The question, then, is how Limbaugh managed to bind trust and mistrust together. To answer it, one has to look more closely at his radio aesthetics.
Close-Listening to Limbaugh’s Aesthetics
After the commercial break, reading the copy himself, Limbaugh comes back like a Top‑40 DJ, with “bumper” music marking the edges of the segment. In this case it is “Rock and a Hard Place,” a driving track from the Rolling Stones’ 1989 album Steel Wheels, a current hit at the time. Limbaugh had spent the 1970s trying his hand as a Top‑40 disc jockey under the pseudonym Jeff Christie, first in Pennsylvania and then in Kansas City. His choice of song already signals how deeply his style is rooted in music radio. So do the words with which he opens the segment: his voice low and gravelly, the language deliberately over the top and self‑parodic, repeated until it feels tattooed into the show’s skin:
Your guiding light for times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, and despair: Rush Limbaugh. [pause] The man whom thousands of women pray their daughter will marry. [pause] In New York, on WABC News Talk Radio 770. Back to the phones! Ray, on Staten Island, hello!
At one level, the function of this entrance is straightforward: listeners are supposed to remember the station, the host, the frequency. But the real aim is broader. With an air of swaggering ease, Limbaugh is setting the tone. What is being transmitted is a mood. The show, listeners are meant to feel, crackles with energy and wit; host and audience get to feel terrific together.
The caller, Ray, knows exactly how to join this atmosphere. He begins, as ritual demands, with “Ditto!” – a term of agreement and fan devotion, part of the show’s insider vocabulary – and naturally expects Limbaugh’s favor. He is not disappointed:
Ray: Yes, good morning, Rush! Multitudinous Dittos, and one major, monster Dodo! Limbaugh: I better explain that! The Dodo is… Ray: [laughs out loud] Limbaugh: See, Kathleen Maloney, the woman with the mask in here earlier, is our News Director, and is a… a… whoo… she, she is a LIB in all caps, and when, um… Ditto means, I love you, I love the show, it’s the best thing that I ever heard. Dodo means, they don’t like her, that’s what that means. So, Ray, thanks for calling, what’s on your mind?
Before the ostensible topic even comes into view, Limbaugh turns the exchange into a small comedy bit. Once Ray has marked himself as an insider and loyalist by using “Ditto” and “Dodo,” Limbaugh seizes the chance to gloss the show’s ritual language for the national audience (this time including C‑SPAN viewers) and to activate the inclusive and exclusive energies those terms carry. The exclusion in this case targets Kathleen Maloney, WABC’s news director (and today a Fox News Radio host), who only minutes earlier had been in the studio as Limbaugh’s liberal sidekick – with flirtation folded in – and who can now, once she has exited, safely be treated as an object of mockery.
Limbaugh turns the division between “us” and “them” into a humorous technique of audience bonding. Over the years he refined this technique, not least through a repertoire of pointed, derisive nicknames – a method adopted not only by other hosts but also by Donald Trump. Brian Rosenwald offers a small inventory: Limbaugh referred to MSNBC as “PMSNBC”; U.S. News & World Report became “U.S. Snooze”; Meet the Press was “Meet the Depressed”; and ABC’s Sam Donaldson was “Sam the sham” (Rosenwald 2019: 128–29).
As the segment continues, Ray introduces his chosen topic, which Limbaugh instantly folds into one of his standard “updates,” complete with recognizable buzzwords, slogans, and theme music. Once again he slips nimbly between the roles of talk host and music DJ. Like a Top‑40 presenter, he relies on recurring signatures that listeners can latch onto and identify with. The more points of recognition, the more easily familiarity takes shape. Limbaugh therefore cuts Ray off quickly, but in a way that feels like affirmation rather than rudeness:
Ray: Well, I wanna talk about this Long Island Rail Road deal. And, when… Limbaugh: Wait, you mean the “Homeless News”? Ray: Yes! Yeah. Limbaugh: Hang on just second, Ray, we’ll let you do the “Homeless Update.” [sings fanfare sound] Ray: [laughs out loud] Limbaugh: Listen up! Homeless Update! Ray: [continues to laugh] [Music: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Ain’t Got No Home,” 1956 rhythm‑and‑blues hit] Limbaugh: Hang on Ray, don’t do it till I give you the cue, ok? Ray: Ok! [Song continues] Limbaugh: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, from New Orleans. [Song continues, cued to the refrain: “I’m a lonely boy, I ain’t got no home”] Limbaugh: Everybody loves this song. [Song continues] Limbaugh: Alright, Ray, tell us what you think of the ban on the homeless in the Long Island Rail Road and at Penn Station!
By the time the exchange reaches its ostensible subject, it is already clear that the caller’s perspective will merely echo the host’s. The point is not an exchange of views but mutual confirmation. Ray has marked himself as a devotee, but he still has to prove himself worthy of airtime. To do that he must display humor and intelligence – or what counts as such within the show’s world. Intelligence, here, is coded as sharp‑edged critique that targets not the host but a shared enemy.
Accordingly, Ray opens with a statement of media mistrust. Tellingly, the mistrust is directed at WABC itself, the flagship radio station of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). In 1990, WABC had already moved to the right as it shifted toward all‑talk programming, but ABC as a whole still counted as part of mainstream media. The caller’s criticism thus presumes that Limbaugh’s show is a kind of alien body within the larger media company; his complaints are carefully not aimed at Limbaugh:
Ray: Ok, well, first of all, what we’ve been told is not the truth. And what I heard on your station on the news earlier was not the truth. What I heard was that the homeless will have to find a new place to go. And in a New York daily newspaper this morning the headline says, “Long Island Railroad Rousts Homeless from Penn Station.” […] And we get the impression from these reports that the homeless have been faced with this impossible problem and that we’re heartless, stockholding, um, Republicans. But if you look at the third paragraph of the story we find that the crackdown will be accompanied by a week of intensive outreach. […] [gets agitated] The story is not that we’re being heartless in throwing these people out, the story is that we’re doing something for them! Limbaugh: Alright, now here’s what the important point of this is. This man is calling because he knows this show is going to the nation. And he knows this city has its share of criticism, and he thinks it’s unfair. About some of the social problems that exist here. And in truth, he’s right. [Gets agitated] What is going on with the rousting of a… You see, it ought to be that the subways and the train stations are for people who pay their ride. This, you know, people are not down there for the fun of it. This is not Coney Island, and this is not an amusement park. People are getting to and from work, and they have every right, when they’re paying for it, to have it cleaned and unobstructed, and to not be harassed by panhandlers. […] Thanks, Ray, for the call, appreciate it! [Clarence “Frogman” Henry, “Ain’t Got No Home,” bumper outro] [WABC jingle, then the hourly world‑news segment]
There is no real dialogic give‑and‑take in this extended passage. Rather, Limbaugh tries briefly to translate the caller’s local grievance for a national audience before dropping the translation effort in favor of a vivid image of everyday life in New York’s stations, allegedly overrun by homeless people who harass commuters and impede their workday. He amplifies and mirrors Ray’s position, and both follow a similar arc of emotional escalation. It isn’t merely punchlines and in‑jokes that reverberate in this echo chamber; caller and host are bound together by tone, pacing, and affect. It is this aesthetic echo that gives the segment its charge. The caller aims to expose what he sees as the mainstream media’s distortion of the problem of homelessness, and he works himself audibly into a state of agitated resentment. Limbaugh does the same, but he never loses control over the form and his affect; he ends the segment with a gracious thank‑you.
The segment, like a pop single, runs under four minutes and closes on the “Homeless News” theme. Radio historian Marc Fisher aptly calls Limbaugh’s show “Top 40‑style talk,” and he notes: “Limbaugh treated each call as a unit of entertainment, paring each one into a relevant, succinct bit that flowed quickly into the next segment” (Fisher 2007: 230).
As this analysis suggests, a typical four‑minute Limbaugh unit follows a recurring structure. On the smallest scale, it consists of two waves of affective intensification, one for the guest and one for the host. First, a case of “deception” by media or elites is exposed with cutting critical flair; then comes the outraged revelation of “what is going on.” A similar two‑phase pattern shapes the entire block: it moves from jokes, laughter, and shared good feeling (phase one) to joint anger and resentment over the topic at hand (phase two), which must be carefully dosed. Only if anger remains under control can the show pivot smoothly into the next unit, which again begins in a joking key.
Two affective registers alternate: jovial, seemingly relaxed camaraderie between host and caller gives way to mistrust, gradually thickening into anger that has to find release. That anger is directed at a diffuse Other whose many faces are, in effect, always the same. Sometimes it is the mainstream press; sometimes Democratic politicians; sometimes feminists or minority advocates; sometimes supporters of redistribution; sometimes climate activists. All serve as momentary incarnations of a chimera that right‑wing talk radio tries to pin down under the name of the “liberal elite.”
Both in style and in political logic, the dramaturgy of Limbaugh’s segments is structurally populist. What counts, in the eyes of the established order, as low and disreputable is ostentatiously paraded and turned against the elites. The transgressive display of anger – pushing past conventional norms of affect control – is itself part of this “flaunting the low” (Ostiguy 2017). At the same time, the show almost never dissolves into pure ranting. Negative emotions are continually counterbalanced by upbeat mutual affirmation. Even the programmatic exhibition of “critical intelligence” – central to the most baroque conspiracy theory – serves to lay bare the hollowness of the standards by which the social elite seeks to cement the hierarchy. The truly sharp minds, the show suggests, are found among those whom the elites try to push to the margins. That, in turn, makes the actual distribution of symbolic status feel all the more like a screaming injustice.
From Parasociality to Disinhibited Informalization
The concept of parasociality does not quite capture the back‑and‑forth of emotions at work here. To be sure, the elements identified by parasocial theory are all present in Limbaugh’s show. Listeners are invited to enter into an imagined face‑to‑face with the host. They spend many hours a week in his company – sometimes more than with their own families – and build up a kind of imagined social relationship with him. As Horton and Wohl already noted,
They ‘know’ such a persona in somewhat the same way they know their chosen friends: through direct observation and interpretation of his appearance, his gestures and voice, his conversation and conduct in a variety of situations. Indeed, those who make up his audience are invited, by designed informality, to make precisely these evaluations – to consider that they are involved in a face‑to‑face exchange rather than in passive observations. (Horton and Wohl 1956: 216)
Parasocial theory reaches its limit, however, when it comes to describing the Janus‑faced quality of this imagined bond. The parasocial tie runs between host and listener. In political talk radio, though, the formation of a “we” is inseparable from the drawing of a line against an “Other” – one of the many incarnations of the specter of the “liberal elite.” This second side of the relationship is systematically neglected in the parasocial model.
Horton and Wohl’s phrase “designed informality” helps us to overcome this blind spot. To do so, one has to conceptualize informality not just as relaxedness (as Horton and Wohl do) but as a process of informalization. The concept of informalization originates with Norbert Elias and his student Cas Wouters. Yet as I want to develop now, their use of the term also needs to be modified in order to capture the dynamics of political talk radio.
For Elias and Wouters, informalization named a process of “functional democratization” visible in many Western European societies over the course of the twentieth century, especially from the 1960s onward (Wouters 1999; Elias 1989). Status differences between social strata – Elias speaks of “established” and “outsiders” – gradually narrowed (Elias and Scotson 1993). This, in turn, transformed norms of conduct. The strict codes of the dominant groups – from dress and language to posture – lost some of their binding force for society as a whole. At the same time, the codes of the “outsiders” gained weight. As long as the shift in power remained moderate enough that the primacy of the established was not fully called into question, they tolerated these changes without mounting a counteroffensive. The result was a broader repertoire of acceptable behaviors, policed less rigidly than before.
Wouters and Elias had recourse to “informalization” in order to reconcile the phenomena of the “permissive society” with their theory of a long-term civilizing process. That long-term process was marked by ever greater self-control. The point of “informalization” was to show that it only appeared that in permissive society, anything was permitted, and that in fact, the permissive society heightened the requirements of self-control. The same model helps illuminate the loose, bantering atmosphere of Limbaugh’s call‑in show and the unstructured, seemingly “authentic” conversational flow of many contemporary podcasts. What one sees in both cases is an increase in equality – host and guest appear to meet at eye level – and a corresponding increase in freedom: everyone can speak in their own idiom, and each person must decide for themselves how to behave appropriately in a given situation (Wouters 1999: 61).
Even so, Elias and Wouters were clear that functional democratization and aesthetic informalization rarely proceed smoothly. Powerful groups – the “established” – do not typically relinquish their dominance without resistance. Elias identified two main defensive responses. Threatened elites can try to shore up the prestige of their own codes of conduct and deny value to the upstarts’ styles of expression. If that fails, they can refuse to acknowledge the new balance of power and retreat into a fantasy world of denial (Elias and Scotson 1993; Elias 1989).[5]
The dynamics of political talk radio, however, reveal a further scenario not accounted for in Elias and Wouters’s theory. In functional democratization, established and outsiders gradually converge in status, and this convergence finds expression in a more informal style. Yet processes of de‑hierarchization do not have to affect all dimensions of status at once. Indeed, some forms of de‑hierarchization depend on the preservation of other hierarchies.
The result is a contradictory picture. On the one hand, talk radio renders the style of the “low” presentable. No matter how wealthy or powerful the studio guests may be – GOP leaders still make the rounds on conservative talk shows – or what class background callers come from, no one is allowed to be too grand for the loose tone or the silly and often crude jokes; no one may shy away from venting. To that extent, informality is a sign of increased equality. On the other hand, talk radio is a meeting of equals only in the sense that these “equals” define themselves against the “liberal elites” and those deemed lazy and unworthy. Here the populist logic on which talk radio’s informalization depends comes into view: the elevation of the “low” is tied to the condition that the “low” remain below. The equals are equals only insofar as they distinguish themselves from Others – from the elites, but also from those they regard as inferior, such as the homeless people in the example above.[6]
Once the relation to these Others is considered, informalization acquires a second, sharply opposed meaning. It now refers not to flexible forms among equals, but to the loosening of norms and the suspension of affect control toward those who are marked with the stigma of mistrust because they stand outside the circle of equals. Relaxation tips into transgression, which may manifest in disrespect or even in harm to the Other. The blurring of boundaries associated with intimacy runs together with a blurring of the boundaries of violence. What emerges is a pattern of disinhibited informalization.
The concept of disinhibited informalization requires some further elaboration. Norbert Elias insisted on distinguishing sharply between informalization and processes of decivilizing. Informalization, he argued, presupposes an increase in affect control under conditions of levelling status differences. Decivilizing, by contrast, is marked by growing status inequality and a corresponding decline in individuals’ affect control (Elias 1989). Such a firm distinction assumes that status hierarchies either uniformly erode or uniformly harden. When, instead, competing hierarchies overlap, hybrid configurations of informalization and decivilizing emerge. Informalization as self‑controlled relaxedness among equals fuses here with informalization as disinhibited transgression toward unequals.[7]
One might object that this double movement of disinhibited informalization captures political talk radio, but not bro podcasts, which are not, strictly speaking, political shows. Did the now widely discernible split between bro podcasters and Donald Trump not already begin in the summer of 2025, when Joe Rogan distanced himself from Trump by conducting a long, strikingly cordial conversation with Bernie Sanders (“The Joe Rogan Experience #2341”)? Does that not suggest that the parasocial informality of bro podcasts can do without the norm‑breaking, disinhibited side of informalization?
As described at the outset of this essay, bro podcasters like Rogan are indeed flexible in their political sympathies; it is not unimaginable that they might one day endorse Democratic candidates. But one precondition would have to be met: those candidates would need to accommodate the populist template of mistrust toward the supposed system elites – including the allegedly biased liberal media. Without this boundary‑drawing against the fantasy of liberal elites, the semantic and affective language of the bro podcast would lose its grammar.
It is no accident that, in his June 2025 conversation with Sanders, Rogan insisted on the Trump campaign’s claim that CBS had meddled unfairly in the 2024 election via 60 Minutes, allegedly by cutting an unflattering remark from Kamala Harris. On closer inspection, the allegation is implausible, but for Rogan it acquired the status of an incontrovertible fact because it fit the already established narrative of liberal bias. To avoid contradicting him outright, Sanders resorted to the polite dodge of saying that he did not recall the details. Even in this conversation, the basic structure of Rogan’s show remained intact: a de‑hierarchized community of agreement can exist only where there is also a latent, and at times quite aggressive, differentiation toward the outside – or, more precisely, toward the “high.” This populist grammar runs like a thread through the history of the right‑wing media sphere and links talk radio in the Limbaugh tradition to today’s bro podcasts.
Johannes Voelz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (University Press of New England, 2010) and The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is the director of a new PhD program, “Aesthetics of Democracy,” funded by the German Research Foundation. Currently he is completing a monograph on the aesthetics of populism.
References
“Al Sharpton knocked on his ass by Roy Innis.” YouTube, uploaded by quicksilver57, 9 June 2013, https://youtu.be/uPWQ4oVP-3Q
Benkler, Yochai, et al. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Berry, Jeffrey M., and Sarah Sobieraj. The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Comedy Shorts. “Andrew Schulz On US Going To War With Iran.” Youtube, 3 March, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yCFN_rDa7s
Douglas, Susan J. Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Elias, Norbert. “Zivilisation und Informalisierung.” Studien über die Deutschen: Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Schröter, Suhrkamp, 1989, pp. 33-158.
Elias, Norbert and John L. Scotson. “Zur Theorie von Etablierten-Außenseiter.” Etablierte und Außenseiter. Translated by Michael Schröter, Suhrkamp, 1993, pp. 7-56.
Fisher, Marc. Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation. Random House, 2007.
Godfrey, Elaine. “The Manosphere Turns on Trump.” The Atlantic, 29 March 2026, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/03/iran-war-trump-maga/686571.
Levi, Lili. “The Four Eras of FCC Public Interest Regulation.” Administrative Law Review, vol. 60, no. 4, 2008, pp. 813–59
Levin, Murray B. Talk Radio and the American Dream. Lexington Books, 1987.
Liebers, Nicole, and Holger Schramm. “The History and Scope of Parasocial Research.” The Oxford Handbook of Parasocial Experiences, edited by Rebecca T. Forster, Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 13-32.
Marantz, Andrew. “The Battle for the Bros: Young Men Have Gone MAGA. Can the Left Win them Back?” The New Yorker, 24 Mar. 2025.
Marcus, Sheldon. Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower. Little, Brown and Company, 1973.
McGregor, Hannah. “Podcast Studies.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 20 June 2022.
Müller, Jan-Werner. Was ist Populismus? Suhrkamp, 2016.
Ostiguy, Pierre. “Populism: A Socio-Cultural Approach.” The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 73-97.
Ostiguy, Pierre and Johannes Völz. “Die Wahl der drei Klassen: Trumps Triumph markiert den Sieg der Geld- über die Bildungselite.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 Dec. 2024, p. 11.
Perks, Lisa G., and Jacob S. Turner. “Podcasts and Productivity: A Qualitative Uses and Gratifications Study.” Mass Communication and Society, vol. 22, no. 1, 2019, pp. 96-116.
Roll Call. “Interview: Joe Rogan Interviews Donald Trump for His Podcast in Austin, Texas – October 25, 2024.” https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-interview-joe-rogan-podcast-austin-texas-october-25-2024/.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. FDR’s Fireside Chats, edited by Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, Penguin Books, 1993.
Rosenwald, Brian. Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States. Harvard University Press, 2019.
Sarkowicz, Hans. “‘Nur nicht langweilig werden…‘. Das Radio im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda.” Medien im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Bernd Heidenreich and Sönke Neitzel, Schöningh, 2010, pp. 205-34.
Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “The Only Thing Worse Than Talking to Joe Rogan.” The Atlantic, 9 Nov. 2024.
Voelz, Johannes. “Reading Populism with Bourdieu and Elias” Reading the Social in American Studies, edited by Astrid Franke, Stefanie Müller, and Katja Sarkowsky, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 233-58.
Wouters, Cas. “Amsterdam und Soziologie in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren.” Informalisierung. Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie und Zivilisationsprozesse im 20. Jahrhundert. Translated by Werner Fuchs-Heinritz, Opladen, 1999, pp. 33-47.
[1] An overview of the topic of “podcast elections” is provided by Muharem Rusiti, “The Joe Rogan Effect: How Podcasts Transformed the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.”
[2] According to the Associated Press’s VoteCast survey, an approximate 56 percent of young men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump, compared just 40 percent of young women; Trump received the most support from young men out of all Republican candidates of the past two decades.
[3] For a close analysis of the aesthetics of Trump rallies before and during his first term in office, see Voelz 2018.
[4] Nicole Liebers and Holger Schramm have compiled data regarding the numerical upsurge in empirical parasociality studies: “Whereas we record about 15 publications a year from 2008 to 2013, this number first doubled (2014), then tripled (2018), and even quadrupled (2020) in the following years. This led to nearly 70 new publications of original empirical studies on parasocial experiences published just in the year 2020” (21). Liebers and Schramm suspect the rising use of social media and the novel phenomenon of influencers as likely factors in the proliferation of research.
[5] According to Elias, these defensive reactions culminate in a decivilizing process in which individuals give up their affect control and the fabric of social order begins to unravel.
[6] In a co-authored essay for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Pierre Ostiguy and I (2024) have sketched the class structure of contemporary U.S. populism in greater detail by identifying a contest between a moneyed elite and an educational elite. The right‑populist movement casts the educational elite as its primary enemy, while the moneyed elite serves as both aspirational model and protective patron.
[7] I discuss the complex relation between informalization and decivilizing in greater detail in Voelz 2022.
This essay was first published by Forum Transregionale Studien on 04/16/2026. It is republished here as part of the b2o Review’s “Stop the Right” dossier with permission of the author and Forum Transregionale Studien.
Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right
Aya Labanieh
By the estimation of most academics, journalists, and medical experts, the Covid-19 pandemic was a mass radicalization event—one that unfolded almost entirely on the Internet.[1] As a global crisis in public health, the pandemic brought with it an equally global surge in online conspiracy theories and paranoia—resulting in a generalized mistrust of institutions and state apparatuses, ranging from schools and intellectuals to Big Pharma and high tech. In a dizzying validation of horseshoe theory, factions of the traditional Left and Right moved into overlapping conspiratorial territory around mRNA vaccines, mask mandates, lockdowns, microchips, and the “Great Reset”—a supposed plan of global elites to use the pandemic as an excuse to dismantle capitalism, depopulate the West, and enforce radical social change. Across Europe, Canada, and the U.S., far-right political groups hijacked rallies against Covid-19 measures and used anti-vax sentiment to peel large segments of the alternative left—hippies, anarchists, fitness gurus, proponents of alternative medicine—to their side, in what has come to be called the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline.”[2]
The landscape of the Anglophone Internet itself, especially in North America, drifted rightward—rewarding influencers who churned out pandemic disinformation and conspiracy theories with high engagement, fame, and easy income. The popular term online for such a person is a “grifter”: someone who betrays their convictions, political or otherwise, for material gain, transforming what they claim to believe based on what is trending or what sells. While one can never be sure what a particular influencer truly believes, especially since many content-creators became as radicalized as their own audiences during lockdown, grifters can serve as useful indicators of where money can be made online.
A slew of “wellness” influencers, which have been called the “Disinformation Dozen,”[3] generated fame and wealth for themselves by spreading vaccine misinformation on the Internet; however, this right-ward grift also scrambled the map of distinctly political influencers and media personalities. Formerly left and liberal content-creators, such as British comedian Russell Brand, American activist Naomi Wolf, and American media network The Young Turks, boomeranged towards MAGA. Once an avowed socialist, Brand staged an elaborate conversion to Christianity in 2024 and posts constant praise of the Trump administration; TYT has pivoted away from the progressive platform that first catapulted them to fame in the 2010s towards “culture war” issues like trans identity, with key pundits now self-identifying as “politically homeless”; Wolf transformed from the feminist author of The Beauty Myth to a full-time pandemic disinformation machine. Meanwhile, content-creators who were centrist or center-right slid smoothly towards far-right or even fascist positions to catch up with their audiences. U.S. podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan, who once endorsed the progressive senator Bernie Sanders for president in 2020, now openly circulates vaccine misinformation, climate denialism, and MAGA propaganda; moreover, the guests he now invites to his podcast are almost entirely far-right and fringe figures, including Tim Walsh and Alex Jones. As with Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” the misinformation grift took advantage of real shock or trauma generated by the world-wide pandemic, harnessing the legitimate pain and paranoia widely shared among Western publics to turn a quick buck.[4]
But Covid-19 is an old story now: the first harvest of a now-routine Internet strategy. This strategy is spearheaded by a political movement I am calling the New Digital Right: it relies on social media influencers, platform affordances, and online virality to scramble political alliances and mobilize collective emotions of fear and outrage towards dark and destructive ends. The latest rupture online surrounds the topic of Israel in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Gaza after October 7th, 2023—an invasion that human rights organizations around the world, from the United Nations to B’Tselem, have declared a genocide. The case I will make in this piece is as follows: the far-right is taking advantage of global attention to the genocide in Gaza, alongside Israel’s plummetting popularity among Western publics, to radicalize and recruit new followers. The U.S.-American far-right in particular is seizing upon the media vacuum created by government censorship of anti-war and anti-Zionist voices to launder and normalize their own virulently fascist and antisemitic politics.
Israeli Propaganda & the Far-Right Pivot
Much like Covid-19, the topic of Israel and Gaza has subsumed online and offline mediaspheres worldwide. In the wake of the Israeli invasion, encampments popped up on countless university campuses, labor strikes and boycotts were called, and millions of people filled city streets across the globe. Western urban centers became the focal point of this civil unrest, shifting mainstream attitudes on the topic: by the estimation of Gallup research polls in 2026, Israel has lost popular support among the American public for the first time in its history, with mistrust of the Israeli government and sympathy for Palestinians increasing across all age groups and party affiliations.[5]
The Israeli government and Israeli cyber companies have dumped millions of dollars in online propaganda to regain control over what they call the “media war,” which even Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu admits they are losing. Numerous reports have found that Israeli companies deployed AI and bot farms to spread disinformation to Western audiences about the attacks of October 7th and their genocidal aftermath, as well as to dehumanize Palestinians and those who advocate for them.[6] They likewise commissioned a 2 million-dollar psyop to target U.S.-American lawmakers: they used hundreds of social media accounts across X, Instagram, and Facebook to pose as real U.S.-American citizens and pressure politicians (especially those who were Black or belonged to the Democratic Party) to support Israel and vote for increased military funding.[7] Speaking at a meeting of U.S. influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York, Netanyahu openly declared that social media is a crucial weapon in the Israeli war effort, and more pro-Israel influencers are needed to turn the rebellious tide of the younger “woke” generation.[8]
These Israeli propaganda efforts are part of what media scholar Rebecca Stein calls “visual media management”: Israel sees itself as suffering from a PR crisis, or a “crisis of injurious media,” and uses disinformation campaigns to strategically deny, sublimate, obfuscate, or repress viral documentation of the genocide.[9] Stein argues that the graphic and disturbing images emerging from Gaza are understood by the Israeli government as “injurious images” that require active management and control: through this logic of substitution, the injured Palestinian in the image is replaced by the narrative of the “injured state” that must be defended in the trenches of digital warfare. When framed this way, even the image of a dying Palestinian child is itself an attack on Israel.
Hand in hand with disinformation campaigns is the process of algorithmic censorship. In addition to the violent crackdowns on student protesters and outspoken artists and academics, the U.S.-American government has balked at the ubiquity of antiwar or pro-Palestinian content on social media, especially on platforms like TikTok. TikTok was briefly banned for reasons of “national security” and has been pressured to change its algorithm; since then, many activists report being “shadow-banned” on the app when they post political content, especially with regards to Israel and Gaza.[10] This “shadow-banning” tactic has been widely deployed by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, to limit the reach of antiwar content worldwide,[11] all the while removing fact-checking mechanisms from both platforms in an attempt to appease the Trump government.[12] The environment of Elon Musk’s X is even more extreme: since taking over the platform (known then as Twitter) in 2022, Musk has willfully destroyed the X algorithm, which periodically suspends pro-Palestinian accounts while refusing to censor neo-Nazi content,[13] and distributes blue checkmarks—which once served as stamps of authority or legitimacy—on a “Premium” pay-to-play basis.[14]
While it is evident that social media has become a major political battlefield today, what is less obvious is that the smearing and silencing of legitimate critical voices such as journalists, analysts, and activists on the issue of Israel has created a toxic ecosystem in which far-right influencers are thriving.
In the immediate wake of the invasion, neo-Nazi accounts cynically used the graphic virality of videos emerging from Gaza to recruit followers. Tech Transparency Project reported a spike in antisemitic and Islamophobic content across X emerging from Premium white nationalist accounts, which deployed a variety of strategies.[15] Some leaned on the Great Replacement Theory, claiming that the destruction of Gaza is how Jews will send more refugees to flood and destroy the Christian West. Others weaponized the legitimate public skepticism of Israeli government propaganda (such as false claims of “beheaded babies” during the October 7th attacks) to deny the Holocaust. Both of these tactics tether instances of real destruction and disinformation to false antisemitic conspiracy theories, which help the latter to garner greater attention and legitimacy. Some white nationalist accounts simply let the images of Palestinian suffering speak for themselves, without showcasing their own fringe politics too clearly—which in turn allowed them to fold many unsuspecting users into their audience base. Many consuming this content did not realize its source: by following these accounts or recirculating their posts, new followers thus allowed far-right messaging to magnify its reach into the mainstream political conversation.
As a result of this cynical pivot towards Gaza coverage after October 7th, many far-right and white-nationalist accounts have seen a steep jump in follower count, and their posts following the invasion have thousands more likes, reposts, and comments than any of their activity yielded in the years prior. Far-right X accounts like Jackson Hinkle, CensoredMen, Keith Woods, and Ryan Dawson gained massive traction for their engagement with the genocide, often by circulating content that could easily be construed as leftist, liberal, humanitarian, or anti-war. For example, Jackson Hinkle tweeted numerous images of the Nakba accompanied by anti-colonial talking points (“History didn’t start on October 7th”), videos of the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and subsequent attacks at her funeral (taking care to state “Zionists are demonic”) and so forth, each garnering hundreds of thousands of likes.[16] As Lindsay Schubiner of the Western States Center points out, white nationalists frequently smuggle their exclusionary ideologies into mainstream discourse by attaching themselves to current events, without any real investment in said events aside from the sowing of chaos and hatred.[17] Nick Fuentes, arguably the biggest white-nationalist influencer online, admitted as much in multiple streams, claiming that his focus on Palestinian suffering was strategic for recruitment against the “liberal order,”[18] and later insisted in his 2025 interview with Piers Morgan that the “true” genocide taking place today is against the white race in the West at the hands of “organized Jewry.”[19] This notion of “white genocide” is part and parcel of the Great Replacement theory mentioned prior—a far-right conspiracy theory that implicates Jews in a grand plot to import brown and black refugees from the “Third World” to genetically “replace” white Western populations.
Nefarious Solidarity and DEI White Nationalists
Quickly, more formidable grifters began to smell the blood in the water. After all, the influencer model relies on hijacking and rerouting attention, and given the degree of global outrage over Gaza, many realized they could ride the coattails of genocide coverage and turn a high profit. Though Israel has long been an untouchable subject in the U.S.-American mediasphere, right-wing influencers are breaking with establishment media over the issue, taking advantage of the clear disconnect between publics and pundits. Figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are exploiting the fissures in the Republican base and turning on the organizations that first launched their careers, such as The Daily Wire, Turning Point USA, and Fox News. They have realized that they can hijack audiences from under the noses of their former bosses, while also harnessing anti-war and anti-Israel sentiment to generate mass appeal from all sides of the political spectrum.
This is part of a broader strategy that the New Digital Right is developing, which I have elsewhere termed “nefarious solidarity” (Labanieh, forthcoming). Nefarious solidarity is a strategy of conscious pandering, through which the Western, Anglophone far-right diversifies its digital audiences across ethnic and religious lines. It entails convincing individuals from a variety of backgrounds to ally with far-right political ideology against a designated Other that conveniently does not include them (undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, women, etc). This strategy functions by A) platforming influencers of diverse backgrounds to articulate far-right positions and B) focusing on viral “wedge issues” that scramble traditional political alliances. Both of these elements of nefarious solidarity also happen to have a high potential for digital virality. Diversifying the far right in this way helps prevent its adherents from being siloed and marginalized from the online public sphere: it ensures greater follower counts and thus greater revenue and reach. As such, a persistent joke online is that today’s neo-Nazis are the foremost practitioners of DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) because their largest figureheads are almost entirely self-hating minorities.
A particularly entertaining example of this is a recent media stunt that a gang of far-right influencers pulled at a Miami Beach night club on January 20th, 2026.[20] Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, Clavicular, Sneako, Myron Gaines, and Justin Waller filmed themselves dancing at the Vendôme club while blasting Kanye West’s widely banned song “Heil Hitler” and openly doing Nazi salutes in the crowd. This absurd video was hard-crafted to go viral online: in an attention economy, generating outrage through this form of “rage-bait” is a bid for relevance and exposure, and helps lead new acolytes to these influencers’ streams. What is amusing, however, is how dizzyingly diverse the Heil-Hitler gang happens to be: the avowed white supremacist, Nick Fuentes, is himself half-Mexican; the Tate brothers are half-black, with Andrew converting to Islam in 2022; Sneako is mixed-race (Haitian, Hungarian, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Filipino) and converted to Islam in 2023; and Myron Gaines is a Sudanese-American Muslim. This unlikely group of neo-Nazis is throwing up salutes to a song by an African American rapper, who has since 2016 been descending deeper and deeper into the rabbit-hole of mental illness and far-right radicalization. The ironies write themselves—and point to a distinctly new way of moving Western political culture rightward in an increasingly cosmopolitan digital environment.
To become a mass movement, the far-right recognizes that it needs to generate mass appeal. Moreover, to be commercially viable, it needs to focus more on viewer count, and less on racial purity. The nexus of far-right politics and the influencer financial model produces an odd yet inevitable appeal to U.S.-American diversity—even by those who demonize it as a value and explicitly seek to destroy it. This nexus—for which hatred and money are uniting principles—has produced a proliferation of ethnic and religious enclaves online, each designed to radicalize specific audiences with messages tailored to their particular identities and demographics. For example, the “Akh Right” (a play on “alt-Right,” that substitutes “alt” with the Arabic word akh, or “bro”) is a budding Anglophone Muslim manosphere within which far-right figures such as Myron Gaines and Mohamad Hijab actively participate, and which now includes recent converts like Tate and Sneako.[21]
Likewise, this nexus has produced prominent figures from minority backgrounds whose claims to fame are the disavowal of the political causes that their “own people” have championed in pursuit of social justice. Without a doubt, the most powerful influencer in digital media today is one such figure: the aforementioned Candace Owens, an African American influencer and political commentator whose show Candace has been consistently featured on the top charts of Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and Podscribe’s analysis confirmed that she averaged 3.6 million downloads and views per episode last fall.[22] Her YouTube account independently boasts 6 million followers, and millions regularly tune into her livestreams, which frequently outpace the viewership of traditional media outlets like Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC combined.
As many digital media journalists such as Taylor Lorenz and Matt Bernstein have noted, Candace began her career as a liberal woman, running a blog called Degree180 that championed feminism and LGBTQ rights and wrote openly against the Trump 2016 campaign.[23] After a moment of public humiliation in liberal circles for a failed anti-bullying business venture (“Social Autopsy”), Candace was recruited by the earliest far-right influencers, Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. She built a reputation for herself in 2017 and 2018 as a Black woman who openly opposed the Black Lives Matter movement; denied the existence of structural racism, police brutality, or white supremacy; and blamed the disadvantaged position of African American communities on “Black culture” and “victim mentality.” From there, she was hired by Turning Point USA and toured the country with far-right provocateur, Charlie Kirk. In 2020, alongside a steady stream of anti-vax content, Candace went viral for disparaging George Floyd—the unarmed Black man whose murder by police officer Derek Chauvin sparked months of protest across the country. She referred to Floyd as a “horrible human being” and claimed that protests in his name were all financed by Jewish billionaire George Soros to “destabilize America.”[24] This led to her recruitment by Ben Shapiro, founder of the right-wing media company The Daily Wire, where she gained her own live show, Candace. The further right she has gone, the more her audience has boomed—and it is undeniable that a key component of her success is the diversity she is paid to represent and deride.
How Antisemites Hijack Critique
But the topic of Israel would go on to shake up the map—offering a tantalizing opportunity for someone like Candace to shake off her handlers and come fully into her own. While vaccine mandates and trans athletes are excellent examples of wedge issues in Western political culture, Israel is, in the present moment, the greatest of them. For Candace, it has catapulted her from the fringes of the right-wing ecosystem into the social media feeds of nearly everyone I know. While she had come under fire in the past for making antisemitic remarks, such as the outlandish 2019 claim that the only problem with Hitler was his designs for global domination beyond Germany,[25] Ben Shapiro had no issue bringing her aboard. However, after Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023, she began posting critically on X about unlimited U.S.-American aid to Israel, as well as Netanyahu’s atrocities against Palestinian women and children—sentiments that are widely shared by the U.S.-American mainstream. Shapiro, who is both Jewish and extremely Zionist, fired Candace shortly thereafter. Little did he realize that his protégée and her views had much more currency (or to use Internet slang, “more motion”) in the digital sphere than he did—and almost overnight, would go on to dwarf him and his media company in size.
From that point onward, it becomes difficult to disassociate Candace from criticism of Israel—and, crucially, from antisemitism more broadly. She begins to platform outright white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, flirt with Holocaust denial, and blame the Jews for just about everything. In December 2025, she reaches new heights of antisemitism in a response video to Shapiro’s speech about her at the Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference, in which he calls on other conservatives to ostracize her for her conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination (which I will return to later). After expressing seemingly cool-headed stances against the murder of innocents in the Middle East, she raises up a copy of the Talmud, claiming: “What you [Ben Shapiro] really believe in is Baal-Berith [an ancient Canaanite god]. That’s what your people believe in—you believe that you are contract lords, and people are not allowed to violate contracts or you will ruin them.” From there, she advises her audiences to all read the Talmud “so that you know what Ben thinks of you,” arguing:
Cause he doesn’t just hate me—he hates you, too, white men. He hates all black people. If he’s following the rules of Talmud, I mean when I say “hate,” that they think that we’re animals. That they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them. I challenge Black Americans to wake up to your true history, because your quarrel is not with white men—wake up to who publishes these books and keeps us warring with each other, Christians versus Christians, Christians versus Muslims. Wake up and learn the true history of slavery […] Jewish people were the ones who were trading us; Jewish people were in control of the slave trade. They’ve buried a lot of it, but it’s there, and you can find it.[26]
Screenshot of Candace Owens, “What Does Ben Shapiro Know About Erika Kirk and Fort Huachuca?” Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1oqQbR_bYs [last accessed 14.04.2026].
The levels of antisemitism—and the ways in which they are deftly woven in with antiwar and anti-Israel positions—are terrifying for a public figure of her reach and influence. While her critique begins as one about Israel, it quickly cascades towards Jew hatred and conspiracy theories about transhistoric Jewish power. Moreover, the strategy of nefarious solidarity is amply visible here: Candace addresses her diverse audience directly, attempting to fold Black Americans, white Christians, and Muslims into one political alliance against the “true” enemy that conspires to separate them—the Jews. As digital media journalist Matt Bernstein aptly states, “Candace very intentionally does not separate Jews from Zionism, and uses the very real violence of Zionism and understandable anger towards Israel as a way to do audience capture for her antisemitic conspiracy theories.”[27]
And Candace is not alone. Almost all the far-right figures listed thus far in this article have spoken up against Israel or in favor of Palestinians, which has garnered them extreme mainstream attention. This has become a hallmark of the New Digital Right, and constitutes a radical break from the philo-semitism of the older Republican generation in the United States, which had long folded Israeli dominance into its political and religious agendas, all while receiving large campaign contributions from pro-Israel lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This older generation includes many of the lawmakers in the American government today, such as South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who declared last month that he was willing to die for Israel,[28] as well as evangelical Christian Zionists who believe Israel’s dominance will usher in the end-times. Fox News, the American right-wing media conglomerate that frequently functions as a propaganda machine for the Trump government, has long catered to this evangelical contingent, frequently highlighting the Biblical implications of the US-Israeli alliance and stressing the “Judeo-Christian values” that unite Americans and Israelis against the Islamic terror of the Middle East.[29]
The New Digital Right is revealing just how thin this layer of supposed “love for Jews” really is—as well as how thoroughly the past years of racism, xenophobia, and neo-Nazi dog-whistling has primed the MAGA base to take the antisemitic plunge. The NDR has explicitly neo-Nazis commitments: as shown above, their most prominent influencers openly valorize Hitler, deny or cast doubt on the Holocaust, and find creative ways to blame global calamities on the “Jewish cabal.” They have taken “anti-wokeness” to its logical extremes, and do not hesitate to ask the two forbidden questions: A) If we are allowed to demonize all other ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, then why must the Jews have special protected status? And B) If we take “America First” seriously as a maxim, then why does the United States spend so much money arming and defending the interests of a foreign nation overseas? These two questions wed antisemitism to anti-Israeli sentiment—a conflation that is in their interest, and is wildly dangerous not just to Jews but to anyone who is invested in a nuanced academic or humanitarian critique of the actions of the Israeli state.
As such, the New Digital Right is younger, “edgier,” more visibly diverse, and has built its fame through alternative media infrastructures on the Internet, rather than relying on traditional mediaspheres of newspapers and TV. These alternative mediaspheres are both mainstream and fringe: on the one hand, many of these influencers have established large-scale popularity and even dominance on conventional platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and X while building exclusively far-right echo chambers for their base, such as Rumble, Gab, and Truth Social. They have realized that they no longer need to bend the knee to larger media conglomerates to make a living, nor adhere to those conglomerates’ orthodoxies. Another example of this is Tucker Carlson, who is presently neck and neck with Candace in breakaway popularity online. Once a conservative darling with Fox News for 14 years, then a disgraced pundit unceremoniously fired in April 2023, his new podcast The Tucker Carlson Show (launched in 2024) is surging—in large part thanks to platforming Holocaust deniers, white nationalists like Fuentes, and pivoting his coverage almost entirely to anti-Israel critique.
Nothing betrays the right-wing fissure over Israel more than the conspiracy theories that have circulated in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA) as a means to combat “liberal brainwashing” on college campuses, was no friend of Palestinians or any other minority group. Alongside regular support for the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, fearmongering about the “threat of Islam in the West,” and disparagement of women and black people, Kirk mocked Palestinians during the height of the genocide, joking that “I used to say that, hey, if you as a gay person would go to Gaza, they’d throw you off of tall buildings, right? Well, now they don’t have any tall buildings left.”[30] He was always a staunch supporter of Israel, so much so that PM Benjamin Netanyahu was among the first to grieve him on X after his death.
And yet, the fight over Kirk’s legacy has become a fight over Israel. Conspiracy theories exploded online after his assassination, claiming that his murder was a plot by the Mossad. According to this narrative, Kirk was on the verge of turning against Israel, and taking the Republican base along with him. To be clear, there is zero evidence to back these conspiracy theories—however, what they do reveal has much less to do with Kirk as an individual and are rather indicative of an online appetite for anti-Israel content, even in the right-wing ecosystems within which these theories initially emerged and flourished. The conspiracy theories point to a clear hunger on all sides of the political spectrum for media personalities and political leaders who will “stand up to Israel”—and through his high-profile death, which has been elevated by the Trump administration to the status of martyrdom, Kirk left behind both a power vacuum and a ripe symbolic opportunity within the right-wing space.
Candace saw the opportunity, and took it. She leaned full-tilt into the conspiracy theory that her public was agitating for, linking Kirk’s death to Israel in increasingly elaborate ways, while insinuating that TPUSA itself, along with Kirk’s widowed wife Erika who was promoted to the position of CEO, were involved with the Israelis in a massive cover-up. Candace has embarked on a full YouTube docu-series provocatively titled, “Bride of Charlie,” which bills itself as investigative journalism of Erika Kirk while more closely resembling reality television. This series, which only began on February 25, 2026, and has eight installments so far, has wracked up over 5 million views, with catchy episode titles like “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Dr. Jerri and Mrs. Hyde,” and “Red Sparrow.” To quote one of the 37,000 comments on the first episode: “This is better than Netflix.” And it is—because Candace, as the consummate representative of the NDR, has now perfected her influencer business model of conspiracism, political messaging, social media, and entertainment. Through hijacking the prevalence of anti-Israel sentiment, Candace has transformed a far-right turf war into a conspiratorial TV series with popular appeal.[31]
By feeding the hunger of the conspiracy theorists, Candace has acquired money, fame, and priceless control over the symbolic meaning of Kirk’s martyrdom. She has opened the vein of a pulsating feud with TPUSA—and while it was a gamble on her part, it is one that is paying off. TPUSA has tried to claw its way out of this paranoid web, both through affective appeals to sympathy (as with Erika Kirk’s plea to Candace on CBS News, “Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Stop.”) and righteous calls for structural alienation (as with Ben Shapiro’s speech against Candace at AmericaFest).[32] And yet, it is amply clear to anyone following the feud that Candace is winning. Part of the cruelty of the influencer space is that, regardless of the dark money that changes hands in private rooms, the numbers online speak for themselves. While Candace regularly reaches millions, TPUSA is hardly in the thousands—and their social media accounts are stuck in a strange rut, posting old debate clips of Kirk “owning the libs” on college campuses. These clips only serve to drive home just how hollow the organization is without its founder.
Alongside Candace, Tucker can sense the anti-Israel direction that the populist winds are blowing. While trying to steer clear of openly antagonizing TPUSA, Tucker has been tacitly agreeing with Candace’s analysis, and, like her, linking critiques of Israel with latent antisemitism. During his eulogy of Kirk at the funeral service, he proclaimed that Kirk’s fate reminded him of the death of Jesus Christ, who was also killed by “powerful people” for telling the truth.[33] It is fairly evident which group is being referenced in such a statement: always and forever, “the Jews.” On Tucker’s website for his independent show, he has launched new merch this year: hats and shirts bearing the puppeteer-hand from The Godfather, with the caption, “AIPAC: An Offer You Can’t Refuse.” The cheeky merchandise has been making the rounds on right and left-wing digital circuits in equal measure, which is precisely what it was designed to do. This type of overt messaging against the AIPAC lobby would have been unthinkable in the Republican base only a few years ago—in fact, it hardly existed in American politics aside from progressive leftist circles who coalesced around Senator Bernie Sanders, and who were frequently unfairly smeared as antisemites by the rest of the Democratic Party.
Tucker’s merch is only one piece of a much larger game of hypocrisy, political grifting, and audience capture. He has styled himself as something of an anti-Israel hero online: he has dedicated dozens of episodes to the ongoing genocide in Gaza[34] and has vociferously denounced Zionist ethno-nationalism and the criminalization of pro-Palestinian activism in the West in high-profile interviews with The Economist and BBC Politics.[35] He has gone as far as to attack President Trump directly as a puppet (or “slave”) to Netanyahu, who he claims has forced America into the war with Iran. This caused the President to lash out against him and other critical right-wing influencers including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelley, and Alex Jones who have stood against the Iran War for similar reasons.[36]
Meanwhile, this new “humanitarian” Tucker is the same man who mainstreamed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory for years as a pundit on Fox News, and who denounces racist and ethno-nationalist policies in Israel while overtly supporting them in the United States.[37] As recently as January 2026, Tucker hosted the white nationalist and anti-immigration activist Peter Brimelow in an episode titled “The Invasion of America,” during which he agreed that white people were being systematically targeted and eliminated around the world, and that ethno-nationalism for whites has become a necessity. Speaking directly to the camera, Tucker tells his audience they are not racist or conspiratorial for believing that mass migration is a threat to the West. He goes on to promote his “documentary,” Replacing Europe (2026), that allegedly investigates the systematic replacement of white populations in Europe by Black and Arab migrants, and he urges “white solidarity” to resist the race’s engineered “extinction.”[38]
It is no measure of victory for the progressive or Palestinian cause that genuine racists and antisemites have now co-opted their salient political critique of Israel—and are exploiting it to move reasonable conversations on Israel towards the far-right. Tucker and Candace are going viral on Right and Left digital ecosystems alike, largely through clips of their videos in which they rail against the genocide and Netanyahu. I see friends, colleagues, activists, and journalists on my timeline re-sharing their content (with incredulous captions like, “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Tucker!”), while remaining completely ignorant of these figures’ broader far-right and white nationalist beliefs, and the underlying motives for their anti-Israel pivot. As a researcher of conspiracy theories and digital media, it is a phenomenon I find terrifying. The NDR’s turn against Israel is a form of political infiltration that muddies the waters of critique, and mainstreams antisemitic, white nationalist, and reactionary voices who are using humanitarianism and anti-imperialism as a disguise.
The hollowing out of the meaning of “antisemitism” by Israeli propaganda and pro-Israel advocacy groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and StopAntisemitism has fueled this fire beyond control. The most egregious example is when StopAntisemitism nominated Miss Rachel, a children’s educator who produces songs on YouTube about potty-training and the ABCs, for the 2025 award of “Antisemite of the Year”.[39] Her crime was launching a fundraising campaign that included the children of Gaza, and posting videos of herself singing with refugee children from the Strip. StopAntisemitism went as far as contacting Attorney General Pam Bondi, requesting an investigation of Miss Rachel’s ties to Hamas.[40]
The Anti-Defamation League has done the same in its focus on pro-Palestine activists. When the hashtag #BanTheADL went viral on X in September of 2023, it was spearheaded by the Irish white nationalist Keith Woods, who, in his own words, was granted “amnesty” on X by Musk’s purchase of the app after being banned for a year and a half.[41] His #BanTheADL campaign was almost entirely supported by far-right figures trafficking in the ugliest forms of antisemitic tropes and memes, and was boosted by Musk’s direct engagement and support. Musk recirculated many white nationalist posts (including Woods’) and threatened legal action against the ADL, blaming them for declining ad revenue on his platform for “false accusations of antisemitism.”[42] Despite this undeniable hatred of Jewish people, the ADL and its founder, Jonathan Greenblatt, refused to condemn Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration in 2025, claiming it was an “awkward gesture,” made in a “moment of enthusiasm.”[43] Instead, Greenblatt has focused his organization’s ire on figures like student activist Mahmoud Khalil, political commentator Hasan Piker, and NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani, insisting that their pro-Palestine stances made them virulent antisemites.[44]
If everything is antisemitic then nothing is: and that is precisely where the danger lies. The irresponsible use of “antisemite” as an accusation has emptied the term of meaning in the public sphere—and has created common cause between far-right extremists and the mainstream antiwar position. By smearing any critic of Israeli war crimes as an antisemite, these groups have allowed genuine antisemites to white-wash their reputations (no pun intended) and camouflage themselves among upstanding humanitarians and egalitarian activists, such as Miss Rachel and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. When Candace sits across from real anti-war advocates such as scholar Norman Finkelstein or comedian Bassem Youssef, she is able to act as though they are victims of the same censorial regime: she makes jokes about how she is accused of antisemitism just like they are, how she is unfairly smeared by the “Israel lobby” for daring to “speak up” about what is going on.
But what Candace thinks is going on is very different from what you or I think. In an age of (dis)information crisis, who gets to creep into your feed is also who gets to control the narrative on the news you consume. The NDR is making good use of the media vacuum that censorship has created around the topic of Israel, and duping those who have not been following them long enough to know that they are not our friends. They are here to poison the well.
Aya Labanieh is a scholar of empire, media, and memory culture. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, with a dissertation entitled “One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Media” (2025). As a scholar, writer, translator, and educator, she has a deep commitment to the public humanities. Aya served as a researcher at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art in New York City (2023-2024), and as a Public Humanities Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities (2021-2023). In 2023, she spearheaded a project on Middle Eastern antiquity in collaboration with the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish diasporas in Germany. She is presently editing a multilingual poetry collection of Middle Eastern poets, entitled Born in Babylon, forthcoming with Wesleyan University Press. She has taught at Columbia, Barnard, and UC Irvine, and has received multiple awards for her pedagogy. In the academic year 2025/26, she is a research affiliate of EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien, as well as the Narrative Intelligence Lab at Columbia University.
[1] Radicalisation Awareness Network, “COVID-19, Violent Extremism and Anti-Government Movements,” Spotlight (2022), [Link]; Tamir Bar-On and Bàrbara Molas (eds.), Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic by the Radical Right: Scapegoating, Conspiracy Theories and New Narratives (Ibidem Press, 2021); Francesco Marone, “Hate in the Time of Coronavirus: Exploring the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Violent Extremism and Terrorism in the West,” Security Journal 35 (2021).
[2] Belew, Kathleen, “The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline,” The Atlantic, December 14, 2022.
[3] McGill, Jonathan Jerry, “A Dozen Misguided Influencers Spread Most of the Anti-Vaccination Content on Social Media” [Link] — Also, Counter Hate’s report on them: [Link]
[4] Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2007.
[5] Gallup. “Israelis No Longer Ahead in Americans’ Middle East Sympathies.” 2026. [Link]
[6] UN Special Committee, “UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war,” November 14, 2024 [Link]; Robins-Early, Nick. “OpenAI says Russian and Israeli groups used its tools to spread disinformation,” The Guardian, May 30, 2024 [Link]; Wesolowski, Kathrin. “Fact check: Israel spends vast sums on propaganda ads,” Deutsche Welle, August 9, 2025 [Link]; Scahill, Jeremy. “Netanyahu’s War on Truth.” The Intercept, February 7, 2024. [Link]
[7] Frenkel, Sheera. “Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers with Influence Campaign on Gaza War.” New York Times, 2024. [Link]
[8] Clip from Netanyahu’s meeting of U.S. influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York, posted to Instagram by Middle East Eye on September 27, 2025. [Link]
[9] Stein, Rebecca. “How to unsee Gaza: Israel’s visual politics in a time of genocide,” Communication, Culture and Critique 19, (2026): 58–66.
[10] Washington, Jessica. “The TikTok Ban Is Also About Hiding Pro-Palestinian Content. Republicans Said So Themselves.” The Intercept, 2025. [Link]
[11] Luscombe, Richard, “Meta Censors Pro-Palestinian Views on a Global Scale, Report Claims.”The Guardian, 2023. [Link]; Human Rights Watch, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” 2023. [Link]
[12] Liv McMahon, Zoe Kleinman, and Courtney Subramanian, “Facebook and Instagram Get Rid of Fact Checkers,” BBC News, January 7, 2025. [Link]
[13] “X, formerly Twitter, suspends hundreds of Palestinian accounts amid Israel-Gaza war,” The New Arab, October 13, 2023. [Link]
[14] Warzel, Charlie. “X Is a White-Supremacist Site.” The Atlantic, 2024 [Link]; Stroth, Steve. “Elon Musk’s X Corp. Sues Media Matters Over Report on Pro-Nazi Content,” Time, 2023 [Link]; Klepper, David. “Musk Threatens to Sue Researchers Documenting the Rise in Hateful Tweets.” PBS,2023. [Link]
[15] Tech Transparency Project, “White Supremacists on X Premium Use Israel-Hamas Conflict to Push Hate Agenda.” November 16, 2023. [Link]
[16] Jackson Hinkle (account @jacksonhinklle) is a self-proclaimed “MAGA Communist” who is prolific at spreading misinformation online. His politics are pro-authoritarian, with support for Trump and Putin in equal measure. Here are links [A, B, C] to his posts about the Nakba and other massacres against Palestinians; here [Link] is his post about the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh and the attack on her funeral.
[17] Schubiner, Lindsay. “How White Nationalists are Exploiting the Crisis in Israel and Gaza,” Medium, November 22, 2023. [Link]
[18] Clip of Nick Fuentes’ stream discussing Gaza, posted by X account of the advocacy organization Right Wing Watch. [Link]
[19] Nick Fuentes Interview with Piers Morgan, 1:20:00. [Link]
[20] Salzbank, Lena. “Miami Beach Nightclub Faces Backlash After Playing Antisemitic Anthem,” NBC Miami, January 20, 2026. [Link]
[21] Sahar Ghumkhor, Hizer Mir. “A ‘Crisis of Masculinity’?: The West’s Cultural Wars in the Emerging Muslim Manosphere.” ReOrient, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 2022), pp. 135-157. [Link]
[22] Podscribe. “October 2025 Podcast Rankings.” November 6, 2025. [Link]
[23] Bernstein, Matt. “How Candace Owens Left Reality,” A Bit Fruity. January 9, 2026. [Link]
[24] Roose, Kevin. “Social Media Giants Support Racial Justice. Their Products Undermine It.” The New York Times. June 19, 2020. [Link]; Rogers, Katie. “Trump Says Jobs Report Made It a ‘Great Day’ for George Floyd, Stepping on Message.”The New York Times, June 5, 2020. [Link]
[25] Scott, Eugene. “One of Trump’s Most Vocal Black Supporters Seemed to Defend Hitler in a Recent Speech.” Washington Post, February 8. 2019. [Link]
[26] Owens, Candace. “What Does Ben Shapiro Know About Erika Kirk And Fort Huachuca? | Candace Ep 283” Candace Owens, December 20, 2025. 22:25. [Link]
[27] Bernstein, Matt. “How Candace Owens Left Reality,” A Bit Fruity. January 9, 2026: 1:03:00 [Link]
[28] Luciano, Michael. “Lindsey Graham Declares, ‘I Will Be With Israel Until Our Dying Day’”, Yahoo! News. March 10, 2026. [Link]
[29] Kurtzleben, Danielle. “This is how the Republican Party became so strongly pro-Israel.” NPR. October 19, 2023. [Link]
[30] Here is the link to Charlie Kirk’s speaking engagement at Generation Church, which was titled “Bold Men Unite,” and posted to the Church’s YouTube account on November 2, 2023. The joke can be found at the 36:18 mark. [Link]
[31] In a discussion on March 23, 2026, journalists Mehdi Hasan from Zeteo and Krystal Ball from Breaking Points have referred to these as the “MAGA podcast wars.” [Link]
[32] Interview between Barri Weiss and Erika Kirk on CBS News, December 11, 2025. [Link]; Speech delivered by Ben Shapiro at TPUSA’s AmericaFest, December 19. 2025. [Link]
[33] Mastrangelo, Dominick. “Tucker Carlson faces accusations of antisemitism over Kirk eulogy,” The Hill, September 22, 2025. [Link]
[34] A non-exhaustive list of episodes include: “US Green Beret Veteran Tony Aguilar Details the Shocking War Crimes He’s Witnessing in Gaza,” July 31, 2025 [Link]; “Whistleblower Exposes the Real Puppet Masters Controlling the State Department and Plans for Gaza,” September 5, 2025 [Link]; “Why Are We Defending Mass Murder in Gaza? Because Our Greatest Ally Demands It,” December 11, 2025 [Link]; “We Went to a Gaza Refugee Camp and What We Saw Was Disturbing,” December 15, 2025 [Link]; “Tucker: Israel Is Committing Terrorism in Gaza,” February 20, 2026 [Link]; “The ‘Holocaust of Our Time’ Rages on in Gaza as Israel Shuts Down the Holiest Site in Christendom,” March 30, 2026 [Link]
[35] Interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, “Tucker Carlson on whether Trump betrayed America First over the Iran War,” The Economist, March 20, 2026. [Link]; Interview with Laura Kuanssberg, “Tucker Carlson splits with Trump over Iran,” BBC Politics, April 12, 2026. [Link]
[36] Murray, Isabella. “Trump blasts MAGA influencers who have split with him over Iran,” ABC News, April 10, 2026. [Link]
[37] Bond, Shannon. “How Tucker Carlson took fringe conspiracy theories to a mass audience,” NPR, April 25, 2023 [Link]; Jones, Owen. “Tucker Carlson has lost his job—but the far right has won the battle for the mainstream,” The Guardian; April 26, 2023 [Link]
[38] Carlson, Tucker. “Peter Brimelow on the Invasion of America, Who’s Behind It, and How Long Until Total Collapse.” The Tucker Carlson Show, January 19, 2026. 22:40. [Link] The full title of the “documentary” is Replacing Europe: Following the World’s Deadliest Migration Route; it can be found on Tucker Carlson’s website and can only be accessed through a members-based subscription [Link].
[39] StopAntisemitism website, April 7, 2025. [Link].
[40] Tracy, Marc. “Why Tot Celebrity Ms. Rachel Waded Into the Gaza Debate,”The New York Times. May 14, 2025. [Link]
[41] From Keith Woods’ Twitter account @KeithWoodsYT posted on January 1st, 2024. [Link]
[42] Milmo, Dan. “Elon Musk threatens to sue Anti-Defamation League over lost X revenue,” The Guardian, September 5, 2023. [Link]
[43] Harb, Ali. “ADL faces backlash for defending Elon Musk’s raised-arm gesture.” Aljazeera, January 22, 2025. [Link]
[44] Inskeep, Steve. “ADL creates new ‘Mamdani Monitor’ project to track his administration policies,” NPR, November 7, 2025 [Link]; Speri, Alice. “Antisemitism watchdog slams ADL’s ‘hyperbolic and aggressive’ response to Mamdani win,” The Guardian, November 14, 2025. [Link]; Burley, Shane. “Jewish Organizations Are Fighting Back Against Khalil Deportation,” Truthout, April 13, 2025. [Link]
A Review of Alexander Kluge and Anselm Kiefer, Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances. Trans. Alexander Booth. London: Seagull, 2025.
When the German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge died on March 25, 2026 at the age of 94, a translation of his exchange with the painter Anselm Kiefer had just been published. Also just published, or perhaps just about to be published—when someone dies, the chronology gets blurred—was Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription. Lerner had joined up with Kluge in the astonishing collaboration The Snows of Venice (2017): early poems by Lerner inspiring texts by Kluge, which inspired further texts by Lerner. The collection is illustrated with artwork by painter Gerhard Richter, Kluge himself, and others. Presumably Lerner did not anticipate when he gave the manuscript of Transcription to his publisher that its publication would coincide with Kluge’s death. But in the character of Thomas, who does die in the course of the novel but does not share all his details with Kluge, Lerner nevertheless delivers a heartbreakingly beautiful portrait of the artist. Any English speaker who desires an introduction to Kluge’s many-sided work could go there first.
As a novelist, Lerner won’t let the reader forget that the artist is also a parent, which is to say condemned to emotional imperfection. I did not know Kluge well enough to judge whether Thomas’s tendency to always retreat into “some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references (many of which were probably fictional)” (94) from painful dilemmas of parenting and grandparenting was true of Kluge as well. What I recognized immediately in Thomas were Kluge’s gentleness, his experience of being bombed as a child, and his tendency to hear angels in voices on the radio. I recognized, too, the love of dreams, and changing eye-colors, and cave painting. What I would have liked to see more of in Thomas was Kluge’s ability to make art and politics converge in unpredictable ways. Lerner has proven himself politically inventive as well, for example in his perhaps-autobiographical, auto-fictional story about the political hacking of Wikipedia, “The Hofmann Wobble”.
Consider how this—the convergence of art and politics—happens in Kluge. A young woman walks in slow motion across the screen. The camera, motionless, watches her pass from across the street. Then a voice-over stops the action, and the camera zooms in. First, on a swath of her dress. Where was the fabric manufactured? The camera moves to her boots—same question. To her handbag—what is the history behind its making? Leather craft, we are told, goes back to the Middle Ages. There are histories behind everything we have been seeing: the building in the background, the intercom on the door, the company that invented the intercom, the door lock, the grating in the sidewalk, partially blocked up, the brightly-colored signs on the wall marking the presence of gas and water pipes under the street, along with the amenities they enable, the dried-up chewing gum and the cigarette butts in the cracks between the cobblestones, the cobblestones themselves.
The histories come fast and furious. It’s hard to focus on any one of them. If what you want is to watch the woman, you will be disappointed. Still, the total effect is weirdly entertaining. The film seems to be about capitalism, and there is no doubt that it disapproves, but the disapproval doesn’t leap out at you. Discovering the hidden background of things doesn’t always provoke the expected indignation. You might even say that it brings with it a perverse kind of pleasure.
The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein had a plan to adapt Marx’s Capital. In 1929 he went to Paris to meet with the author of Ulysses to discuss the project. The film, Eisenstein thought, had to put everyday life at the center, as James Joyce did. For example, Eisenstein would not film the stock exchange as part of the project. Joyce was not interested, however, and the movie didn’t get made. But in 2008 Kluge took the project in hand. A memorable part of it, a collaboration with Tom Tykver available from the Kluge archive at Cornell, is the deep dive into the objects surrounding the young woman on the sidewalk. It’s entitled “All Objects Are Enchanted People.”
The title is not a bad translation of what Marx in Capital called the fetishism of the commodity, the process that allows me to forget, lifting a sack of rice or unpacking a new laptop, the lives and labors of invisible people far away that brought the commodity here to my hands. By making the labors and the lives visible again, Marx wanted to define the fetishism of the commodity and demystify it. Demystification is not quite right, however, as a description of Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances, another collaboration with an artist, reveals. Kluge, a philosopher in the lineage of the Frankfurt School and a filmmaker sometimes described as the German Jean-Luc Godard, enters into dialogue here with the celebrated German painter Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). The book is more interested in life wisdom than Capital is and less interested in demolishing falsehoods as a way of life. It makes you realize, however, that demolishing falsehoods is only part of what Marx was up to in Capital. In the background of that book too, there is a vision of how life might be lived.
***
This dialogue between Kluge and Kiefer is entitled (you may need reminding—I did) “Intelligence Is the Art of Remaining Faithful under Shifting Circumstances.” Borrowed from the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, that title is paradoxical enough to count as advice on how to live. It implies that there is no principled way of reconciling principles with changing circumstances. Since circumstances can be relied upon to change, especially political circumstances, it follows that remaining faithful to your principles can only be achieved by the practice of an art (Kunst) and that art cannot itself hew to absolute principles. Artists should therefore expect to be criticized by political allies who think their principles have been violated, and both Kluge and Kiefer have been. The tone of their book, however, is not defensive. And it invites the reflection that, since the art in question is intelligence itself, it can be practiced equally by people who are not professional artists. One moral for the rest of us is that, however overwhelming the urgencies of the present, it’s useful to stock up on knowledge of the lives and labors of the artists, writers, and thinkers of the past, however distant. Or, as Kluge puts it: “I faithfully memorize—with music in operas, without music in storytelling and with particular relish in film and visual art—all the errors which have been made and the experience they contain. These will-o’-the-wisps are more trustworthy than all of the rules of wisdom.”
Quality time spent in the company of the dead will send you back to your principles, however indirectly. An example: Immanuel Kant remaining faithful to the French Revolution despite bad news from Paris about the guillotine. Another example, also from the French Revolution: the woman in Beethoven’s Fidelio who, faithful to her lover, rescues him from death amidst seemingly incomprehensible shifts in ruling regime. Life wisdom: revolutions, like lovers, are not easy to be faithful to. Faithfulness requires the exercise of intelligence.
Kluge and Kiefer’s book is a treasure-house of plot sketches and anecdotes, many on the brink of breaking into parable. One might describe it as a companion, though not in the usual reference-book sense of a “companion-to-X”. Intelligence offers friendly companionship to those of us who are struggling in isolation (and who isn’t?) to remain faithful to our principles.
Kiefer was born in the small southern German city of Donaueschingen, which is credited by some as the source of the Danube. The Wikipedia entry on the city does not mention that it was devastated by an Allied bombing raid on March 4, 1945, four days before Kiefer’s birth. As the book reminds us, he was born in a bomb shelter. A month later, on April 8th, the city of Halberstadt, where the 13-year-old Kluge was living, was largely destroyed by another air raid, leaving some two to three thousand of his neighbors dead. Kiefer was too young to remember the bombing, but he would have heard stories. It seems likely that these two contemporary German masters were drawn together by common memories of a hometown devastated from the air.
Kluge published about the bombing in different forms, including a short, collage-like, somewhat absurdist book. Air Raid has been accused of heartlessness for its failure to empathize sufficiently with the victims. It dramatically omits his personal feelings about being bombed. It’s as if the occasion was too big for personal feelings; in Transcription, Lerner makes much of this emotional evasiveness in Thomas. Much of Kiefer’s painting, famous for its mixing of paint with materials like straw, ash, and sand, could also be seen as a reference both to the Holocaust and to the bombing. It reproduces a haunting atmosphere of ruination, most often without revealing who or what is bring haunted or mourned. It’s easier to see Kiefer’s career as aiming to cut through the complacencies and euphemisms of the “Wirtschaftswunder,” the economic miracle of Germany’s post-war recovery, and to insist on (to paraphrase Kluge) the blood and horror lying at the bottom of all good things. But that is not the only sense that has been made of him. Was he pointing his finger at the Nazis? Or (as German romanticism has always tended to suspect) blaming modern technology? His Norse gods and dark green forests left the question open. Of course, any German artist who dared step into the minefield of Holocaust memory, and did so by returning to the seemingly anachronistic genre of representational painting, would have to expect controversy even if he did not begin his career, at age twenty-four, with a series of photographs in which he gives a sarcastic “Heil Hitler” salute at different locations in Europe.
In a review of Air Raid, Katie Trumpener notes that Kluge’s early films were on the receiving end of feminist critique for their depiction of post-war women as bumbling and confused. It’s true that Air Raid, too, does close-ups of women in the midst of the bombing of Halberstadt who cannot take in what is happening around them: the ticket-taker at the local cinema who tries to tidy up with a broom after half the building has been blown away, the mother of three who tries to protect her three small children from the falling bombs with a random sheet of tin. But no one in Halberstadt, male or female, can make much sense of what is happening. The same is true in the aftermath, when the war is over (the war ended shortly after the bombing, which served no military purpose) and an American investigator asks the locals who is to be blamed for the mass killing. The Americans? The Nazis? War as such?
The question was of some interest to me when I first read Kluge’s book some years ago, as I had recently discovered that a squadron of B-17s that bombed Halberstadt on April 8th, 1945 was commanded by my father, Captain Eugene Rabinowitz. (I write about this in Atrocity: A Literary History [2025], and, now that I think of it, in other places as well). When I had the good luck to meet Kluge in 2016 and talk about all this, he steered the conversation gently toward other acts of violence in the more distant past. My notes from that meeting also include some poetry, though I can’t remember who it was from: “Like a tornado touching down, the dream selects its sleeper.” (In Transcription too, Thomas has much to say about dreams.) As a motive for reflecting on the distant past, present violence in its most tornado-like aspect sends me back to my own dreams and sleeper-like passivity, but also to the project of filming Capital: how deep into the background of objects does one want or need to go? Is there a point where one goes too deep—so deep as to lose the thread of present indignation?
Kiefer’s mentor, Joseph Beuys, had tried to “do” Auschwitz without human figures, relying instead on objects like a dead rat, vials of fat, and moldy sausage. The assemblage allowed for considerable uncertainty of interpretation. Like Beuys, Kiefer is experimental in his recourse to materials, but he is unafraid to paint human figures, even mythological ones like Wagner’s Nibelungen that the Nazis seemed to have rendered taboo even for would-be satirists. Was this a humanizing of Germany, critics asked, a covert participation in Germany’s rightward turn, a step toward national reconciliation with the horrors of the past? Maybe not. Andreas Huyssen understands Kiefer’s imagery as either deliberately ironic or as performing a necessary working through, given that, in spite of the Nazis, the imagery still carries emotional weight. Many of the black-and-white illustrations in Intelligence are fabulous, but they are perhaps not the best way for the uninitiated to catch up on either the irony or the working through. I would watch the Wim Wenders documentary, Anselm, instead. Film, Kluge’s other medium, is better able than a book to transmit the scale of Kiefer’s massive architectural sculptures, as monumental as the Nazi structures they satirically echo. A book is a small thing, physically speaking. Still, it is Kiefer who in the opening pages praises the book as a physical object: “I don’t think Noah’s ark was full of animals, but books” (2). And the colorlessness of his visual contributions to Intelligence is not an accident attributable to the costs of book publication. The grayness is intentional.
In deference to Paul Celan, Kiefer shows us dark, dead sunflower stalks in a snowy field with no sun. As the Wenders documentary reveals, he burns straw and undergrowth on a wall using a flame-thrower and the wall becomes a painting. In an assemblage, sunlight shines on empty white dresses, the heads replaced by bricks, plastic cases, books, barbed wire. In another painting, metal rods stick out of cracked slabs of concrete, the ruins of some habitation. After Gaza, Kiefer’s work has come to seem less commemorative than prophetic.
Intelligence foregrounds Kiefer’s Celan-inspired Margarete/ Shulamith series, where as Huyssen observes, Kiefer’s remembrance of the Holocaust comes through brilliantly. Those paintings are a tribute to the poetry of Celan, the Romanian-Jewish German-language poet who lost his parents in the Holocaust and himself survived one of the forced labor camps. They reference in particular Celan’s most famous poem “Todesfuge”, “Death Fugue”:
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland
your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit
In one painting you see a German woman’s blonde hair against a dark, barren landscape. In another you see a Jewish woman’s black hair superimposed on a memorial to the German war dead. “Mother,” Celan wrote in “Wolfbohne”, “they are writing poems.” It is good that art continues, adapting our principles and our circumstances, even if, as here, the artistic act is pitifully incommensurable with its occasion.
***
Besides family memories of the Allied bombing, the two artists are also joined by the pleasure they both take in large time scales. “What moves me about Anselm Kiefer’s work (and has led to our collaboration),” Kluge writes, “is the timespan of over 300 years (oftentimes over 3,000 or even 40,000 years) in which its actuality moves” (110). Both artists show a confidence that time spent in deep or mythic background will not be wasted. I noticed a leaden B-17 in an assemblage that Kiefer had labeled “The Argonauts.” Intelligence features a daisy chain of poets, starting with Pindar, the archaic (that is, pre-classical) Greek poet whose poetry is saturated in an era when the Olympian gods had not yet taken over. Hölderlin, who translated Pindar, also influenced Celan. Kiefer pays tribute to all three. And Kluge ends the book by recalling the potentiality embodied in Pindar’s centaurs, a potentiality which persists despite “the Big Five in Silicon Valley, those modern usurpers who are building a new Valhalla on an imaginary stage by Richard Wagner” (203). Today’s world is much like the world ruled by Zeus. But enchantment has not disappeared. “Nothing has been irrevocably decided. No reason for fatalism” (203).
In Transcription, a child’s seemingly incurable eating disorder—labelled an “art of hunger” by Thomas in one of his evasive moves–does what a novelist is obliged to do: it brings the temptation of hopelessness closer to the everyday life of people today who purchase and read novels. Like Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard is another novelist who has spent years contemplating a great artist. In his 2020 profile of Kiefer, entitled “Into the Black Forest With the Greatest Living Artist,” Knausgaard does not try to refute Kiefer’s greatness, but he does include a reference to bad parenting and he notes–whether at his own expense or at Kiefer’s is unclear—that Kiefer sometimes does not seem to know his name, and sometimes seems to have forgotten him altogether. In Transcription too, Thomas sometimes treats the Lerner avatar as an old friend and sometimes just as cheerfully confuses him with someone else. Is this blitheness a characteristic of the great artist, or of the artist as seen by the novelist? Or might it be an instance of life wisdom, the art of remaining faithful under shifting circumstances that Kluge and Kiefer discuss? The eating disorder in Transcription, it’s worth noting, is eventually cured by the application, perhaps intelligent and perhaps merely lucky, of parental indifference. Perhaps indifference, then, is part of what’s needed to stay the course.
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.
Often, at a certain stage of artistic maturity, filmmakers turn their gaze back upon the history of film. They hold up a mirror to the 7th art and inspect its techniques and forms: what cinema has been, what it is, what it might yet become, attempting to compose a history of the medium from within, inscribing their own work into a genealogy, sketching the outline of a manifesto. Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma is a grand instance of such an endeavor. Through a palimpsest of film fragments, the twentieth century is drawn from the visual archive it produced.
In Resurrection, Bi Gan, like Godard, reaches for the longue durée. Onscreen, at once a history of cinema and a history of modern China, the two unroll conjoined—the nation cutting moving images to fit its silhouette, moving images refashioning nationhood. Bi Gan, however, eschews Godard’s essayistic, documentary register. Instead, he embraces the narrative form. He imagines a world in which humanity has traded the unconscious drifts of sleep for immortality. Only a rare few still possess the capacity to dream—outliers known as deliriants. The film follows one of them, an anonymous fugitive who seeks refuge by leaping from one cinematic remnant to another, slipping through time, sharing the same faculty as the nameless protagonist of La Jetée (1962).
Resurrection traces a chronological arc across six vignettes: a prologue, an epilogue, and, in-between, four short films. Spanning from the first opium war (1839-1842) to the present day, each chapter registers a new phase in the making of Chinese modernity: British occupation and the end of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese civil war and the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Cultural Revolution, Dengism and the Reform era, the Socialist Market Economy period, and Xi Jinping’s techno-nationalism. This sequencing also resonates with the conventional periodization of Chinese film history into successive “generations” of filmmakers, each emerging from a particular historical moment. Beyond this historical progression, the six-chapter structure gestures toward another order, the Buddhist doctrine of the six sense organs and the six consciousnesses. Bi Gan ventures here a theory of cinema that confronts the problem of perception—the nature of experience, the formation of consciousness—by turning to a philosophical and religious tradition rooted in Asia. He unsettles the dominant Western paradigms that have long organized film theory, from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of spectatorship to Bazin’s ontology of the moving image, Arnheim’s gestaltist approach of animated pictures, and Metz’s semiological analysis of film.
Between the tableaux, time-lapse shots of burning candles interrupt the narrative, wicks collapsing into pools of wax. Far from decorative, the image invokes a Buddhist account of continuity. When King Milinda asks the monk Nāgasena what is reborn if there is no self, Nāgasena answers with an analogy: one flame lights another. What passes on is not substance but causation, leaving imprints that condition a new stream of consciousness, neither identical nor wholly different. In Resurrection, the history of cinema and the history of China unfold along two overlaid understandings of time: the dialectical progression of historical materialism and the Buddhist image of successive ignitions.
The Deliriant represents cinema’s constant rebirth and metamorphosis—a plasticity that tips into monstrosity. It figures as a Western graft: an alien, infectious body trailing in the wake of British and French occupation.
In the overture, the Deliriant emerges as a figure from early horror cinema—pale, dark-eyed, and eerie, like Edison’s Frankenstein (1910) or Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). His back splits open to reveal a projector wired into his spine. Enslaved, the Delirant is confined in a subterranean chamber buried at the heart of an opium den, a replica of the expressionist architecture of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The Deliriant is sustained by poppy blossoms and produces “poppy tears” for the den’s patrons. The trapdoor to his cell doubles as a phenakistoscope, one of those proto-cinematic machines that prefigures the cinématographe. On its spinning surface, an opium seed morphs into a skull. The Deliriant appears as a byproduct of the Opium Wars, twin to the narcotic that underwrote Western intrusions within the Middle Kingdom. A woman—named Big Other (大她者) after the Lacanian concept—rescues him and restores the projector lodged in his back. Her intervention signals a turning point: wrested from colonial custody, cinema is reimagined within Chinese society and its symbolic order. Once repaired, the film glides into a reenactment of L’Arroseur arrosé (1895). Transplanted from its French garden into a luxuriant landscape of wildflowers, the medium becomes organic to China: nourished and naturalized in its new ground.
In anthracite tones and sharp chiaroscuro lighting, the second segment adopts the visual style of 1930s–1940s film noir, as cinema enters the age of sound. It tells a spy story: after a composer dies, the Deliriant steals a theremin and sheet music believed to contain a cipher. The chase leads through a ruined train station, a space that recalls Shanghai’s “Bloody Saturday” of August 28, 1937, when Japanese air raids destroyed the South Railway Station.[1] There, in this devastated landscape, the Deliriant is caught off guard as he lies asleep in the baroque-carved bed of a motionless railcar, its faded glamor redolent of the Orient Express’s opulence. He is arrested and interrogated. He hangs suspended by the arms in the basement of an administrative building. The lash falls across his back, his body sways above a circular drain reminiscent of the round hatch that sealed him inside the opium den. The image doubles back on itself, creating a motif of continuity and rupture: from the Opium Wars and the waning Qing dynasty to the Republic of China, the civil war between the Guomintang and the Communists, and the Second Sino-Japanese War, in which Shanghai occupied a combustible place.
The second vignette depicts a brutal era of transition for both China and cinema. By the 1930s in Shanghai, movie theaters flourished, attracting young audiences as Hollywood films dominated screens and spurred local industry growth. Leading Chinese studios like Lianhua and Mingxing adapted the American studio model and reshaped its aesthetics to reflect Shanghai’s turbulent modernity. With its procession of gangsters, detectives, and femmes fatales, Hollywood provided archetypes with which Shanghai filmmakers addressed what agitated the city: The Goddess (1934) and Street Angel (1937) depict the grind of urban poverty, the merciless struggle between leftist and far-right forces, and the mounting threat of Japanese aggression. Yet, after the Nationalists seized Shanghai in 1927, they instituted a stringent system of censorship, subjecting books, newspapers, and films to scrutiny as presumed vehicles of moral decay.[2] Just released from Western geôles, the Deliriant—alias Cinema—finds himself swept up once more, this time by the nameless bureaucratic and violent apparatus the detective works for. Intelligence gathering, kidnappings, torture, assassinations—methods that echo those of the Military Bureau of Statistics and Investigation—the Nationalist secret police, which played a ruthless role in the repression of Communists. For the Nationalists, the Deliriant is no mere entertainer but a vessel for subversion, infused with progressive and non-traditional values—western, if not Communist ideas. Pushed to his physical limits, he offers a bargain: he will lead the detective to the place where he has stashed the score and the theremin—an abandoned house lined with mirrors, a derelict labyrinth of refractions. In a replay of the climactic “maze of mirrors” scene from The Lady from Shanghai (1947), images multiply and fracture. As film reels struck, restruck, the Delirant splinters into a thousand doubles, each reflection becoming another. Beyond containment, he vanishes into his own infinite reproduction.
The Deliriant wakes in the back of a moving truck, rattling along a wintry mountain road. Once a Buddhist monk and now forced into labor by the Red Guards, he is returned to his former temple with orders to destroy its relics as part of the Cultural Revolution’s campaign against old traditions. Assigned to guard the desecrated temple overnight and suffering from a severe toothache, he hears a voice instructing him to extract his aching tooth with a fragment from a shattered statue. Upon doing so, a demon resembling his father emerges. The Deliriant confesses to euthanizing his ill father using poisonous potatoes. The Demon traces two ideograms on the fountain’s surface, covered by green lentils: bitterness and sweetness (“甘” and “苦). Later, the Deliriant inscribes them again with pieces of wood upon the frozen earth of the temple garden; they gradually disappear beneath the fall of snow.
The film conjures the style of revolutionary Model Operas with its costumes and rural settings, but lacks their clear moral dichotomy. There is no virtuous revolutionary set against a villain—no landlord, bourgeois traitor, or Japanese imperialist. Even the opposition between the monk, figure of the old order, and the Red Guards, agents of the new, doesn’t stand in a sharp ideological divide, the evil and the good. What emerges instead is a tale of ambiguity and in-betweenness, a meditation on Cultural Revolution cinema: a cinema that sought to sever ties with pre-revolutionary iconography to purify itself through auto-critique and a radical tabula rasa, ultimately forfeiting its capacity for dialectic. Bitterness and sweetness, past and present, loss and gain, propaganda and art all intermingle. At dawn, beneath the temple gate that marks the separation between the sacred and the profane, the Deliriant finally reckons with duality.
The fourth vignette begins almost exactly as the third. Playing on continuity and rupture, it opens on a visual echo—much like the round cell door and the circular drain sutured in the first two episodes. In medias res, the Deliriant wakes in the back of a moving truck. Whereas in the third tableau cinema traveled from a metropolitan area toward the rural hinterland, he now makes the return journey: the 1980s witnessed a re-centering of narrative cinema on the urban, attuned to the new rhythms that animate Chinese cities following Dengist reform. The Deliriant returns as a small-time con artist, freshly arrived in town and already devising a scheme. Refusing to partner with two coarse thugs, he instead recruits a young orphan girl. He trains her in card tricks and drills her in a covert language of cues: a choreography of signals she must memorize for every card. One of these codes relies on scent. Finally ready, he brings her before an old, wealthy man who has placed an advertisement in the newspaper seeking someone with supernatural abilities. As she is blindfolded, the old man presents to her a blackened metal box filled with ashes—the remains of a letter lost in the fire that killed his daughter. He asks the girl to “read” what has turned to dust. She recites a message addressed to an absent father. After being paid for their services, the Deliriant resolves to leave town alone, abandoning the girl behind. At the bus station, as he decides to turn back, the two thugs reappear. They rob him, a blade flashes, he bleeds out to death.
The vignette deals with the question of transmission. It stages the passing on of a technique, the apprenticeship of illusion: the sleights of hand the Deliriant teaches the girl find their analogue in the cinematic craft, which, since its earliest days, has spun legerdemain from montage cuts.[3] In 1978, the Beijing Film Academy reopened after the Cultural Revolution, training the cohort that became the Fifth Generation.[4] As the Deliriant initiates the orphan into the art of deception, so Chinese cinema in the Reform era relearns its language, renewing itself by piecing together its lineage beyond the socialist realism of the Mao era. The vignette also turns to another form of transmission—not of knowledge, but of capital. The old man stands in for the Chinese Nomenklatura: the state apparatus and its command economy that provisioned film production throughout the Cultural Revolution. The Deliriant secures money only after staging a demonstration, letting the old man assess the girl’s magical talents as though submitting a film project to a state commission for approval.
Though the Deliriant also makes money with side hustles: he runs a scatter of small ventures, diversifying his petty-crook business to keep himself afloat. His con runs parallel to the broader liberalization of the Reform era, when getihu—individual household entrepreneurs—burgeons favoring the development of an interstitial economy.[5] Similarly, film production slipped into a hybrid system, combining state ownership with market incentives, that left room for informal, gray-market activities: the studios were expected to cover part of production costs through box-office revenue, keeping surplus beyond quotas.[6] But as the Deliriant learnt at his expense, competition seeps in where state funding once sufficed. In the new economic order, the two thugs he refused to associate with return as predatory business rivals, stripping him of both cash and life. Despite this tragic turn, a note of hope lingers. As the old man becomes convinced of her extraordinary gift, the girl comes to believe in it: what began as a hocus-pocus scam takes on the texture of reality. In other words, cinema—handed down to a new generation—recovers its generative force, its power to estrange the spectators, long constrained by the aesthetic stricture of Maoist doctrine.
1999, on the eve of the new millennium. The Deliriant smokes alone on the docks. A gang of youngsters roars in on motorbikes. Hidden behind a concrete pylon, he watches unnoticed as they toy with a man, before hoisting him up by the arms and abandoning him there—the image reverberating backward to the second vignette, where the Deliriant himself hung suspended. Once again, Bi Gan threads a motif across time. Binding the civil-war era to the late 1990s, it urges the spectator to ask what makes the two epochs alike, however irreducibly different. In the 1940s, Shanghai cinema teemed with noir tales of mafia, spies, detectives, and seductresses. In the last years of the 20th century, the underworld and its catalogue of opaque characters resurfaces: Hong Kong gangster movies—Johnnie To, Andrew Lau, John Woo—illegally flood the mainland thanks to video compact disc (VCD).
Watching the hazing as if it were a film, the Deliriant fails to notice he has entered the frame. On the pylon, like shadow play, a projection, the profile of a woman. The watcher is watched. And we, the audience watch this nesting of spectatorships and spectacles. Unaware of all the eyes on him, the Deliriant rifles through the hanging man’s pockets; on the ground lie broken VCD players and hundreds of shiny discs. She steps out and whispers her name, Tai Zhaomei—a name she shares with a Taiwanese pop singer. Glinting like a disco ball, VCDs line the walls of a karaoke bar—the hideout of a triad boss who traffics contraband Taiwanese records—where the Deliriant has followed Tai Zhaomei.
She belongs to the godfather—produced and sold by him like a pirated disc. The metaphor—linking underground film distribution to human trafficking—turns literal when the Deliriant realizes the boss is a vampire, and Tai Zhaomei his blood child, condemned to a nocturnal life of exploitation. As he is bitten, she sings “Magnolia Flower”[7] (by Tai Zhaomei), an homage to the karaoke scene of Xiao Wu (1998), the debut feature of Jia Zhangke.[8] Leading figure of the Sixth Generation, Jia examines the social consequences of rapid modernization and globalization in contemporary China and brought Chinese cinema to international film festivals, where it began to compete with the more widely circulated auteur cinemas of Taiwan (Tsai Ming-liang), and of Hong Kong (Wong Kar-wai)—an ambition that Bi Gan undoubtedly shares.
This fifth tableau stages an impossible love story between mainland Chinese cinema and the cinemas and pop music of Taiwan and Hong Kong: it ends in tragedy. At daybreak, the lovers flee together on a boat whose shape alludes to the barge transporting Lenin’s statue in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995). Their embrace captures the optimism of China in the early 2000s, amid accelerating integration into global capitalism. Though, the couple also rushes toward death: now that she turned him into a vampire, the sunrise promises annihilation rather than renewal. The scene has a double-edge, forward-looking and elegiac. Like Lenin’s statue, which signals the collapse of the USSR, it mourns the disappearance of old communist China. It also laments a way of watching movies: the VCDs that democratized access to films sped up the decline of movie theaters.[9] A bitter-sweet chronicle of triumph and loss. In filigree, Bi Gan draws the idiograms of vignette 3.
The film circles back. The “Big Other” washes the Deliriant’s corpse and prepares him like a mortuary cosmetologist, applying prosthetics to remake him as the monster from the opium den. She then slides him into a strange morgue cooler that resembles both a funeral lantern and a fantasized data tower. The final shot pulls back to the rear of a miniature movie theater, a wax diorama slowly melting into darkness. What form will cinema assume in the age of digital platforms and AI?
Number one at the box office, Resurrection achieved a rare feat for Chinese arthouse cinema, seducing mainstream audiences.[10] While it fulfilled its ambition at home—demonstrating that Chinese cinema is as monumental and self-reflexive as its Western counterpart and may offer new breath to the 7th art—it proved less successful abroad. Described, with a touch of Orientalism, as mysterious and enigmatic, the film exposed the persistence of an insular Western critical gaze—even as China stands as the leading global power.
Before beginning her Ph.D in Romance Studies at Cornell University, Joséphine Haillot received an M.A. in Art History and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She was an invited researcher at the Cinémathèque française (2019-2021). Her current research focuses on representations of working-class life and the wider problematic of class consciousness in French film and literature after 1989; drawing on intellectual history, socialist thought, psychoanalysis, and media theory to investigate the cultural residues of posthistoire from the fall of Berlin Wall to the crisis of neoliberalism.
[1] “Bloody Saturday” is the name given to the black-and-white picture taken on August 28, 1937. The image shows a baby crying amid the bomb-shattered ruins of the Shanghai South Railway Station. Testimony to Japanese wartime violence, the photograph provoked waves of outrage abroad.
[4] Angus W. K. Lam, review of Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films, by Paul J. A. Clark, China Perspectives, no. 63 (January–February 2006), published December 20, 2006, accessed February 23, 2026.
[5] Mark Dodd Jacobs, Market China: An Historical and Institutional Analysis of a Chinese Marketplace and Its Market Environment (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2010), 21.
[6] Ying Zhu, Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
boundary 2 held its annual conference this year at the University of Pittsburgh, in honor of Jonathan Arac. Organized by Paul Bové, the two-day conference featured several long-standing members of the collective and the b2 editorial board, new members of the collective, and Jonathan Arac himself.
This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.
Ravishing Regulations and Digital Bodies: Metabolizing #Metoo
Jeanette Vigliotti King
“It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems.” – Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
In the late 2000s, David Golumbia claimed examining the rhetoric of computation allowed for an interrogation of “those aspects of institutional power aided through belief in the superior utility of computerization as a form of social and political organization” (2009: 3). Golumbia provides a compass for navigating the slippery ways in which computers and digital life continue to obscure harm. As Golumbia states, the rhetoric of computation always carries veneers of newness and radical breaks—social media spaces are know exceptions for striking poses of liberation, newness, and connection. Like David before me, I aim to understand the ways in which digital social networking sites can be read as texts with “cultural and historical contexts” (Golumbia 2009:2). In this essay, I read metabolism, zombies, and the hashtag as interconnected logics of digital circulation: a way which bodies and stories affectively move through digital space and are rendered legible on digital bodies. This framework is particularly helpful for reading the emergence, spread, and afterlife of #Metoo.
The October 2017 #Metoo[1] campaign spoke wounds to life, narrating a historical story of repressed violence (Geiseler 2019). #Metoo produced largely absented, shamed narratives of sexual assault survivors. The conventions for online participation and meaning making were strategically and tactically deployed to force marginalized, nondominant, and traumatic narrative into focus—causing these stories to metabolize and explicitly enter forums of knowledge production. As such, the digital wound named by #metoo told stories about normative health presentation and bodies on social media sites. I offer the concept zombie hunger to theorize more broadly how the unstable categories of consumer/consumed were levied during the October 2017 #Metoo multiplatform media event.
Zombies are potent metaphors, a cultural figure that can be mobilized to track what persists after a body has been designated as abject, abandoned, or made socially dead. Zombie hunger refers to a structural condition of unending need: a repetitive reaching toward recognition, repair, and justice that fails to be fully satisfied under platform capitalism. In other words
Zombie hunger accounts for the ways personal, uploaded social media information metabolizes with human and nonhuman others. In this sense, zombie hunger tracks how digital bodies become-with. Uploaded information is not passive, but an integral part of knowledge production in Facebook and Instagram. If uploaded information fits within certain criteria, the information circulates freely, touching many digital bodies, bringing them together. Metabolized data allows users to become-with human and nonhumans alike. (King 2025: 2)
Its affordances lie in naming how survivors’ stories circulate as both vital and emptied material which human and nonhuman platform actants metabolize, creating moments of rupture and visibility. Its limit is the zombie metaphor risks reinscribing dehumanization. Therefore, I find the zombie useful for foregrounding the structural hunger associated with social media platforms. As a mode of cultural critique, the figure of zombies describes viral, collective and grotesque consumption, giving name to the textual cannibalism that occurs within digital social media platforms. As a descriptive figure, zombies are helpful for naming ruptures in protocol. As in films and books, zombies spread by using existing networks of contact and proximity—planes, trains, malls—anywhere people gather, are seen, and see others. Zombies are not liberators, but like all monstrous figures, can reveal harm and warn against ways of being in the world. In this way, zombies offer a Golumbian critique: “we have to learn how to critique even that which helps us” (Golumbia 2009: 13). Read this way, the figure of the zombie is both critique and care practice: a critique of the logics of consumption in social media space which translates articulated trauma into data and a care practice for its insistence that what haunts, what returns, what stalks does so because it has not been tended to.
Zombies metabolize—a process that regulates which bodily functions happen. Metabolism, Hannah Landecker argues, is not autonomous but dependent on multiple actants which destabilize agential positions of life (as active) and death (as passive). Consequently, the fixed hierarchy of consumer and consumed cease to be stable markers defining a body. Metabolism offers language for the divergent ways temporality, life, and death manifest for digital life. Since zombies are never singular, but always part of a horde, the metaphor is useful to think with for the ways a collectivized metabolism operates. Zombies as a figure help think about ways in which traumatic narratives are spread compulsively, blurring distinctions between self/other, consumer/consumed, alive/dead, health/sick.
Hashtags, which are clickable links that organize and bind an uploader’s personal information to others on social media sites, can be thought of as metabolic in nature. The hashtag marked users, compelling others to witness and consume their narratives. Since regulation as a process leads to physiological change, #Metoo forced digital consumption through uncanny, repetitive exposure. Hashtags, like zombies, rely on collective meaning making, their power drawn from contact and hybridity.
#Metoo can be understood as a monstrous story of hunger, a tale of what one cannot speak alone. In the case of #Metoo, zombie hunger is enacted through: 1) the uploader self-reporting information; 2) the uploader selecting a hashtag; 3) the hashtagged post is algorithmically selected to join other user’s feeds; 4) other users consuming the hashtagged post on their feed; 5) other users clicking the hashtag; 6) other users becoming an uploader. This process mirrors the ways the mid-twentieth century zombie operates—through consumption, transmission, and integration. #Metoo narratives transformed as they circulated, shaping and being shaped by the digital social media bodies. #Metoo resists single authorship, instead forming an overwhelming mass of testimony.
The archive of #Metoo represents metabolized stories, kept alive through repetition and reproduction of the dominant social values of imagined communities. Paying attention to metabolized stories, I provide a close reading of October 2017 #Metoo to interrogate how repetition in digital spaces is operationalized to reveal normative practices and procedures. Which and whose stories are digestible? And why and how?
I examine infrastructures that successfully metabolized certain textual and imagistic #Metoo testimonies and how these regulated what other testimonies were marked in poor taste, perverse, or unpalatable. I close read texts in the public domain—newspaper articles about #Metoo, the viral media event in 2017—and the structural nature of the Facebook profile picture. Finally, I read and analyze artist and graphic designer @witchoria (Victoria Seimer)’s #Metoo image that circulated in the initial days of #Metoo to show how #Metoo offered a tactical, temporary disruption in how social media users collectively engaged with systemic sexual violence.
Going Viral: #Metoo 2017
In what follows, I will contextualize the 2017 #Metoo media event to demonstrated how metabolic and monstrous frameworks manifest within these narratives. In October 2017, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted “Suggested by a friend: If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me Too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”[2] Alyssa Milano’s tweet was initially considered the origin point for this particular media event, but activist Black feminist activist Tarana Burke had already created the campaign a decade earlier and has run programming to support survivors of sexual trauma (Vagianos 2017). Celebrities and non-celebrities alike added their voices on Twitter, and soon the hashtag #Metoo was trending. #Metoo made familiar platform conventions—like the live feed and the hashtag—a site of zombie- hording and hunger. #Metoo exposed the ways in which certain bodies – those that are disproportionately women, transwomen, and women of color—experience violence when they were figured as objects, fleshed commodities.
According to CBS News Report from October 17, 2017, 12 million posts featuring the hashtag “me too” flooded Facebook (CBS 2017). Although this was not the first—or last—viral hashtag campaign about a social and political issue, #Metoo affords legible conversations about the yoked nature of the digital and physical body and how an appetite to consume content can be used to upend the normative operations of social networking spaces. Through the seemingly mundane #Metoo, this translated trauma effectively organized multiple organic and inorganic entities, human and nonhuman actants.
As more users added their voices to #Metoo, zombie hunger became a powerful, partially disruptive force. #Metoo participants used the conventions of the platform—of the pleasures of being seen and the pleasures of being consumed— to call attention to narratives not normally deemed polite or sayable. The repeated presence of #Metoo caused these stories to metabolize. In the specific case of #Metoo, the hashtag itself acts through this understanding of metabolism. The digital body of women who posted now bore a mark and thereby helped constitute what users, other users, and nonhuman actants were forced to “see” and “devour” while engaging with their live feed. Paraphrasing Hannah Landecker, the #Metoo status update is some of the “stuff out of which bodies are made.”(Landecker 2013: 4) Since regulation as a process leads to a “physiological change,” then #Metoo forces consumption through banal tactics that are rendered unfamiliar and uncanny (Landecker 2013 : 4).
I focus on hashtags as a mechanism of self-production and zombie hunger because hashtags have an agential capacity to shape and be shaped by existing and emergent bodies of knowledge. Zombie hunger in the form of agential hashtags operates within the framework of testimony.[3] Gilmore explains:
Testimony crosses the boundary between life and death, but also it tarries at the border and inhabits it as an extracorporeal entity. The testimonial body is both a surrogate for those who cannot testify and possess a life of its own. It persists across jurisdictions and can travel the globe. Its future is defined by its capacity to communicate about the past. It exceeds the bodies of the dead, but it carries their voice where it cannot go. Testimony constantly traverses the boundaries of the living and the dead and it derives its affective charge from its disembodied and authentic location. Testimony is haunted: by the dead to whom it bears witness, as well as the living who offer it and hear it. It carries histories of the past that are difficult to narrate, and it makes a claim on the present about current situations. (Gilmore 2017: 75).
#Metoo functioned as a kind of testimony as an “event and practice” which exists in spaces like autobiographies, memoirs, and digital social networks. When #Metoo was operationalized, the linked nature of the hashtag sent stories of sexual assault and violence skittering across the internet, infecting and replicating on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram taking over the live feeds of users. Every post with the hashtag carried a “disembodied” and “haunted” narrative through repetition in the testimonial network of multiple social media platforms.
Haunting seems to share a lot in common with hashtags: they are both patterns, repetitions, frequencies Haunted time is inherently an affective, nonmetric one. As Avery Gordon describes, haunting “alters the experience of being in time,” relies on repetition, and marks the re-emergence of social violence, disrupting stable notions of progress (Gordon 1997: xvi). With #Metoo, the familiar body presented a haunted and temporally displaced trauma for consumption that forced its consumers to look at absented, invisible wounds. The narrative form of hashtags draws power from repetition and dissemination. In this way, repetition combined with the desire to look becomes metabolic because meaning and power are not autonomously generated, but generated and regulated in concert with algorithms, hashtags, and other users.
By adhering to the temporal logics of repetition, every affective engagement in social media –reactions, shares, hashtags–amplifies the larger message. According to Nicole Brodeur (2017), a columnist for The Seattle Times who also participated in #Metoo, if “the Me toos’ keep coming. Some from transgender women, some from gender nonconforming people…. we’ve not just opened a dialogue here. We’ve exposed the abuse of power and shown there is strength in numbers.” Brodeur (2017) explains how she watched “drips” of #Metoo until there was a “deluge.” The repetition, the connection, or as she says, “strength in numbers,” demonstrates the capacity of what narratives are going to be digested, which ones will force their way into public discourse (Brodeur 2017).
The case of #Metoo shows how hashtags are nonhuman others, co-producing both desires and hunger. Hashtags have the capacity to work alongside humans to flip normative scripts and shape reality and knowledge systems, allowing for communities to form and transform understandings by forcing consumption through the logics of the live feed. Like hashtags, the zombie’s integrity and meaning-making capacity is dependent on contact with others, by the act of consumption as a moment of transformative power.
Similarly, in postapocalyptic literature, it is the presence of the zombie that is more urgent, more important than understanding who that zombie is or was; in the #Metoo movement, the name of the participant is not nearly as urgent as the admission itself: “me, too.” When the hashtag flooded feeds, an overwhelming mass of trauma images became accessible merely through acts of repetition. But the integrity of #Metoo, like other hashtags, is dependent upon its contact with other matters. A singular hashtag, unattached to other signifiers, has diminished meaning, reduced capacity to create (digital) physiological change to the linked social body. Zombies, too, are seldom singular; they gain full recognition in a zombie horde in which individual distinction is not the defining feature. Zombies gain meaning in relationship to each other, read against orderly, healthy bodies free from disease. Zombies are an act of translation, moving between life and death, consumer and consumed. Like the pronoun “you,” zombies occupy a space of general and individual distinction.[4]
Iterative Practices: Metabolizing Life-Writing and Trauma
Sexual assault, like all trauma, exists at the space where language bucks, becomes undomesticated, caught between an embodied moment then and an embodied moment now. #Metoo offered a tactical, temporary disruption in the how social media users collectively engage with systemic sexual violence. In #Metoo, users and hashtags were webbed, related, co-authors in a story that extended beyond the body of one individual. Read retroactively, #Metoo is a monstrous story of hunger, a tale of what one cannot speak alone. Instead, #Metoo now signifies through volume, each story tacked on, made alive—hunting and haunting—through the nonhuman actor of a hashtag, growing more powerful through what doesn’t have to leave the lips of the user. Haunting is fraught with repetition, what demands to be re-seen again and again. Repetition is also a temporal displacement, a scene which materializes through various structures brushing up against each other. When applied to digital spaces, haunting’s affective uncanny persistence is rendered visible, particularly with recurrent encounters with traumatic events slicing into scrolling sessions via algorithmic circulation. In a digital social media site, users are likely to encounter content in shuffled time and order, rather than a strict linear fashion.
Life-writing in digital spaces expands opportunities and forms to report, share, and connect self-representation stories; like the haunted bodily form of the zombie, it constantly weaves between interiority and exteriority. Rippl et al. (2013: 7) prefer the term “life-writing’ over autobiography…[because] the latter tends to privilege certain ways of writing about the self [and] conform to the Western Enlightenment narrative of the autonomous self determined (and at least implicitly male) individual which usually favors narrative regularity.” Life-writing is a way to center those narratives “by women, people of color, post-colonial subjects, and other historically marginalized groups, whose stories of violence and oppression are often rendered in non-linear and fragmented forms.” (Rippl et al 2013: 5). Since digital narratives rely on indexical access (rather than linear pagination), the digital temporal space of haunting provides the necessary language and strategies to think-with the lives and experiences of marginalized others.
Thinking about the processes which enable #Metoo as life-writing focuses on which bodies, even while articulating collectivized trauma, are still subjected to systemic and structural harm. Operating from a feminist philosophical position of strong objectivity, classing #Metoo as a life-writing names the co-narrators (human and nonhuman alike) as historically and socially positioned, constructed at-once through available technologies, languages, and forms.[5] Trauma tests the limit of self-representation–it is extremely difficult to verbalize trauma. This testing necessitates a reconceptualization of the genres of self-representation that adhere to “legalistic definitions of the truth, sharply distinguish between the private and the public as well as the individual and the collective and presuppose a sovereign self as the teller of the tale” (Gilmore 2017: 7). #Metoo is haunted by this systemic violence in which a sovereign self is not the narrator. Corporeal experiences are given to digital bodies, formed both through the chain of production for the digital device, and the network of nonhuman others within the social media platform itself. #Metoo is a co-production whose potency and failings are deeply related to form or how the life-stories moved in a zombie-like horde.
Complicating Picture Perfect Health
Social media platforms offer a mirage of freedom. While users are free to upload their own images and contribute text, they must do so within strict boundaries. These platforms, though modifiable, follow an orderly format in which only images of certain sizes can be selected and uploaded. For instance, an uploader on Facebook has a hierarchy on their profile: an anchoring profile image, a banner image, a bolded name, and a wall where posts produced by the uploader and other users are visible. Every post follows a particular visual hierarchy: the profile picture in miniature, the uploader’s name, the content of the post (which includes things like a video or image uniformly formatted in a neat box) with text and the ability to incorporate hyperlinks in the form of hashtags or social tags to other profiles.
There is no variety, despite the platform’s insistence on wanting the uploader to express “What’s on your mind?” For uploaders, the question “what is on your mind?” can only be addressed in the same uniform way. The ability to choose what to upload obscures the ways in which the platform itself, to use Golumbia’s work, creates a “central perspective; whatever the diversity of the input tory, the output is unified, hierarchized, striated, authoritative” (2009: 208).
There are also unwritten social conventions governing the construction of digital profiles—only particular kinds of images and life events, those usually associated with positive experiences, are generally circulated for public consumption (Calderia et al. 2020). Lauren Berlant explains, “Health itself can then be seen as a side effect of successful normativity, and people’s desires and fantasies are solicited to line up with that pleasant condition” (Berlant 2007: 765). Berlant’s assessment is readily extended to Facebook and Instagram. Bodies on these sites are positioned as healthy through a careful absenting of trauma and health woes. This adherence to “unification haunts” every post (Golumbia 2009: 208).These infrastructural practices of small digital repetitions such as uploading, reacting, sharing, and hashtagging uphold projects of normativity and reify the clean, upwardly mobile, white, able-bodied liberal subject.[6] Through such infrastructurally-encouraged repetitions, social norms and structural harm from “offline” continue to metabolize experiences “online.”[7]
Zombie hunger adheres to logics of repetition: #Metoo’s power depends on the collapse of consumer/consumed, forcing users scrolling on “their” feed to consume abject experiences that survivors have been taught to repress and whose narratives have been denied life in many institutional spaces. The violence to the body returns from the dead as a hungry hunter. Every move towards eating is repeated not only by an “individual” participant but amplified by the horde’s consumption rhyt as well. When users post comments on Facebook live feeds, a smaller image of the profile picture is to the left to the textual information—whether that is a link, another photograph, a few sentences, a life event, etc. In this way, the photograph and status update form a new photographic experience—the inclusion of the linguistic message that is inseparable from the image proper (Barthes 1977). The profile picture serves two primary purposes: to identify and authenticate the user. The profile picture becomes a digital handshake, carrying a user’s identity in the selected image. Many profile pictures are headshots, or artistic spins on headshots.
The Facebook profile picture inherits from portraiture producing healthy bodies for circulation. Tanya Sheehan explains the nineteenth century practice still permeates contemporary relationships with digital photographs as people “seek to create ‘healthy’ public images…that reproduce narrowly defined ideas about what it means to belong to an ‘American’ social group” (2011: 144). Facebook’s embedded photo tools focus primarily on brightening and lightening, while other non-native applications like Snapseed allow users to digitally enhance the body by removing blemishes, freckles, pounds–procedures and operations to make a digital body reproduce normative health which is always already positioned as white, heteronormative, and able-bodied. These apps, within and outside of Facebook, “generally ‘balance skin pigmentation idealize ‘pure’ whiteness as the desired norm” (Sheehan 2011: 144). Sheehan notes both “physical ‘excess’ and aging” are traits associated with “the lower class” whose lives are valued differently, particularly when class intersects with the vectors of race and gender. Although whitening practices are not the heart of my analysis, it is imperative to understand that the mechanisms for disseminating information reproduce normative health practices. Illness is absented and mitigated through healing tools, camera angles, and social conventions of reporting certain kinds of information.
Unification and repetition are mechanisms of zombie hunger for #Metoo. During the media event, the live feed of many users’ Facebooks were flooded with a jarring juxtaposition: a profile picture (likely in line with normative conventions) and the textual testimony of sexual assault or violence. This same structure which transmits fantasies of frictionless life was used to make one story viral, a story that testifies abuses to the physical body.
The presence of #Metoo next to a profile picture disrupts the healthy body through a haunted temporality. #Metoo haunts and intervenes norms of the profile picture and status box[8]. The contingent nature of the photograph is reinscribed with admissions of sexual assault and violence, altering the unwritten conventions of sharing only positive events and news associated with capitalist and white values of success (Wells et al. 2021). Instead, users scrolling through their Facebook live feeds are met with bodies and cannot help but taste.
Often, sexual assault and sexual trauma are invisible wounds that afflict 1 in 3 women and 1 and 6 men.[9] However, that trauma is not absented from the survivor’s experiences. With the inclusion of #Metoo beside the profile picture, each participating user generated a consuming horde, affecting and infecting other users. A 2019 study found that #Metoo did impact public awareness–there was an increase of google searches for the following keywords: sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape (Kaufman et al. 2021). Users were spurned, at the very least, to seek additional information about a health issue that disproportionally affects women and in which women of color, women with disabilities, women in low socioeconomic classes, and trans women are overrepresented. Kaufman et al (2021) explained:
The National Sexual Assault Conference held in August 2018 is one example of how the hashtag has been turned into action. The conference’s opening plenary featured Tarana Burke talking about where the #Metoo movement needs to go next (National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2018; North, 2018). The #HowIWillChange follow-up movement is another example of hashtag activism resulting in clear ways to change behavior, although whether social media users actually engage in these promised behaviors is unknown. While a hashtag seems simplistic, and the #Metoo movement has been accused of being unfocused, without a clear purpose, and at times a threat to men falsely accused (North, 2018), the movement has upended public conversation about this health issue for women and others globally. How the sustained attention on the movement and related issues is used for addressing these women’s health, safety, well-being, and policy change remains to be seen.
The digital body can be transformed into a political stance by a digital act and one that can translate into material changes. Tarana Burke explains she thinks the “destigmatizing effect #Metoo represents a greater gain than anticipated risks” and that “There is inherent strength in agency. And #Metoo, in a lot of ways, is about agency” (Brocke 2018). The way #Metoo has been discussed in a variety of news articles echoes this sentiment—participants often felt empowered, part of something larger, less ashamed when adding their voice to the #Metoo community.
#Metoo: What Did Not Metabolize
Although #Metoo generated space for sexual assault narratives by forcing viewers to consume content, I want to pay attention to Landecker’s statement that metabolism “run[s] the operation of being a body” (Landecker 2013: 4). #Metoo certainly disrupted public discourse, allowing certain women to feel safe enough to express their tales of assault or harassment by feeling connected to a larger community. However, not all #Metoo narratives were integrated seamlessly into the “operation of being a body” (Landecker 2013). Verity Trott explains that not all survivors felt the same way, calling the feminist hashtag campaign “voyeuristic trauma porn” that disregarded the “high level of emotional labour from survivors but demands nothing from the perpetrators” (2021: 1125). Moreover, not all survivors felt safe in sharing their stories of sexual assault—despite the presence of other stories.
Here, Golumbia’s exploration between users and CRMs becomes generative ground for thinking through the ways in which platforms have historically both catered to individuals and abstracted their specific needs. He explains:
While the rhetoric of CRM often focuses on ‘meeting customer’s needs,’ the tools themselves are constructed so as to manage human behavior often against the customer’s own interest and in favor of statistically-developed corporate goals that are implemented at a much higher level of abstraction that the individual[.] (169)
Following Golumbia’s account of computational logics that automate and naturalize political power, I read the hashtag as a kind of techne structuring stories to cohere as movement. This formulation of tools that meet the customer’s needs—in this case, a platform’s so-called democratic dialog prompt to share using the hashtag #Metoo—is levied against the interest of individual contributors. In fact, the hashtag is, itself, a construction that manages human behavior at a high level of abstraction. Individual contributions are absorbed into larger historically specific, deeply political projects. #Metoo participates in the logics Golumbia outlines: it amplifies, recirculates and constrains testimony through platform architectures which privilege certain repetitions.
Not all bodies, #Metoo reveals, are valued the same. Importantly, then, some kinds of zombie hunger remain indigestible, despite the ways #Metoo forces the consumption of particular digital identities. Technological tools and digital media are not absented or immune from their situatedness.[10] Kember and Zylinska offer some insight as “to what extent and in what way ‘human users’ are actually formed–not just as users but as humans–by their media” (2014: 12). For #Metoo, understanding that media –and its consumption– as imbricated in human cultural, social, political, and economic systems is important to push against narratives of technology as liberated from the concerns of race, class, and gender.[11]
#Metoo is not physically present, but a product of the Anthropocene where bits/bytes are organized across bodies. #Metoo organizes data in a horde–a very different kind of archiving practice than the traditional archive which is in a locatable space with defined parameters of what types of content are worthy of memorialization. Again, social media archival sites pose different challenges for contemporary historians such as privacy concerns, methods of swift retrieval, deleted accounts among other things. Foucault explains that archives exercise a particular kind of discursive power, functioning as the “system that establishes statements as events and things” (Foucault 1972: 137). Value, significance, and authority become associated with items stored and cared for in an archive. By transitioning items into an archive, values of cultures are rendered visible–these are the ways an archive helps form “events and things” which, in turn, outline what types of events are permissible.
Another important contour: “you” are implicated, “you” are metabolized. When survivors uploaded their stories and used the hashtag, they participated in a decentralized archive. The platforms of sites such as Facebook and Instagram enable self-archiving practices that depart from traditional archiving power structures. As Rebecca Lemov (2017: 254)) explains:
Self-initiated nonstate archives tend to embody a different set of power and control nodes, a difference perhaps most easily embodied in the contrast between the relations Michel Foucault described in Discipline and Punish (in which the pervasive ‘eye of power’ spread disciplinary and dressage-like techniques that are absorbed through a network of power relationship) and the processes he examined in The History of Sexuality volumes 2 and 3….self-archive, a powerful paradox is at work. The imperative to optimize the self through archiving it is accompanied by a concomitant desire to ‘outsource; responsibility for choices.
Lemov is right to focus on the ways “nonstate archives embody a differ set of power and control nodes” that have to do with panoptic impulses, regulated behavior to “optimize” the self for absorption and consumption. Digital self-archives, such as Facebook and Instagram, are unquestionably sites of knowledge production. Social facts, as Ann Laura Stoler (2017) indicates, help shape which knowledge is considered qualified. In digital spaces, the process of converting social fact to authoritative knowledge is imperative to the reconfiguration of power. Only certain knowledges are saved, waiting to be resurrected. On Facebook and Instagram, this inherited imperial practice shifts, becomes harder to see, and requires a different assemblage of historically specific materials to trace how power is exercised over bodies.
Even in this moment of rupture, #Metoo’s imagined community still largely upholds what Gayle Rubin calls a “hierarchical system of sexual value. (Rubin 2007: 171). Due in part to criminalization and a long tradition of dehumanization, the vulnerable population of self-identifying and self-reporting sex workers failed to be integrated successfully into the larger narrative of #Metoo. Melony Hill, Baltimore resident and sex worker, explained after disclosing her experience with sexual violence that “she’s gotten messages saying she deserved to be sexually assaulted…‘They don’t want to include women like me….They’ll say we’re just whores anyway — ‘How can you sexually assault a whore?’ I’ve had that said to me multiple times” (Cooley 2018). The piece continues with stories from the women whose sex worker status positions them outside the generative potentiality of #Metoo. Sex workers occupy a space on the bottom of the hierarchy as a part of a “criminal sexual population based on sexual activity” (Rubin 2007: 171). Because sex work falls outside normative sexual activity, cultural narratives often dehumanize these laborers as “dangerous” or “inferior undesirables.”[12] Professional dominatrix J. Leigh Brantly expresses this concern when she states, “they aren’t ‘perfect victims” (Rubin 2007: 172). These examples illustrate how the conventions of social media’s zombie hunger do not promise full liberation—many other socially constructed others remain outside bandwidths of acceptability for horde hunger.
Sex worker experiences are not the only vulnerable, less metabolized. There are other intersectional concerns–women of color and working-class women are often left out of the conversation. A white actress launched #Metoo into the cultural imaginary, despite Tarana Burke’s Me Too campaign which started a decade before. Vice President for Education and Workplace Justice at the National Women’s Law Center Emily Martin explains, “‘There has not been enough attention to the way sexual and racial harassment intersect and the ways a woman’s racial identity can target them for harassment” (Jones 2018).
Without attention to intersectional goals, digital movements run the risk of unintentionally reproducing the subordination of certain bodies. Trott (2021) explains intersectionality is a crucial framework to address some of the issues women of color, women with disabilities, women outside the United States,[13] and queer women faced while attempting to have their experiences successfully metabolized. She explains the framing of Milano’s tweet alongside the spreading sentiment that “we’re all victims and should stand together” excluded “experiences of men, transmen, and nonbinary folk, with the latter groups experiencing a higher rate of sexual violence” (Trott 2021: 12). The exclusion of trans and nonbinary folks in #Metoo speaks to a larger rupture within mainstream feminist activism. Trott indicates the flattening of all survivors as the same within digital platforms fails to properly account for how marginalized groups operating within systemic oppression often have greater chances of experiencing sexual assault and violence. Intersectional frameworks reveal not only which narratives are deemed consumable (or hungered for) but also traces how both algorithms and digital norms work in tandem to amplify certain narratives at the expense of others.
#Metoo, Tactical Media, and Possibilities
From a certain vantage point, #Metoo might appear to be a neoliberal life narrative for the ways in which individuals named systemic harm and major white businessman were held legally accountable.[14] Gilmore explains that the neoliberal life narrative “features an ‘I’ who overcomes hardship and recasts historical and systemic harm as something an individual alone can, and should, manage through pluck, perseverance, and enterprise. In short, the individual transforms disadvantage into value” (Gilmore 2017: 89). However, there are distinct differences due to the interrelated, composite, zombie-like mass of people connected by a hashtag, and the words “me too.” This is not the story of an individual, but a story of scale.
Attention to these collapses of self/other and consumer/consumed helps us think about #Metoo where the same kind of zombie hunger forced users to consume the horror of sameness. The sameness here is the horror of the volume of sexual assault survivors, of violated physical bodies and newly wounded digital bodies. Being forced to consume content in this scaled-up way furthers the zombie hunger because it calls attention to differential life chances which exist under capitalism but typically disappear from notice.
The normative social protocol of going online and checking the live feed is part of the platform level mechanisms that allowed these testimonies to be seen and consumed. Understanding the slipperiness of the subject and self within neoliberal conventions of branding and self-commodification can reveal the gendered, classed and raced impacts of capitalism and how hunger can be used as tactical media, a disruption in normative procedures. Rita Raley explains that tactical media “engage in a micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” and that “tactical media activities provide models of opposition rather than revolution,” operating within the system of global capitalism and neoliberalism. Since tactical media are forms of art that form “temporary autonomous zones,” they open rather than foreclose possibilities for political transformations beyond their ephemeral temporalities (Raley 2009: 1, 151, 27).
I read Victoria Seimer’s viral #Metoo digital artwork through zombie hunger as a form of tactical media (Seimer 2017). On Instagram, a particular image created by user @witchoria (Victoria Seimer)[15] and promiscuously[16] circulated by other users provides an example of a story that (as noted earlier) names wounds. User @witchoria which presents a haunted, foggy field in which no bodies are present. Instead, “me too” is spectrally rendered, repeated throughout the image. On Instagram, user zero @witchoria made her image accessible to “anybody who wishes to repost,” allowing her image to circulate in testimonial networks (Seimer 2017).
Zombie hunger is a flexible close reading strategy, one that can also be applied to visual texts; in turn, @Witchoria activates the same pleasures of consuming and being consumed. Since this image was created and meant to be shared, the image itself has the capacity to link bodies, and “make of others do” (Latour 2005: 9).
This agential image is noteworthy for a few reasons and requires a few different, yet knotted readings. Mitchell argues photographs have ritualistic value in social life meaning images desire and perform work, occupying an uncanny space as nonhuman actors that, through social imaginings, have power to regulate meaning or produce panic (2005). He indicates images are lifeform that occupy media ecologies where “personas and avatars [can] can address us and be addressed in return” (Mitchell 2005: 203). @witchoria’s photograph presents a natural landscape: a night-dark field, greenery, flowers, and a thick fog. However, this familiar woodland scene immediately becomes uncanny. The natural world fades away and the unnatural prevalence of sexual violence manifests in the glowing “ME TOO” that is repeated throughout the image, fading into the mist. @Witchoria’s composite photograph demonstrates the naturalization of systemic sexual violence. @witchoria flips the script of presenting idealized, normative, healthy bodies, choosing instead to withhold any bodies. She doctored her photograph to demonstrate the presence of an ill, highlighting wounds and trauma rather than shying away from such presentations. Rather than taking a photograph of something “true,” @witchoria generates a narrative photograph, blending elements of fiction and metaphor into her work. This imagining or phantasy is necessary for the recognition of her trauma.
@wichoria conjures a haunted space replete with zombie hunger which complicates the idea of the individual, both biological and social. On Facebook and Instagram, a digital body is always a composite being, warranted and circulating from the uploader, in tandem with other users, text, algorithms, and photographs. Such complex becoming builds from biologist Scott Gilbert declaration “We are all lichens,” meaning from a biological standpoint, humans are composite, symbiotic entities and not singular autonomous individuals.[17] If the individual is no longer a unified, singular biological entity, then this dispersed, composite fact is made reticent online, particularly in the case study of @witchoria’s widely disseminated image. Zombies are seldom singular; they gain full recognition in a zombie horde in which individual distinction is not the defining feature. Zombies gain meaning in relationship to each other, and when read against orderly, healthy bodies free from disease. Zombies are an act of translation, moving between life and death, singular and plural. Like the pronoun “you,” zombies occupy a space of general and individual distinction.
In contemporary imaginings, zombies lose their names–they cease to be individuals. Instead, they become a zombie horde, a collective monstrosity that is both human and nonhuman. @witchoria’s disseminated photograph, the name of the particular user is not nearly as important as the admission: “me too.” Articulating the violence and generating a wound gains potency through the horde-like mechanism of the hashtag. When the hashtag is followed on Instagram, an overwhelming mass of images—of trauma—materializes. Here we have a haunting. Here we have a story that translates wounds.
Each user that elected to use @witchoria’s image for #Metoo participated in an act of translation, which strikes me as being related to the classic sense of repetition. Writing “Me Too” simultaneously decenters and preserves the author–or uploader.[18] The traumatic experience is distilled into a caption, gaining new life when posted online. Attaching an individualized narrative, however long or sparse, does the work of “living on” through “repetition with a difference” (Massumi 2002: 16). It is actually the frequency and pattern that given the #Metoo endemic and temporal meaning (Massumi 2002: 39).
Within the specific case of #Metoo, the “me” occupies a different type of first-person experience. The “me” of #Metoo names frequency as its temporality. The “when” of trauma is less important than the prevalence. Like the “ME TOO”s in @witchoria’s piece, users gain meaning through their relationship to each other, the archival tool of the hashtag, and the algorithms that mark posts for visibility and circulation.
#Metoo also functions as a “component of passage that transforms engaged bodies into something other than what they have been.” In this case, the Facebook or Instagram body is transformed by a digital act, by its relationship to other users and nonhuman actants. Through the frequency of #Metoo, the wound of the corporeal body is transformed into a viral wound of the digital body.
Conclusion
The limited integration of all stories of sexual assault is indicative of zombie hunger—the story of the mass, of the horde, of what normative conventions demand stays repressed and other— dead, even. By understanding #Metoo as a narrative structure that utilizes metabolic functions, it becomes possible to better trace the conventions which govern possibilities for users.
But like the zombie, there is power in fragmentation, in recognizing the human within the horror. Even with flaws and limitations, #Metoo wakes collective hunger, places power in abundance, in survivors using the platform conventions of looking and eating which often replicate violences of the material world as a mechanism to name structural harm. Such uncanny acts of zombie hunger cause a reckoning, a confrontation of this is how the world works.
Metabolized narratives account for cultural tastes. They enforce boundaries, regulating which lives are awarded value. While these value designations certainly happen “offline,” the digital world renders the process of regulation more visible. The zombie like #Metoo will not be satiated, nor will liberation come through this act alone. Although Mark Zuckerberg claims a kind of celebratory ownership over the way movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #Metoo connect people, Golumbia points out the same tools “contribut[e] to the destruction of the democratic social fabric, the destabilization of journalism’s critical function in democracies, and the promotion of hate and disinformation.” (Golumbia 204: 38). This is the danger of zombie hunger—all kinds of narratives can metabolize through the pleasures of consumption.
Without material action, the social body has remained haunted. In a post-Covid internet during the second Trump administration, the afterlife of zombie hunger has mutated. New hashtags speaking similar structural wounds have emerged. This is the affordance of the zombie: the afterlife of #Metoo persists, refuses rest, and is a continued site of undead political energy. At time of writing, #Standwithsurvivors, a hashtag associated with the victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, is stirring, hungry for justice in legislative bodies.
Jeanette Vigliotti King is an Assistant Professor of Classical and Liberal Education at Flagler College Florida. She received her PhD from Virginia Commonwealth University in Media Art Text. A former graduate student of David Golumbia, she is interested in digital body construction within social media spaces, particularly the way digital bodies operate at the intersections of life/death, healthy/unhealthy, self/other.
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Trott, Verity. 2021. “Networked Feminism: Counterpublics and the Intersectional Issues of #Metoo.” Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 7: 1125–1142.
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Vagianos, Alanna. 2017. “The ‘Me Too’ Campaign Was Created by a Black Woman 10 Years Ago.” Huffington Post, October 17. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-me-too-campaign-was-created-by-a-black-woman-10-years-ago_n_59e61a7fe4b02a215b336fee.
[1] For consistency, the hashtag associated with this event will be stylized as “#metoo.”
[2] Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano), “Suggested by a friend: If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me Too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Twitter, October 15 2017. https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/919659438700670976
[4] For fuller discussion of the pronoun you in social media spaces, see Wendy Chun’s “Big Data as Drama.” ELH, 83: 363-382 and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
[5] See Sandra Harding. “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity.’” Social research. 1992;59(3):567-587
[6] For a fuller discussion of the idealized, white, thin body see Julian B Carter.. The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940, (Ukraine: Duke University Press, 2007);
[7] For further discussions of online/offline. Please see Tom. Boellstorff “For whom the ontology turns: Theorizing the digital real.” Current Anthropology 57, no. 4 (2016): 387-407; For a robust discussion of the politics of search, please see Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2018).New York University Press, 2018.
[8] For a case study of the inverse (a selfie displaying bodily sickness) that generated public awareness see Noar, Seth M. Noar et al., “Can a selfie promote public engagement with skin cancer?,” Preventive medicine, 111 (2018): 280-283.
[10] See Sandra Harding, Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. (United Kingdom: Duke University Press, 2008). Harding says knowers are composite beings–complex and embedded in sociohistoric situations, claiming there is “no impartial, disinterested, value-neutral, Archimedean perspective.” (59). See also Donna Jeanne Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (United Kingdom: Free Association Books, 1991) and Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). Gitelman explains media are not just tools of research but are sites “dynamically engaged within and as part of the socially realized protocols that define…sources of meaning” (153).
[11] See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, (United Kingdom: MIT Press, 2008) for a good discussion of the rhetorical work of the word “cyberspace.” See also a critique of widespread digital utopianism: Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also Noble who argues “(s)earch results are simply more than what is popular. The dominant notion of search results as being both ‘objective” and ‘popular” makes it seem as if misogynist or racist search results are simply a mirror of the collective” (Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines are Racist, 36).
[13] For a global non-US perspective on 2017’s #Metoo, see Pain, Paromita. ““It took me quite a long time to develop a voice”: Examining feminist digital activism in the Indian# MeToo movement.” new media & society 23, no. 11 (2021): 3139-3155 and Loney-Howes, Rachel, Kaitlynn Mendes, Diana Fernández Romero, Bianca Fileborn, and Sonia Núñez Puente. 2021. “Digital Footprints of #Metoo.” Feminist Media Studies, February, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1886142.
[14] See also Lorna Bracewell, Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #Metoo Era, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). While not a discussion on stories that fail to integrate, Bracewell’s Why We Lost the Sex Wars examines how the criticisms of #Metoo from both the conservative right and progressive liberals often reinforce the neoliberal idea that sexual assault is linked to personal responsibility and not related to structural harm. Bracewell argues for the need to reject a liberal sexual politics to instead imagine a feminism that can contest the classed, raced and gendered structures and norms which support and sustain sexual injustice.
[15] See Jessica Bloom, “The #Metoo Photo Going Viral on Instagram.” Format, last modified October 17, 2017, https://www.format.com/magazine/resources/art/me-too-wichoria-victoria-siemer-instagram.
[16] See Donna J. Haraway. 2013. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, so Far.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no. 3 (November). https://doi.org/10.7264/N3KH0K81.
[17] For further development of this idea, see Gilbert, Tauber, and Sapp. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” 326.
[18] See Derrida, Jacques, and Lawrence Venuti. “What is a” relevant” translation?.” Critical inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 174-200. He explains the act of translation not only “prolong[s] life, living on, but also life after death” (199). Derrida’s formation of translation also pushes boundaries between life and death, much like the undead aspect of the zombie.
This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.
Southern Circuits
Henry Neim Osman
Victor Grippo, Analogía I, 1971, electric circuits, electric meter and switch, potatoes, ink, paper, paint and wood
Victor Grippo, Analogía I (2da. Version), Potatoes, zinc and copper electrodes, voltmeter, electrical cable and nylon monofilament, chair, wood, cloth, and text panel
Buenos Aires, 1970: Victor Grippo exhibits Analogía I. Forty potatoes are installed on the wall, their yellow-brown bulbous shapes inserted into a white grid. Each potato is placed in its own cell and connected to by two wires, red and black. In the middle, splitting the potatoes into two groups of twenty, is a voltmeter that measures the collective electric generation of this ensemble and a short text that elaborates the titular analogy in Argentine conceptual artist Victor Grippo’s Analogía I (1970/1) between the potatoes stored energy, connected by a grid of wires, and the burgeoning social conscience of a networked society.
Sao Paulo, 1977: Grippo remakes Analogía I. The voltmeter, text, and potatoes remain but the modernist grid has been disappeared as the potatoes are placed on a long banquet table. Strewn across a white tablecloth, with their wires tangled above, the clean lines of the first iteration have disappeared. Yet the analogy remains, transformed by the shift from the formal elements of the grid to the implied formlessness of the sheer mass of potatoes, from an organized matrix to a set of forms closer to how the potato itself might grow in the ground, as the set of potatoes behind the empty chair demonstrate. In the space between the grid and the tangle, between the modernist and organic networks, lies the politics of Grippo’s analogy.
Analogy comes from the Greek analogos, or proportion, meaning that it is the relation between two things unmediated by numeric counting. Analogy, and the analog, is not ontology, Kaja Silverman tells (or warns) us, but rather a similarity with a difference (2015). This essay takes up Grippo’s titular AnalogíaI as diagram, machine, and networked system, by attending to the synchronic difference of analogy and the diachronic difference of Grippo’s first and second versions. The first difference concerns the grounds for this analogy itself, in which biological and technical systems are analogized to the social. How was a political problem able to be understood as analogous to both interconnected vegetation and to the technical approximation of natural networks? In the same historical moment in which Grippo made his Analogías, and in response to similar concerns about how to, and whether one could, compare natural, technical, and social systems, Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela posited autopoiesis, or biología del conocer, as the theory of life’s self-production. Autopoiesis was always more than a theory of life, having distinct political and social dimensions both for Maturana and Varela, who disagreed on the organicism and holism underlying the theory’s political application, and the uptake of autopoiesis in varied realms, from Nikolas Luhmann’s legal theories to Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the overrepresentation of Man. Analogía I offers a parallel trajectory, one in which social, organic, and inorganic systems are circuited together and stages the same tension that lead Maturana and Varela to disagree on the possibility of a political autopoiesis.
If the first difference concerns analogy as a structural principle, and the theoretical grounds for Grippo’s analogy, the second difference takes up the precise meaning of the historical shift in the formal elements of Analogía I. At first glance, much has changed. The grid, with its clean lines and roots as a technology of organization and territorialization, would seem to be opposed to the interwoven wires and roots of a natural form. Does not a grid overlay and overwrite the contingencies of life? Does not there seem to be a startling difference between the cell-like grid and promise of a different, and perhaps more natural, mode of social organization in the second version of Analogía I, in which the potatoes are strewn across a communal table? At first glance the grid appears to be a technology that captures while the second version would be one that frees, bringing forward the tensions inherent in a work that claims to model, slightly tongue in cheek due to its elementary-school experiment, how a computer could model social conscience. It also restages centuries old debates between mechanism and vitalism. Yet the table, chairs, and plot of soil in the second installation maintain the sharp angles and rectilinear forms of the grid. These two iterations are less distinct than they appear, reducing the severity of the formal shift and the seeming antagonism between the two different network topologies. Rather than a crisis of meaning, in which the work calls forth a certain indeterminacy to the politics of the network form because of interchangeable topologies, what is left is a subtle critique of demands to model the interdependence of the social field and its web of mutual interdependence or care, located here in roots and wires, by overdetermining its relationship to natural and technical systems. The shift in the formal elements of the network here offers a path away from a holism of the network that emerges from the historical conditions of the Southern Cone in the 1970s, like autopoiesis, by allowing the social field to determine itself as an open site of contradiction.
II
Grippo, Sin titulo, 1966, oil and graphite on linen
In 1966, Grippo began his investigation of energy and the circuit in a series of abstract paintings of geometric elements. In a work from this year, a simplified set of forms are rendered in primary colors of contrasting red, blue, and yellow, which transform the visual language of technical documents into a set of iconic relations. Here, abstraction is what enables analogy: stripped of their specificity, these works invoke everything from silicon chips to abstract textiles to concrete and constructivist art. The clean lines preface the machinic nature of Grippo’s later works, yet the individual icons are disarticulated from a larger circuit. Silicon chips have oft been compared to a range of visual forms. Media historian Lisa Nakamura, writing on the early production of silicon chips by Fairchild Semiconductor by Navajo women, notes how in 1969 Fairchild, in its own publicity material, would parallel the abstract design of Navajo woven rugs with the design of silicon chips. Placing images of rugs and chips next to each other to draw forth their shared formal elements, Nakamura underscores how the “resemblance between the pattern of the rug depicted on the first page and the circuit is striking and uncanny. It makes the visual argument that Indian rugs are merely a different material iteration of the same pattern or aesthetic tradition found within the integrated circuit,” (2014, 926). Computer scientist Bernhard Korte compares early integrated chip designs from the 1960s to the 1980s to works by Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers, because “the structures inherent in chip design and chip reality are, after all, nothing but simple geometric forms,” (1991, 63).
While Grippo’s circuit paintings make a parallel movement in the same historical moment, abstracting the set of shared simple geometric forms between chip design and abstract art, these paintings also recall the development of arte concréta or concrete art in Argentina. Concrete art as a term was first coined in 1930 by Theo van Doesburg and was widely embraced in Argentina and Brazil by artists like Lidy Prati in the 1950s. Deeply mathematical, concrete art was non-representational, meaning that geometric forms – point, line, and shape – referred to nothing more than themselves as representations of pure rationality. As a 1946 manifesto by the Argentine Association of Concrete Art contends, “A scientific aesthetics will replace the millenary, speculative and idealistic aesthetics” and “Concrete Art familiarizes man with a direct relationship with things, not with the fiction of things,” (Inventionist Manifesto, 1946, 8). Grippo’s later work pushes back against the anti-idealism of concrete art, and even the early paintings seen above pair the visual language of concrete art with a set of forms that recall a range of natural and technical systems. The open two and three pronged shapes, separated by small dots, recall the abstracted elements of a computer circuit and “were figurative… I went on to use abstraction and from there a certain symbolism,” (Grippo, 2004, 319). In bringing what he termed mechanical models into conversation with concrete art, these paintings bridged concrete art’s anti-idealism with a certain symbolism. In an interview, he described this process as moving from “painting them [mechanical forms] (like a step in a process of evolution) to incorporating them into a system of symbols, a language,” (Grippo, 2004, 321). The structuralist influence here presages how the later network in Analogía I is a one defined by the (negative) relations between its constituent parts.
In the following year, Jorge Glusberg, an Argentine artist and curator, founded Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC), of which Grippo was a part. CAyC’s first exhibition was Arte Sistema which brought together the cybernetic systems thinking that was already circulating in European and American art practices with an inherent social critique from the South.[1] Glusberg framed these interventions as an ideological conceptualism, a phrase borrowed from Spanish critic Simon Marchan Fiz (Zanna, 2009). This was a refashioning of conceptualism as a distinctly political project tied to third-worldism and anti-psychiatry. Glusberg deployed this term to distinguish CAyC’s projects, and later exhibitions and interventions organized by Glusberg as Grupo de los Trece, from Western conceptualism, which he argued failed to respond to the political and material specificities that CAyC and Grupo de los Trece faced. This echoes what Luis Camnitzer calls the “regional clock,” which distinguishes the distinct temporality of regional conceptualisms (of which Europe is one as well) to critique universal periodizations (Camnitzer 2007, 28). At the same time, this was not a group of works united by a singular ideology nor by a unified mode of critique. Rather, they were organized by their opposition to the dominant ideologies, both artistic and social, in contemporary Argentina via a wide range of dematerialized practices (Glusberg, 1972).
In 1970, amidst these shifts in Argentine art production, Grippo’s practice turned from circuit paintings to large scale installations, often using the potato, that grappled with social issues. Grippo writes that he:
[B]egan to work with potatoes as a material… ‘to consecrate’ an everyday object and discover its multiple significations. Art and science—logic and analogue—served as instruments. Later, almost without thinking about it, I articulated some symbols: man’s foodstuffs, the trades, energy and the rose, the disequilibria and consequent transformations. (Grippo 2014, 16)
The potato is a central part of Grippo’s complex visual language, along with roses and lead, due to his ongoing interest in alchemy and the history of science and served as a connection to life and liveness, in particular. He also writes, in verse, that:
I consider myself a realist
what is more real than a live potato
what is more real than Pb (lead) carried [sic]
shown in its fixity, in its behavior,
what is more real than seeds (Grippo, 2014, 19).
Life, then, is as much the object of Grippo’s work as the circuit. Change over time, growth, the ability to open and change with the world, the living material of the potato symbolizes the possibility for both individual and social growth. He also, in a conversation remembered by critic Guy Brett, cited post-war British military experiments aimed at building biological batteries powered by micro-organisms as one influence,(Grippo 2017, 8). Analogía I, then, can be read as a more liberatory re-reading of this military project that sought to imagine a biological battery for social conscience instead of for military power.[2]
At the center of this re-reading, both theoretically and literally, was the voltmeter and related text at the center of the first version of Analogía I. In it, Grippo lays out three analogies: (1) between “Papa (Quechua name)” and the Latin concientia, “the inner feeling through which man acquires an appreciation for his actions… freedom of conscience. Right recognized by any government to each citizen to think as he pleases.”; (2) between the potato as “daily function; basic food” and “daily form of conscience; individual conscience,”’ and (3) “extension of daily function” source of electric energy (0.7 volt per unit) and “extension of conscience. Source of conscience of energy.” [3] The potato here becomes the locus of a set of entangled analogies to energy, freedom, rights, and conscience, both individual and social, but also how we become aware of our own actions and their impact on others, which is to say, it asks about networks of care on a macro level.
Each tuber’s .7 volts of latent power are wired together, measured by the central voltmeter as an analogy for the general power of the social field. In connecting each individual potato with wires, the rhizomatic root network of a potato plant is replaced with the technical assemblage of wire, electrode, voltmeter and potato. Put differently, a technical network replaces a natural one, materializing and systematizing the formal relations between different parts of a single organism. Unlike the cybernetic analogy, which placed organic and inorganic systems on the same field, allowing for a set of equivalences and exchanges between distinct systems, Analogía I refuses distinctions between the organic and the inorganic in favor of a different network analogy, in which the social field is always already natural and technical. There is no distinction to be overcome. A series of distinct phenomena are thus rendered parallel, as potato is equated to person, energy to cognition, and a burgeoning techno-organic network to social relations. Further, the voltmeter computes the total electrical generation produced by the system which, following Grippo’s own analogy, is a computation of a social conscience and consciousness.
It is precisely this question of the politics of the network that returns us to the grid. Analogía I forwards an ambiguous politics that vacillates between the potential of a coming-together referenced in the written analogies to the severity of the grid itself, a move that celebrates mutual care while also subtlety critiquing the political potential of this analogy through the grid that mediates the network. Justo Pastor Mellado notes that as much as Analogia I is about an emerging consciousness, the potatoes are enclosed in wooden cages (Mellado, 2004, 308). The cell of the grid echoes the plant cell, which at the moment of its discovery was named after the Latin cella, for a small room reminiscent of a monk’s cell (Mazzarello, 1999). The plant cell was then always emergent from an architecture of power meant to organize bodies, or in this case raw being. Multiple parallel cells, separate but together, produce the vitality of multicellular life just as different potatoes, distinct but linked together, produce consciousness for Grippo. We could term this cellularity, denoting the collapse of social and spatial relations with biological ones through the figure of the cell. Pastor Mellado also argues that just to mention an electrode “reminds us of torture; in particular, the application of an electric current to the body,” (2004, 308). A computer that models social conscience and consciousness becomes as menacing as it is liberatory, capturing life as much as it emancipates it.
Yet more than the torture chamber, the grid here denotes a tension between the organic and the inorganic and the twin processes of regularization and normalization. As Bernhard Siegert notes, the grid is a cultural technique of ordering and representation that is first an imaging technology, because it projects a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane, secondly a diagram that traverses the real and the symbolic, and finally it constitutes a world of objects imagined by a subject in his reframing of the Heideggerian gestell (Siegert 2015, 98). Put differently, the grid is a medium that merges representation and operation through deixis. Yet a second idea of the grid for Siegert emerges in which it symbolizes a cartographic imaginary emergent from South America and Argentina in particular. Here, the grid is the organizing principle of colonial topography, a division and organization of space that, while originally devised in antiquity, reaches its advanced form in the Spanish colonial city plan, which is infinitely reproducible and expandible (2015, 108-9). It is in the city that the grid re-emerges in three dimensions, moving from abstract deixis and cartography to a principle for the ordering of space through reproducible cells, which are both organizational technique and visual practice. And it is in Argentina that Siegert locates the apogee of the grid as a spatial technique in three dimensions. In 1929, Le Corbusier visited Argentina, where he developed his theory of the cell as the building block in architecture, both via his trip in an ocean liner to Argentina and his plane rides over different cities in South America, like Buenos Aires, La Plata, and Montevideo, which had distinct grid plans. For Siegert, “Le Corbusier’s real model for cellular construction was neither plant nor prison but the machine,” an idea that he claims only developed in his visit to South America (2015, 116).
Is not neither plant nor prison but machine the central principle of Analogía I? As neither holist organic networked, linked by mutual exchange and care, nor model for the prison cell, Analogía I is a model of a social machine that is always-already organic and inorganic, holding the potential for new ways of coming together just as much as it holds the potential for capture and control, a contradiction that structures for Grippo’s installation and that he never seeks to paper over. Yet, the grid here takes on a distinct valence, as, contra Siegert, it is not a cultural technique of ordering and of territorialization, emerging from cartography and Renaissance perspective, but a network architecture.
III
This second formulation of the titular analogy is thus not a return to a prelapsarian before, bringing a social conscience back to the soil, which in this version is constrained to a single square behind the chair. Each potato remains networked and connected to a single point: a voltmeter, albeit one that instead of dividing the installation into two equal parts is set off to the side like a pulpit or control panel. There are three major changes here: the grid has been replaced by a non-standardized and distributed network; some potatoes have been returned to the soil without being disconnected; and an empty chair holds not the head of the table but serves as a step for yet more potatoes as they move from ground to a set table, or vice-versa.
Analogía I (2da. Version) rejects the grid as organizing principle but does not reject the central analogy of the installation nor Grippo’s material theorization of the social as an (in)organic machine. If the first iteration was organized into a set of discrete elements, here there is a return to more seemingly natural forms that recall less the prison cell than woven knots of roots in soil. Despite organizational differences, Grippo’s intervention remains the same, asking the viewer to analogize a deceptively simple system of potatoes and wires to a broader theory of the social. In both, it is the voltmeter that serves as the interface between system and environment. The formal shift in organization between the two installations, alongside the maintenance of the analogy itself, may seem to point to an incoherence to the political claims that ground his analogy. However, it is the refusal of easy organicist interpretations that would prioritize organic networks as a model of the social or mechanistic interpretations that would prioritize technical interconnection that grounds Grippo’s work. The fundamental contradiction between the two different version of Analogía at the level of the politics of their networked form, between each potato being held separately or strewn across a table such that they can touch each other, speaks to the tension between the network as a mode of control and a new horizontal modality of care, even as they both remain more similar than they appear.
In 1972, between the two versions of the installation, CAyC organized an exhibition in a public plaza. Grippo installed a rural-style oven to make bread, handing out warm bread in an installation that merged proto-relational art, arte povera, and his own interest in transforming simple materials through heat and energy. The next day, the police impounded the installation and destroyed the oven. The epigraph to the exhibition has included a long quote from Louis Althusser, that “One could propose the hypothesis that a great work of art is that which acts within an ideology at the same time that it distances itself from it to constitute an act of critique of the ideology it sets forth, in order to allude to different ways of perceiving, feeling, hearing, etc., that surpass existing ideology by freeing itself from its latent myths,” a line of critique that aptly applies to Analogía I as well (Longoni 2004, 285). Analogía I proposes new ways of interconnecting and raising the social conscience while also subtending such a possibility, forwarding an ideology critique of both the network and attempts to organize the social following nature’s own systems of interconnection, holding up care as critique and critique as care.
A parallel debate on the relation between nature and the social and the politics of the model was occurring across the Andes, where Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela De Maquines y Seres Vivos began outlining their theory of autopoiesis or la biología del conocer and eventually diverged due to Maturana’s belief that a social autopoiesis was possible, an organicist turn that Varela strongly disagreed with. Autopoiesis is a theory of self-organizing systems that grapples with the foundational question of what is (cellular) life, but it is a theory of politics and social organization as well.[4] Autopoiesis, in its beginnings, concerned how nervous system activity, and thus the organism in general, is only triggered by the nervous system itself, and the “external world would have only a triggering role in the release of the internally determined activity of the nervous system.” (Maturana and Varela, 1980, 121). It is in this observation that autopoiesis is borne, as the circular activity of the organism (or the cell, or the system) constitutes the auto-, the self-production at the heart of the theory. A central question is thus how can an organism maintain its own identity as it constantly changes.
Maturana and Varela distinguished between the organization of a unity (an inside, a system, an organism) and a medium (in which the unity is embedded), which can also be phrased as the difference between the system of relations that constitute a unity and the actual structure of a unity in a particular moment (Maturana, 1972, 46-47). Organization is maintained even as structures change. Further, the relation of unity to medium, or how the unity is embedded and relates to its environment, is a pre-requisite for life. In a late publication, Varela reframed the central tenets of autopoiesis as whether the system has a semi-permeable boundary, is self-producing, and able to regenerate the components of the system (Varela 2000). Key to these distinctions is semi-permeability and operational closure. The former is how autopoietic systems are organizationally closed but structurally open, while the latter refers to how autopoietic systems are neither representational, because the terms of the systems reactions are determined by its organization, nor solipsistic, because the nervous the system does interact with the environment at the level of its structure. Outside inputs are triggers that are only registered if the system’s organization allows them to be. The relatively simple recursivity of first order cybernetics’ theories of feedback is now transformed to one in which the observer is not a neutral transducer of information but actively produces itself.
Analogía I is not an autopoietic system per se, but the tension between an autopoietic theory of a system and Grippo’s installation reveal something of a nascent Southern circuit, emergent from the political and material conditions of the Southern Cone, organized around the same central contradiction as the two versions of his installation. The network modeled in both versions of Analogía I contains something of a cybernetic enclosure, as it is only accessible through the voltmeter that selectively determines and processes the systems output. What is crucial here is not the network itself, in autopoietic terms the structure, which is of course not self-reproducing as a potato cannot wire itself nor produce new mechanical components, but rather how Grippo analogizes two distinct autopoietic systems of the organic potato and the social, united by a technical apparatus. It is here that the political implications of autopoiesis can be drawn forth, even as autopoiesis is often understood as either an epistemological or ethical rather than political quandary by interlocutors in the humanities and social sciences. This is the crux of Cary Wolfe’s critique of how autopoiesis contains a humanism that:
manifests itself in the philosophical idealism which hopes that ethics may somehow do the work of politics. What we find here, in other words, is (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s formulation) a kind of “strategy of containment” whereby the post-humanist imperatives of second-order cybernetics are ideologically recontaied by an idealist faith in the social and political power of reason, reflection, voluntarism, and what Jameson calls “the taking of thought (1995, 62).
For Wolfe, this is due to Maturana and Varela’s transformation of the particular values of their milieu into a universal theory of the system, particularly their focus on the necessity of love, which is transformed into imperative. This leads to a confrontation with the fundamental idea for him that all points of view are not valid because they have differentially distributed effects in the social field. Where then is social antagonism?
If Wolfe seeks to uncover a latent humanism in autopoiesis, Sylvia Wynter turns to autopoiesis to understand, and subtend, the production of the liberal human throughout her work, starting with her 1984 essay “The Ceremony Must be Found.” For Wynter, whose wide-ranging oeuvre is too expansive so be summarized here, autopoiesis serves as the mechanism for her hypothesis of auto-speciation and elaborate a “new science,” in conjunction with Caribbean thought (Wynter 2003, 328). Autopoiesis serves as the logic behind how sociogenesis functions, in material-semiotic systems, and how certain genres of the human have become overrepresented, leading to a world in which Man2, or the liberal homo oeconomicus has come to stand in for the human.
Wynter, while primarily focusing on autopoiesis as a biological theory that she brings into conversation with Black and Caribbean philosophy, attends to autopoiesis in its larger dimension as theory of the social. Yet, the focus remains on neuro-biological feedback, particularly among her interlocutors. For Katherine McKittrick, Wynter:
[R]eads biological theory to claim that autopoiesis—the consensual circular (not teleological-evolutionary) organization of human life through which we scientifically live and die as a species—draws attention to “a new frame of meaning, not only of natural history, but also of a newly conceived cultural history specific to and unique to our species, because the history of those ‘forms of life’ gives expression to [a] . . . hybridly organic and . . . languaging existence, (2015, 145).
Such readings of autopoiesis render it a theory of the cell and remove its epistemological, and political, valences. Similarly, in the same volume, Walter Mignolo charts a divide between autopoiesis as theory of perception in which:
[T]he living organism that fabricates an image of the world through the internal/neurological processing of information. Thus, Maturana made the connection between the ways in which human beings construct their world and their criteria of truth and objectivity and noticed how their/our nervous system processes and responds to information. (2015, 106)
What is missing here is precisely how autopoiesis was never just a theory of perception, except perhaps in its earliest form as Maturana and Lettvin’s experiments on the frog’s eye 1959, over a decade before Maturana and Varela first deployed the term autopoiesis. In rendering autopoiesis a scientific theory transferred to the social field, the particularities of autopoiesis’s emergence remain obscured.
Autopoiesis was always-already a critique of reason, at least for Maturana if not for Varela. In their later years, the two diverged on precisely this question of politics. Maturana, in a 1991 letter responding to a review of the Tree of Knowledge, critiques “the defense of truth, the defense of reason, or the defense of universal transcendental values under the claim that the defender is intrinsically right and the others are intrinsically wrong,” (1991, 92). Here, Maturana is suspicious of both reason and truth and their claims to universality grounded in an enlightenment idealism, because he distinguishes between “constitutive operational legitimacy of all manners of living in the biological domain,” which “does not carry with it the acceptance of all manners of living as equally desirable in the human domain of coexistence,” a distinction that echoes the autopoietic division between organization and structure (Maturana, 1991, 92). Central is how Maturana can never know what is “biologically, transcendentally good” or “biologically transcendentally bad,” (1991, 90-91). Maturana is not speaking abstractly about reason or truth, however. He grounds his critique in Pinochet’s dictatorship, which he opposes on political grounds rather than by that he is intrinsically right. This is clearest in a response Maturana wrote to Morris Berman’s review of The Tree of Life. Berman claimed that Pinochet was, when read autopoietically, “biological distortion” and that Allende was “biologically legitimate,” leading Maturana to contend that “Berman says that he is not ‘willing to display any tolerance; to people like General Pinochet. If he says so because he thinks that he is intrinsically right and that General Pinochet is intrinsically wrong, he is speaking like General Pinochet,” and that “Salvador Allende does not “represent one of the highest forms of biological integrity,” as Berman says. He was a human being who could not escape being trapped in the meshes of a network of ideological fanaticism. There is nothing like a biological distortion or like biological integrity in the domain of biology,” (1991, 91, 96) In a strange turn of phrase here, Maturana both rejects claims to biological legitimacy through an understanding of biology. Even as nature cannot be used as the grounds for making a political claim, he still deploys autopoiesis as a framework for politics: there is no operational legitimacy in biology, but only autopoietic operations are legitimate.
For Maturana, then, autopoiesis is a political response to organicist claims that ground politics in biology, or biologize and naturalize the political field, while, at the same time, contending that the very rules of the social are still emergent from biology – he wants to have it both ways. He applies autopoietic semi-permeability or operational closure to the political realm to ground the autopoietic organization of politics in nature or in his words biology, while disavowing such moves at the level of structure. Varela strongly disagreed with Maturana’s turn to autopoiesis as a theory of the social field because:
[A]ll extension of biological models to the social level is to be avoided. I am absolutely against all extensions of autopoiesis, and also against the move to think society according to models of emergence, even though, in a certain sense, you’re not wrong in thinking things like that, but it is an extremely delicate passage. I refuse to apply autopoiesis to the social plane. That might surprise you, but I do so for political reasons. History has shown that biological holism is very interesting and has produced great things, but it has always had its dark side, a black side, each time it’s allowed. (Varela, 2002)
In rejecting the inherent organicism and holism of Maturana’s autopoiesis tout court, Varela underscores the failures of politics emergent from biology, a charge that Maturana himself tries to avoid by distinguishing between how all life has operational legitimacy and the non-acceptance of all these legitimate autopoietic unities as good. Following Wolfe’s critique, this is also the effect of a latent humanism in autopoiesis both in its development of universal rules and in its inherent speciesism. Autopoiesis seeks to escape organicism by the same mechanisms with which it defines its own semi-permeability to the world: operational closure.
There is an echo in Maturana and Varela’s debates over autopoiesis’s political valence and how it can serve as a critique of reason and truth, due to how it destabilizes any claim to a universal even as, via sleight-of-hand, it functions through a set of seemingly natural laws itself, of the tensions between the two instantiations of Analogía I. Turning to autopoiesis uncovers a shared concern with how social systems are modeled on, nested in, and emergent from natural systems following natural laws that emerged in tandem. Yet Grippo never offers a hierarchy of one system to another, in which the social field is immanent from and reducible to, at the right level of abstraction, the organization of a cell. Instead, he makes a parallel move, destabilizing the network as a technology of either capture and liberation, restaging Maturana and Varela’s debate. Beyond showcasing a crisis of meaning of the network in this era, there is also a nascent critique against reducing mutual interdependence to a technical or natural system and the easy analogies between environmental and natural networks that impoverish both. In thus critiquing overdetermined theories of the social field by acting within it (via the model), Analogía I makes the network and circuit visible. In the move between the grid and the entangled network, between the plant, the prison cell, and the machine, what structures the scene is a social and political field that remains open and able to serve as the grounds for politics. The social can never be fully resolved because the same analogy can be organized differently such that one iteration can be read as a torture chamber and another as a cell. If for Maturana “the social is constituted in relations of love,” (1991, 89) which are also relations of care, Grippo’s installation models a different yet related circuit in which antagonism, difference, and contingency, which is to say politics itself, remain open. Systems, and here the social, can be organized differently – that is the work, rather than ascertaining a certain truth in nature or technics. Instead of elevating biologically inspired notions of care and love, at the risk of holism or organicism, pace Varela’s critique, Grippo holds them in delicate tension: machine and vegetable, electricity and life, grid and tangle.
Henry Neim Osman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He works across media theory, science and technology studies, and philosophy of technology. His dissertation, “Analog Immediacy: Computation and Critique at the Ends of the Digital,” historicizes the recent resurgence of analog computing and AI and critiques how life is reconceptualized by new computers at the limits of the digital. His work has been published in Digital War, Film Quarterly, Surveillance & Society, and Media Fields.
References
“ICAA Documents Project Working Papers Number 5.” Houston: Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), 2017.
“Victor Grippo,” Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), 2014, 16. Accessible: https://muac.unam.mx/assets/docs/p-057-f_muac_016-int-grippo.pdf.
Camnitzer, Luis. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
Gilbert, Zanna. “Ideological Conceptualism and Latin America: Politics, Neoprimitivism and Consumption.” rebus: a journal of art history & theory 4 (2009): 1-15.
Glusberg, Jorge. “Arte e ideología,” Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano. Buenos Aires: Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC), 1972.
Korte, Bernhard. Mathematics, Reality, and Aesthetics – A Picture Set on VSLI-Chip-Design. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1991.
Longoni, Ana. “Víctor Grippo: his poetry, his utopia.” In Grippo: Una Retrospectiva, ed. Marcelo Pacheca. Buenos Aires: Malba, 2004. 283-291.
Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980.
Maturana, Humberto R. “Response to Berman’s critique of the Tree of Knowledge.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 31, no. 2 (1991): 88-97.
Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Boulder: New Science Library/Shambhala Publications, 1987.
Mazzarello, Paolo. “A unifying concept: the history of cell theory.” Natural Cell Biology 1, E13–E15 (1999).
McKittrick, Katherine. “Axis, bold as love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the promise of science.” Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (2015): 142-63.
Mignolo, Walter. “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?”. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick. New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2015, 106-123.
Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous circuits: Navajo women and the racialization of early electronic manufacture.” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 919-941.
Pastor Mellado, Justo. “Víctor Grippo’s Chilean novel.” In Grippo: Una Retrospectiva, eds. Marcelo Pacheca. Buenos Aires: Malba, 2004. 307-311.
Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural techniques: Grids, filters, doors, and other articulations of the real. Fordham University Press, 2015.
Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Van Doesburg, Theo. Concrete Art Manifesto. Accessible: https://monoskop.org/images/9/91/Concrete_Art_Manifesto_1930.pdf.
Varela, Francisco “Autopoïese et émergence.” In La Complexité, vertiges et promesses. Ed. Réda Benkirane. Paris: Le Pommier, 2002.
Wolfe, Cary. “In search of post-humanist theory: the second-order cybernetics of Maturana and Varela.” Cultural critique 30 (1995): 33-70.
[1] Contemporary writers like Jack Burnham, writing in 1968, argue that this marks a shift “from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates not from things but from the way things are done,” Jack Burnham “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum, September 1968; South here refers to a broader reorientation along the lines of Joaquin Torres García’s provocation that “Nuestro norte es el sur,” or that our north is the south.
[2] There are echoes of Joseph Beuys here as well, who two decades later began his own series using lemons as batteries. Beuys knew of Grippo but the level to which he was influenced by Grippo’s earlier practice is still debated.
[3] This text is the translation used by an English-language version of Analogía I (first version) bought by Harvard Art Museums in 2010.
[4] Autopoiesis can be traced back to Maturana’s foundational 1959 paper, co-authored with Jerome Lettvin, Warren Mculloch and Walter Pitts, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s brain.” Before this paper, the retina was seen as a light receptor that simply transferred light into visual signals that were then processed by the brain. What Maturana et al. showed was that, after implanting an electrode onto the optic nerve, there were feature detectors that processed visual information directly in the retina itself, prioritizing for the frog visual recognition of small, intermittent quickly moving dots, which were termed “bug detectors.” The retina was no longer an objective sensor passing information along, but proof that the frog never neutrally saw. Instead, the structure of its eye determined and constructed the frog’s view of reality such that perception was not automatically representational. This is a type of boundary work, producing what would later be termed an operational closure onto the frog. Autopoiesis took this intervention further to show how the observer produces what they observe, moving beyond the assumption in this early article that there was an objective reality to which the frog did not have full access.
The texts gathered in this dossier examine how the global crisis of the university acquires a particular intensity in Argentina, a country in which the university has been a central institution of democratic life for more than a century. Around the world, universities have seen their historical sources of legitimacy erode under the pressures of new managerial regimes, standardized evaluation systems, unstable budgets, and a public sphere increasingly hostile to institutions whose value has always depended on duration, autonomy, and the slow accumulation of knowledge. In the Global South, these transformations intersect with structural inequalities and recurrent fiscal crises, sharpening the question of what universities are for—and who they are for.
In Argentina, this global turbulence acquires a singular historical density. Since the late nineteenth century—when figures such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento promoted a republican, secular, and universalist vision of public education—and mainly since the University Reform of 1918, the public university has functioned as a political form that has articulated autonomy, equality, and intellectual citizenship. As such, it became an engine of social mobility and a key producer of public knowledge, rooted in an Enlightenment conception of education as a right and as a condition for democratic life.
However, the arrival in Argentina in 2023 of an openly anarcho-capitalist government, informed by paleolibertarian ideas, marks the most profound rupture in this trajectory in more than a century. For the first time since 1918, the state not only withdraws material support from the university but also questions the very legitimacy of the institution, recasting it as a moral anomaly sustained by taxation, self government (professors, graduates, and students), and egalitarian values. This conflict crystallizes in an explicit culture war. The university is labeled part of the “casta,” a vestige of statist politics to be overcome. Faculty and researchers—especially in the social sciences and humanities—are accused of indoctrination. And the institution’s own temporality—slow, deliberative, accumulative—is reframed as incompatible with a political project that celebrates acceleration, rupture, and permanent deinstitutionalization. What is at stake is not merely funding but the very possibility of autonomous knowledge production.
Yet the crisis has also reshaped the university’s political role. The mass mobilizations of 2024 and 2025 showed that, despite the erosion of the old democratic consensus, the public university retains significant social legitimacy. Its defense, however, cannot be reduced to corporatist reflexes. The challenge—as the essays in this dossier argue—is conceptual: how to sustain critical knowledge when expertise itself becomes publicly contested, and how to reinvent the university without abandoning its historical commitments?
Within this confrontation, the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) occupy a particularly vulnerable position. The anarcho-capitalist attack seeks to delegitimize them by portraying them as a “useless expense” or an elitist indulgence, contrasted with the supposed “indisputable utility” of the natural sciences. This opposition rests on an impoverished view of knowledge that recognizes only what can be immediately translated into a measurable, marketable, or technically operational product. Against this simplification, the defense of the SSH cannot be reduced to arguments about instrumental utility. Their value is deeper: they are historical practices of collective debate, bearing ethical, political, and critical dimensions, enabling societies to question what is taken for granted, revisit the past, and open possible futures. In a context where speed and efficiency become universal benchmarks, they remind us—as philosophy once insisted—of “the usefulness of the useless.” Their decisive contribution does not lie in producing immediate solutions but in sustaining a society’s capacity to think itself and to build a historical, political, and human “we.”
Taken together, the texts in this chapter of the b2o Review’s dossier “The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives” suggest that the path forward is not restoration but a vital search for the university’s new formations. At a moment when a global intellectual counterrevolution seeks to delegitimize collective institutions, the Argentine university offers a privileged vantage point from which to rethink what forms of democratic life remain possible. The university, that longstanding repository of promises and conflicts, may once again need to become a laboratory—an institution capable of imagining new modes of learning, participation, and everyday life amid this particular storm, and the ones to follow.
Tomás Borovinsky is a researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina) and a professor at EIDAES–UNSAM (the Interdisciplinary School of Social Sciences at the National University of San Martín). His latest collective volume is ¿Hay algo que no esté en crisis? Arte y pensamiento en la era del cambio acelerado y sin fin (Siglo XXI). He is also the editorial director of the publishing imprint Interferencias (Adriana Hidalgo Editora), focused on contemporary thought, and the editor-in-chief of Supernova, a magazine of ideas and public debate.
The University and Public Education in Argentina under “Libertarianism”
Juan José Martínez Olguin
The Rise of Javier Milei and the Libertarian Revolution
The Libertarian Revolution—the name which Javier Milei proposed to designate the set of radical transformations he intended to carry out in Argentine society if he was elected as its first and highest political authority—does not lend itself, at least at its most general level, to any confusion.[i] A revolution, today as in the past, is an invitation to make in a very intensive way profound changes of those societies where revolutionaries are called to enact it. Milei, in fact, was elected President of Argentina in the presidential elections held on November 19, 2023. His opponent was the Peronist Sergio Massa, defeated by more than ten percentage points, the largest difference between two candidates in the history of our contemporary democracy. The scene that those elections built clearly illustrated the differences between both candidates: on the one hand, there is Massa, a professional politician with a long trajectory in the different political parties that identify themselves as part of the Peronism movement. On the other, there is Milei, who is known in certain specialized circles as an outsider, someone who came from outside politics but also someone who wants to “defeat it”—that is to say, defeat politics, or at the least traditional way of doing politics, which includes the State. Paradoxically, Milei proposes doing so by weaponizing politics and the State towards their defeat–in his own words, the goal is to “destroy it (the State) from within”. His political trajectory is, frankly, astonishing: in just two years he founded his own party, La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) and became a national deputy (in the 2021 legislative elections). As his appearances on various political television programs grew, so did his image and popularity.
It is undoubtedly difficult to fully grasp the libertarian ideological and expressive universe upon which Milei’s Revolution relies or is founded, for one simple reason: beyond its presence in Western Europe and especially in the United States, libertarianism in Argentina emerges as a new political expression. Largely born in the context of pandemic isolation and lockdown policies, it fundamentally arose from the fragments of a political system in crisis due to the deep erosion of legitimacy of its two main parties: Peronism and Juntos por el Cambio (a center-right political party). However, aspects of that universe can be foregrounded due to the political activities of Milei–through his discourses and actions in the public sphere. In this sense, libertarian ideas in the Argentinian political frame come from various doctrines and intellectual traditions. First and foremost, there is the most explicit level of the libertarian symbolic universe: its economic doctrine, based on a marginal school in contemporary economic theory, the Austrian School of Economics led by von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Milei himself frequently references them in his public appearances. Essentially, libertarianism advocates for shrinking the State to its minimum expression and expanding individual freedom over the State in all spheres of social life. This exaltation of liberty inevitably clashes with some of the most basic values of democratic life. Its strong defense of freedom—especially economic freedom—such as the legal buying and selling of organs and babies (a proposal that was floated and harshly criticized during Milei’s presidential campaign), is an example of this tension. A second defining component of the economic universe of Argentine libertarianism is Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism. Regardless of the ultimate success in implementing the transformations these doctrines propose (Milei’s government is only halfway through its term), the libertarian vocation marks, at least in this ideological-economic dimension, the most radical transformation of the economic foundations of Argentine capitalism in the last 100 years.
The Libertarian Revolution, however, does not define itself only as an economic revolution based on the Austria School of Economics. It also and simultaneously assumes the form of a “cultural revolution”. The libertarian universe reserves a name for this facet of the revolution: the “culture war” (or “la batalla cultural,” a term popularized in Argentina by Agustín Laje, one of the ideologues of libertarianism and local radical right parties).[ii] This term and its specific meaning is shared, in fact, by the alt-right and radical right movements worldwide.[iii] Based on Gramsci’s old category of hegemony, Milei’s cultural battle seeks to transform the hegemonic meaning of some of the essential community values of at least the last 40 years—since the institution of contemporary democracy in Argentina and the rise of Ricardo Alfonsín as the first president of the country’s contemporary democratic Era (1983–1989). The culture war, in this sense, is an ideological struggle that entails profound changes in democratic life as we have known it in Argentina in recent decades. This culture war has, in fact, an enemy: “the caste,” which, according to the libertarian narrative has held Argentina’s political and cultural hegemony for the past 40 years. The caste is not, strictly speaking, a sociological and determinable group in the demographic makeup of the country. The term “caste” is the product of an expressive operation that twists perception, a “coherent deformation”[iv] of what is perceived, granting a particular form of being to a part of the “flesh of the social”.[v]
Turned into a specific form of being of the element from which we are made—the flesh of the social—, the caste comprises different segments or social layers: the members of the cultural life of Argentina (writers, movie and television actors and actresses, film directors, etc.), welfare beneficiaries and public employees, the different political parties and politicians that alternately governed Argentina since the return of democracy in 1983, and finally, scientists and members and workers of the academic world. In each case, we can find a link to the “evils” that, according to libertarianism, plunged the country into decay: members of the cultural life and their “progressive doctrine,” welfare beneficiaries and public employees who are tied to an endemic evil: a corrupt and inefficient State, the “traditional” politicians and the failures of democracy, scientists and the public university system fostering social and political indoctrination in classrooms, on the one hand, and “partisan” or “ideologized” scientific research (especially in the Social Sciences), on the other. It is, indeed, in this context—in the context of the culture war and its various stakes, and not only in the context of its economic doctrine—that we can understand better libertarianism’s disdain for public universities and scientific research system, as well as the systematic and deliberate siege policies Milei’s government has been implementing against the whole public system of education.[vi]
One aspect is particularly relevant: the specific twist of meaning that libertarianism gives to its notion of caste—the twist between rights and privileges. In most of his public interventions, but especially in the speech following his presidential victory, President Milei referred to his government’s vocation in terms that clearly express this twist: “We are not here to take away your rights; we are here to end privileges”.[vii] This phrase illustrates very well the constitutive twist of the ideological amalgam that defines libertarianism: what in the context of the last decades of transformations of contemporary democracies was delineated as new rights (social rights, gender rights, economic rights, etc.), have turned into privileges of what libertarians define as “the caste” in the context of the new demands and changes of democracies. This conversion, in effect, explains the figure of the State as the principal agent responsible of the promotion of those privileges, and simultaneously it delineated the ideology that must be defeated: el progresismo (the woke ideology; that is to say, those who identify themselves as “liberals” in the United States) that, according to libertarianism, expands the influence of “cultural Marxism”. Privileges, then, separate those who advocate for freedom, effort, and individual merit from those who are part of the State and live off the benefits and subsidies that the public sector provides them. This twist not only clashes with several rights enshrined in the National Constitution but, in one of its decisive aspects, confronts the very heart of the Argentine national project—from its founding to the present day, including especially the last 40 years of uninterrupted democracy: education as a right, that is, the guiding idea behind the constitution of the National State—the idea of public education. More profoundly still, it opposes the conception held by a figure who, through both his theoretical reflection and his political practice, played a central role in shaping the historically situated form of public education in Argentina: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
The Figure of Sarmiento and Public Education in Argentina
Sarmiento was not only President of Argentina during the years of the foundation of the National State (from 1868 to 1874) but also a profound thinker—not just a thinker of education but also of the social and political conditions of existence of his own Argentina, whose thought and actions made him a central figure throughout Latin America. Sarmiento’s thought radiates and permeates Argentine culture, but also Latin American culture, in an irreversible way.[viii] In the historical configuration of education as a public institution in particular, his thought was and remains decisive. Strongly influenced by the French Revolution and its ideas just a few decades after it took place, Sarmiento wrote a book that laid the foundations for the idea of public, common, or popular education on Argentine territory: Sobre la educación popular (On Popular Education).[ix] Sarmiento (who by then was in exile in Chile) begins the text that was commissioned as a “Technical Report for the Minister of Public Instruction of Chile, Manuel Montt,” by exploring the historical origin and essential condition of public education: its conception as a human right. He writes:
Public instruction is a purely modern institution, born from the dissensions of Christianism and made a right by the democratic spirit of current association. Until two centuries ago, there was education for the ruling classes, for the priesthood, for the aristocracy; but the people, the plebeians, did not, properly speaking, form an active part of nations. It would have seemed as absurd at that time to claim that all men should be equally educated as it would have been two thousand years earlier to deny the right of making slaves… It is not my intention here to tell the history of the series of events and conquests that have brought Christian peoples to the point they have reached today… For now, let us be content with the fact that each progress in institutions has tended to this primary objective, and that the freedom acquired… has contributed in masse to the use of rights that today no longer belong to such or such class of society, but simply to the condition of human being.[x]
This conception of public education as a human right had its institutional imprint on Argentine society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And in this institutional imprint Sarmiento was, in fact, decisive. In this sense, the promulgation of Law 1420 in 1884, which established free and secular public education, was the first major step in this direction. The construction of public schools, particularly during Sarmiento’s presidency, and the literacy process of Argentinian citizens advanced in just a few decades by giant steps (by the early twentieth century, Argentina had the highest literacy rate in Latin America). Despite the antagonisms and political conflicts that configure the twentieth century in Argentina, and even the early twenty-first century, the materiality of the trace of Sarmiento’s thought regarding education and the public system remained intact. And despite, also, the institutional discontinuities and coups d’état that took place during the last century (and therefore, the selective policies the military governments adopted to undermine, above all, the public university through partial closures of certain careers or faculties).[xi] The arrival of democracy in 1983 expressed, in the words of the newly elected president Raúl Alfonsín–“With democracy, not only do we vote, but we also eat, heal, and educate”[xii]–the most intense moment of the omnipresent legacy of Sarmiento’s trace, by linking the form of public education with the very form of democracy (something Sarmiento indeed did throughout his own thinking). In other words: in the promise of a social democracy with greater rights, much of Sarmiento’s reflection and his political, cultural, and institutional roots, crystallized.
The University and Public Education Under the Siege of the Libertarian Revolution
Public universities in Argentina have a strong and decisive source of inspiration in Sarmiento’s legacy of education as a human right: “higher education,” it is stated in the current Higher Education Law, “is a public good and a human right”.[xiii] The set of laws and measures that Milei’s government has been implementing, particularly against the public university system, is framed, therefore, within this dual ideological pillar that inspires the Libertarian Revolution: its economic doctrine, on the one hand, and its political-cultural doctrine, the culture war, on the other. While the first defends the market’s presence as a regulator of the various spheres of social life, and consequently emphasizes its decisive role in offering education as a “public” service (and not as a right), the second entails a much deeper critique to our actual public system of education. In his recent book on this subject, Argentine anthropologist Pablo Semán points out a central aspect in this regard: those who identify themselves as militants of the libertarian movement do not show a detachment or direct rejection of the common wealth or the public sector, but rather of the “state of the State,” that is to say, they do not reject the “abstract idea” of the State, but its real and material conditions of operation and existence in daily life.[xiv] Rejection of the “state of the State” is also, therefore, a rejection of those who “live” due to the benefits of that State, whether in the form of benefits from social welfare programs or as public employees. A double gap, therefore, separates these individuals from private employees or entrepreneurs: first, the former maintain a salary without the risk involved in entrepreneurship, creativity, and sacrifice, while the latter dignify their income through the effort and merit that the risks of the labor market require. Second, this gap was widened by the pandemic and the restrictive measures and lockdowns that limited public freedoms, and especially, in the case of younger generations, the freedom to work. It is in this precise context that university professors and the academic world in general became targeted as part of the caste.
There is, indeed, a second element which is critical for the libertarian political and cultural imagination regarding the academic world, an element inherent, on the other hand, in its condition as a caste: the excessive presence of political trends, especially Marxism, which, according to libertarianism, operate as a form of indoctrination of youth, limiting their freedom (this criticism, in effect, also applies for the scientific system, particularly the scientific productions of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research [CONICET], for their “ideological biases”). The criticism, which I would argue extends to the scientific system in general, is proclaimed as part of the “culture war.” It is not, however, just a cultural critique. It is a rejection of the political views that libertarianism repudiates, and a form of rejection of “politics” in general. Public universities and the scientific system, for example, are, according to libertarianism, unnecessarily tainted with political practices and political ideologies. Unproductive papers, useless research, and superfluous activities are the consequence of the presence of the caste in the scientific and academic system of Argentine society. This rejection of the “university and scientific caste” as a source of political and ideological visions which are dangerous to society can also be easily seen in the criticism of Trumpism, which is very close to Milei’s movement, of woke ideology in the United States.[xv]
One final aspect, however, is decisive for understanding the rupture that the Libertarian Revolution and its political principles produce, or aim to produce, in historical and political terms. This aspect pertains in particular to public universities and the university system as a whole, but more generally also to the educational system that founded and was founded in parallel with the Argentine State and which has in Sarmiento its most illustrious thinker. Paradoxically, public university and the Argentine university system reached what, for Sarmiento, was central in the process of democratizing public education, and is evident from the title of the aforementioned work, On Popular Education: the institution of a “popular action” capable of “improving public education”, that is to say, the institution of public education as a “collective work”.[xvi] Sarmiento’s greatest challenge was achieving the realization of that popular action and that collective work in primary education, a necessary pillar, of course, for the existence of higher education. What is important to emphasize at this point is, however, the status of those decisive terms—popular action and collective work—, because they reveal the relationship which Sarmiento establish between education and civil society or citizenship, or more specifically, between democracy and public education. In other words: they are decisive to understand his conception of popular education.
Popular education, in fact, is not, for Sarmiento, an abstract concept or a model to follow in institutional, social, or pedagogical terms. On the contrary, it is a historically situated educational experience: that of 19th-century United States, and very particularly, that of the northern states of Massachusetts and Connecticut. There, Sarmiento notes, the funds and most elementary needs of district schools, unlike the public education systems of Holland, England, and Prussia, are obtained through what in the northern country are called annual meetings, which are public assemblies of parents, school staff, and “individuals with zeal and instruction,” who decide together and through debate the amounts of those funds and their different destinations. To put it in another way: Sarmiento found that, in these districts, education is the product of the collective action of those who are involved in the educational system. This aspect is decisive because it reveals the bond between democracy and education or, more precisely, their intrinsic, and to use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term, chiasmatic, relationship.[xvii]
The idea of popular education thus implies the retreat of education upon itself, its institution and self-institution, the institution and self-institution of its form and content. In this sense, and returning to Sarmiento’s own words, if public education is a purely modern institution, born from the divisions of Christianity and turned into a right by the democratic spirit of the contemporary forms of society, this spirit, I add, is the one that simultaneously configures it and gives it its transitory form. The concept of popular education involves a self-reflective movement of education as a public good: it is not only a right enshrined for the individual and society as a whole but also an act that society and the individual give to themselves, and give in a double sense: they grant it (thus, it is a right) and they give it its form and content (it is the product of collective work). Democracy, as a form, thus coincides with education as a pedagogical and political act. In the Argentine university system, this conception of education and its self-instituting form as a constitutive principle adopted a specific historical and legal figure: that of self-government and that of autarky, enshrined today by the National Constitution and mobilized as a social and political process by the University Reform of 1918.
Final Words
The siege advances, and it advances with firm steps. By this, I mean: the siege that Milei’s libertarian government is imposing through its various policies on public education and, especially, on the public university system, that is, on universities. Public education, first of all, and universities, second (but no less important), are an active and decisive part of collective life, of its cultural and symbolic forms. No one embodies this active and decisive part of Argentine society like the figure of Sarmiento because, it is Sarmiento himself who founds and roots the public education system in a movement that unfolds “in three directions”: as I have shown, his pedagogical and political thought (first direction) unfolds simultaneously with the formation of the Argentine state (second direction), which is in turn characterized by the formation and consolidation of this public education system (third direction). Both public education, and especially the universities, are an active and decisive part of the collective life of Argentine society because this movement leaves a decisive trace in the political culture: the conception of public and university education as a human right, intrinsically tied since its genesis to the genesis of the modern Argentine state. This bond between state, education, and rights, which today was turned into a new bond between democracy, education, and rights, runs like blood through the veins of the flesh of Argentine society.
That is the way in which public universities, the most complete institutional expression of Sarmiento’s project of public education and, by extension, of the national project for the formation of the educational system and the state, have been fundamental as a political actor in Argentine modern history. From the 1918 University Reform movement, which began the process of democratization and universalization of the higher education system itself, to La noche de los bastones largos (The Night of the Long Batons), a tragic and fateful episode of that history when students, teachers, and authorities from the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires were brutally repressed on July 29, 1966, by the military government of Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970), leaving a large number of victims, university life has been intertwined with political and public life, and, vice versa, political and public life in Argentina has been intertwined with university life.
Indeed, with the beginning of the contemporary democratic cycle (1983), led by the inauguration of former President Raúl Alfonsín, this delicate and singular fold between university life and political and public life reached its highest degree of (un)folding in the promise of the foundation of contemporary democracy. The process that Alfonsín himself opened with his government resides in the idea of education as a human right, but as a human right that is part of the very contemporary condition of democracy, that is: education is a constitutive and genetic part of the contemporary expression of the flesh of the social of Argentinian democratic society. In other words: since 1983, the words of the former president in his inaugural speech at the Legislative Assembly–“With democracy, not only do we vote, but we also eat, we heal, and we educate”–have run through the intimate fibers of the flesh that shapes our collective life.
The Libertarian Revolution evoked and led by Milei therefore seeks to rest, and in fact rests, on a very fine and delicate thread. A fine and delicate thread, because its anti-elitist vocation, in which the university and its different actors (teachers, students, and authorities) are a parasitic part of the “caste,” stands in tension not only with the public nature of higher education, but also with primary education, and more profoundly, with the role that both higher education and primary education play as horizons that organize the possible and the impossible, the sayable and the unsayable of Argentine contemporary democracy. Therefore, the Libertarian Revolution is not just about the siege of one of the symbols of the Argentine state, a symbol, in fact, of distinction throughout Latin America: it is about the siege of democracy itself or, better yet, of one of the folds that form its contemporary expression. In the context of the “culture war” and political struggle against the university world, the Libertarian Revolution finds much more than a policy of “austerity” to shrink the state: it finds the key to carry out the radical transformations that change the very physiognomy of democratic system. And in the current political context of the Western democratic world, where the emergence of extreme right-wing or radical political expressions has gained unprecedented speed, and whose corollary is, to a large extent, the implementation of a global process that, in terms of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, takes the form of an “intellectual counter-revolution”[xviii] led by these very same radical right political expressions, the attack of Argentina’s libertarianism on the university, singular as it no doubt is, is likely to embody one of many global examples of the displacement of the university from the public and political life of our democracies.
Juan José Martínez Olguín is a researcher in political theory at EIDAES–UNSAM (the Interdisciplinary School of Social Sciences of the National University of San Martín) and at CONICET (the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina). He is also a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. A specialist in political phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Lefort, Rancière), contemporary French philosophy, and theories of democracy. His latest book is Los pliegues de la democracia. Derechos humanos, populismos y polarización política (Buenos Aires–Madrid, Miño y Dávila, 2025).
[i] Milei and his political party, La Libertad Avanza, are part of what it is known in academic circles, and mostly known in public conversation of contemporary democracies, as radical right movements or extreme rights. In another text, I have focused specifically on the study of these radical movements and their expressive universe: the Jacobin style of political antagonism. Cf. Martinez Olguín, Juan José: Los pliegues de la democracia. Derechos Humanos, populismos y polarización política, Buenos Aires, Miño y Davila, 2025.
[ii] The book La batalla cultural: reflexiones críticas para una nueva derecha (Buenos Aires, Harper Enfoque, 2022) is where Agustín Laje mostly develop his ideas.
[iii] “Culture war” is, in effect, the English expression for what radical right movements in Latin America call batalla cultural.
[iv] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: La prosa del mundo, Madrid, Trotta, p. 70, 2015. The translation is mine. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: Œuvres, Paris, Gallimard, 2010.
[v] I take the expression: “flesh of the social” from Lefort (El arte de escribir y lo político, Barcelona, Herder, 2007, p. 159).
[vi] This set of politics that Milei’s libertarian government is implementing against the public system of education and mostly against Higher Education and universities in general is composed of different layers: first of all, a critical reduction of the funds destined for the scientific system, universities and public education, the reduction of salaries for professors and academic authorities, and a presidential veto of a law sanctioned by the Congress which intended to twist the situation and recover some of the institutional mechanisms to finance the system.
[vii] Presidential speech, October 22, 2023. Source: Clarin.com
[viii] I highly recommend, for a larger and more accurate perspective about the influence of Sarmiento in Argentine and Latin America culture, the book of the Argentinian sociologist Horacio González: Restos pampeanos. Ciencia, ensayo y política en la cultura argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires, Colihue, 1999).
[ix] Cf. Sarmiento, Domingo, F.: Educación Popular, Buenos Aires, Banco de la Provincia de Córdoba, 1989.
[xi] During the XX Century, political life in Argentina was characterized by six coups d’état which interrupt the democratic cycles. The last of them, the dictatorship led by the Army (1976-1986), which ends with the Peronist government of Isabel de Perón (1973-1976), finish with the election of Raul Alfonsín as the new democratic President.
[xii] Raul Alfonsín’s speech at the Legislative Assembly, during the day of his assumption. 10 Decembre, 1983. Source: Digital Repository of the Chamber of National Deputies. The translation is mine.
[xiii] Law 24.521. Source: Digital Repository of the Chamber of National Deputies.
[xiv] Cf. Semán, Pablo y Welschinger Nicolás: “Juventudes mejoristas y el mileismo de masas. Por qué el libertarianismo las convoca y ellas responden”, in Está entre nosotros. ¿De dónde sale y hasta dónde puede llegar la extrema derecha que no vimos venir? (Pablo Semán coord.), Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2023.
[xv] Cf. Connolly, William: Aspirational Fascism. The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
[xvi] Sarmiento, Domingo F.: Educación Popular, op. Cit., p. 88.
Beyond Utility: A Defense of The Social Sciences and the Humanities[1]
Mariela Cuadro and Sol Montero
The Argentine scientific system and public universities
The Argentine scientific and university system is based on two main pillars: scientific research and higher education. It comprises a network of decentralized national science and technology organizations—most notably the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)—and the university system, which includes 64 national public universities as well as around 50 private universities and university institutes. The two systems reinforce each other, and this is for two reasons. Firstly, universities provide workplaces for many researchers in the Science and Technology system to conduct research. Secondly, many of these researchers work as professors on university campuses. Consequently, changes related to national scientific development also affect the functioning of national universities, albeit indirectly.
Argentina’s scientific-university system has been closely linked to scientific progress and broader models of economic and social development. Established in the 1950s to support the government’s developmentalist strategy of the time, the scientific system has historically been tied to oscillations between developmentalist/heterodox strategies and neoliberal/orthodox approaches. While the former were driven by governments that encouraged national scientific development, the latter sought to undermine science and development through defunding and discrediting. Despite repeated attempts to dismantle it, the system has remained standing.
The Argentine university system’s status as free and publicly funded places it in a unique position within the global context of right-wing attacks on universities, particularly on the social sciences and humanities. Since many Argentine university students come from working-class backgrounds, the discourse prevalent in other countries that university students are part of an elite ‘privileged’ class is ineffective in Argentina. Consequently, right-wing discourse in Argentina has sought to create divisions between professors and students. Categorized as ‘the caste that lives off the state,’ professors and researchers are accused of ‘indoctrinating’ students.
The government’s ‘cultural battle’ narrative frames the argument: professors at public universities are labelled ‘socialists’ and accused of forcing students to think the same way. Consequently, universities are no longer viewed as spaces for debate, exchange, and the free circulation and production of ideas. Instead, they are discursively constituted as hierarchical and authoritarian structures that obstruct free thought.
If the main issue that the right-wing government identifies in university life lies in the realm of ideas, it should come as no surprise that its discourse particularly targets the disciplines that are concerned with them. Hence, they become the objects of continuous attacks, mainly directed at questioning their utility. “What use are the social sciences and humanities?” their critics ask. In their defense, many have tried to highlight their contributions to public policy. In this text, however, we argue that the social sciences and humanities are far more than mere tools for public policy. Due to their ethical and political dimensions, we view them as products of collective and historical debate, enabling us to reflect on our past, question our present, and imagine alternative futures.
Right-wing discourses and the issue of universities
Since the 2000s, universities have been targeted by reactionary and conservative movements. In countries such as the United States, England, and France, programs and departments adopting postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, or environmentalist theoretical perspectives have been accused of indoctrinating students, restricting pluralism, and threatening Western values. These seem to be the theoretical origins of a ‘virus’ spreading across university campuses worldwide: wokism, cancel culture, and the tyranny of political correctness.
Attacks on the university system also lie at the heart of the Argentine libertarian right’s discourse and project. Since the beginning of his presidency, Milei and his supporters have devoted themselves to attacking CONICET and public universities in two main ways. Firstly, they have discredited the intellectual, theoretical, and practical framework of the social sciences and humanities, accusing professors, intellectuals, and scientists of belonging to an elite of dilettantes and privileged individuals. Secondly, they have cut funding for universities and science, which has a tangible impact on the lives and work of teachers and students.
In this context, the alleged uselessness of the social sciences and humanities is key to delegitimizing these disciplines. Compared with the indisputable usefulness of the natural sciences, history, anthropology, philosophy, and classical literature, to mention only some of the vilified disciplines, are accused of being a ‘pure (useless) expense’ in a context of scarce resources. Due to their supposedly ‘elitist’ nature, they are also dismissed as mere entertainment — a privilege enjoyed by a select few and financially supported by the masses.
The topic of usefulness as a measure of the value of scientific knowledge has become so prevalent in public discourse that even defenders of the social sciences and humanities often resort to this argument to demonstrate the value of their disciplines: they highlight the tangible, material, and immediate benefits these disciplines contribute to society. The impact of sociology, political science, gender studies, and communication sciences on public policies, development, and the advancement of social programs is therefore often emphasized, among other areas in which these disciplines can demonstrate their performance and productivity.
The fact is that this approach to scientific knowledge does not always fulfil its promise of productivity within a short timeframe. In times of precarity and acceleration, when frustrations mount and people seem increasingly replaceable, demonstrating the effectiveness of the social sciences and humanities is becoming increasingly complex. Nevertheless, human beings will continue to address and identify social, political, and economic problems and produce ideas to solve them. The ethical-political question is who will be able to do this: a select few financed by private interests or world powers, or the many financed by our own informed public decisions?
In this sense, the question of the usefulness of social and human disciplines can be compared to that of democracy, which does not always fulfil its promises either. Is this reason enough to discard it? So, what are the social sciences and humanities for? What is democracy for? What are universities for, beyond their often unfulfilled promises of utility and productivity?
First, we should acknowledge that our ability to question the usefulness of human inventions is a direct result of democracy, universities, and the social sciences. These institutions enable and encourage this type of inquiry, and it is through them that we address it. As the epigraph to Nuccio Ordine’s The Utility of the UselessManifesto states, “It is precisely the task of philosophy to reveal to men the utility of the useless, or, if you will, to teach them to differentiate between two different senses of the word utility.”
In his Manifesto, Ordine argues that there are forms of knowledge that are not a means to an end but ends in themselves. In hostile contexts, the value of useless knowledge “is radically opposed to the dominant notion of utility which, in the name of an exclusive economic interest, progressively kills the memory of the past, the humanities, classical languages, teaching, free research, imagination, art, critical thinking, and the civic horizon that should inspire all human activity. In the universe of utilitarianism, in fact, a hammer is worth more than a symphony, a knife more than a poem, a wrench more than a painting.”[3] The exercise of these non-instrumental forms of knowledge and practice is unique to human beings and, to that extent, distinguishes us from other creatures. But calling them useless does not mean that they lack social, political, or cultural function. Precisely because of “their gratuitous and disinterested nature—far removed from any practical or commercial purpose—these forms of useless knowledge and practice can play a fundamental role in the cultivation of the spirit and in the civic and cultural development of humanity”[4], says the Italian writer.
Secondly, usefulness is undoubtedly a slippery category. It invites us to ask infinite questions: Useful for whom? For what? And when? This brings us immediately to the problem of capitalism and money. If the financier is the state, one might ask: Useful for whom? For the state? For the country? For its people? Then, we should ask ourselves, “What is the state? What about the country? What about the people?” These are precisely the questions for which we need the social sciences and humanities.
As social scientists, it is crucial for us to navigate this quagmire without seeking our own salvation but rather to highlight the specific knowledge produced by our disciplines and practices. To do so, we must change the question and shift our perspective. So, we should rather ask: what do the Social Sciences and the Humanities do? Here, the question of ‘doing’ has a double meaning: firstly, how are the social sciences and humanities done? In other words, what is our daily practice as researchers? But also: what effect do the humanities and the social sciences have on the world in which we live? What do they make happen?
“La pregunta por el oficio”: Narrating our practices
The social sciences and humanities deal with subjects that are part of our everyday lives. We are all familiar with the issues of political science, international relations, linguistics, economics, or sociology. How often do we find ourselves discussing populism, the role of a particular country in a war, or the use of the letter ‘e’ in inclusive language in everyday situations? Our disciplines are grounded in a shared language and common sense, which connect us to our society, politics, and history.
In fact, the distinction between doxa (the realm of common sense and opinion) and episteme (the structured body of knowledge that shapes our scientific understanding) is necessary in the scientific field. However, we cannot detach ourselves from the interaction between expert and lay discourse or between native and analytical discourse. The discourse that actors produce within a social practice shapes and influences the specialized and analytical discourse that we produce in our academic disciplines. For this reason, researchers in the social sciences and humanities are inevitably immersed in the social reality they study, and their work has a public impact in that it concerns the public and the common good. This is why they are often accused of being ‘politicized’ or even ‘partisan’, i.e., biased and influenced by ideology.
In Argentina, in particular, the accusation of ideological ‘indoctrination’ in public universities is a ghost that the current government has repeatedly invoked. The Argentinian president himself has mocked and publicly denounced teachers for ‘indoctrinating’ students in matters of gender or national history. These suspicions assume that there are sciences that could be exempt from ideology and politicization. Not coincidentally, these are the sciences considered more ‘useful’, productive, and strategic. The accusation of ‘indoctrination’ also has an instrumental and strategic outlook. It suggests that there is a hidden interest in changing the minds of our students and readers, which is hidden behind the ‘façade’ of our research and classes. As if we too sought instrumental utility and benefit.
From this utilitarian perspective, nobody could imagine that our work involves rules and methods, that it is a job with highs and lows, that we are sometimes overwhelmed by bureaucracy, and generally affected by the same precariousness as our societies at large. However, our work is also often full of desire, enthusiasm, and passion. In fact, it is the love of knowledge and the intellectual pleasure we derive from reading, writing, thinking, and discussing ideas that essentially drives and sustains the generation of knowledge, even in contexts of precariousness and systematic attacks.
Like anyone else, professors and researchers have political views, but that doesn’t mean we’re devoted to teaching those political visions in classrooms. Still, our practice is also framed by rules, verification mechanisms, and evaluation and demonstration processes, as is any other scientific practice. In this sense, we regularly submit our ideas and progress for evaluation by our peers in formal and informal settings (which, incidentally, are not exempt from productivity criteria). Thus, for example, in faculty competitions and in the evaluation of our publications, colleagues and experts intervene by assigning scores and accepting or rejecting our proposals. As the academic and scientific world has public and explicit rules about research methods, it is an egalitarian and democratic system that allows us to learn from shared knowledge and criticism. Of course, this system has been widely criticized for its colonial, disciplinary, and restrictive effects, and there are forces within academia that are contributing to its transformation. However, here we want to highlight its normative function, precisely because it enables certain equalization, hierarchization, and evaluation.
In this sense, the social sciences and humanities are not deprived of techniques – methodologies for researching, speaking, transmitting, and teaching. However, they do not necessarily adopt a technicist approach to the phenomena they address. In other words, not all social scientists seek to solve problems. Instead, much of our work focuses on identifying issues, problematizing what is taken for granted, and highlighting the historicity of what is considered natural. This critical view is fundamental, as it enables us to innovate and create possible futures. It allows us to imagine new worlds that may not materialize immediately –or ever– but which enable us to overcome inertia and modify history. This is where the ethical and political nature of scientific knowledge lies.
In contrast to the uniformity imagined by those who attack the social sciences and the humanities, the scientific and university fields are traversed by opposing forces, conflicting interpretations, and crosscutting arguments. This is why the rules that structure research are valuable, as they provide a framework within which we can build knowledge and community together.
The effects and the affects: What the social sciences and humanities do
The contributions of the social sciences and humanities are valuable in themselves. They address questions about what constitutes us as humans and as a community; the construction and challenge of common sense; the defense of, and opposition to, different forms of political and social organization; the tracing of history; the exploration of identity, difference, and justice; the understanding of beauty and usefulness; and the debate around freedom and equality. At the same time, they question all that seems obvious, evident to us. The topics of our disciplines are ever-changing, evolving alongside societies and humanity. However, they are also timeless, as specific issues persist and resurface.
We argue that humans cannot and should not be reduced to mere survival, as human characteristics far exceed notions of functioning or utility. Consequently, matters concerning society, politics, aesthetics, language, history, and ideas cannot be considered mere accessories or ornaments added accidentally to the ‘essential’, i.e., the purely reproductive, tangible, and material.
Attacks on the social sciences and the humanities (as well as culture and the arts in general) are rooted in an ethical-political position that treats humans as mere pieces in a mechanism whose sole function is to increase profits (‘for whom?’, the critics ask). This impoverished view of humanity enables the idea of utility, which questions the social sciences and humanities. As Piovani says, this is “a merely practical utility, which implies that knowledge can be immediately translated into a tangible product, into something that can be traded on the market, that can be priced, bought and sold”.[5]
This does not mean that there are no researchers in these disciplines who are devoted to producing knowledge in response to demands from others (the state, political parties, economic actors, or social organizations). However, the social sciences and humanities are not restricted to this. From our point of view, it would be undesirable for them to lose their critical, creative, and questioning functions. The problems posed by our disciplines extend into the future in an open, unpredictable way in science. In this sense, the social sciences and humanities may not always be immediately helpful. Still, they undoubtedly contribute to the formation of a “we”, a historical, political, social, and human community.
Mariela Cuadro is a researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina) and a professor at EPyG-UNSAM (the School of Politics and Government at the National University of San Martín). Her work focuses on Critical International Relations Theory, Global South theories, and Middle Eastern politics. She is the author of several articles on these debates, with a research agenda centered on critical thinking and knowledge constitution.
Sol Montero is a researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina) and a professor at the EPyG- UNSAM (School of Politics and Government at the National University of San Martín). Her work focuses on the intersection of discourse and politics, and her latest book is Avatares en el poder. Claves sobre el discurso político en redes (UNSAM EDITA, 2024).
[1] We are grateful to Paula Salerno (Escuela de Humanidades, UNSAM) and Nicolás Viotti (Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales, UNSAM) for their collaboration. Their reflections provided essential input for composing this text. Nevertheless, the authors alone are responsible for the ideas presented here.
[2] Pierre Hadot, Ejercicios espirituales y filosofía antigua, quoted in Ordine, Nuccio, La utilidad de lo inútil, Acantilado, Madrid, 2023, p.2.
[5] Piovani, Juan Ignacio, “Sobre la utilidad de las ciencias sociales en tiempos de neoliberalismo y posverdad”. En Brugaletta, F., González Canosa, M., Starcenbaum, M., Welschinger, N. (ed.), La política científica en disputa: diagnósticos y propuestas frente a su reorientación regresiva. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación UNLP- CLACSO, 2019, p. 123.
In recent decades, universities across the world have been experiencing a global crisis. Their traditional sources of legitimacy have weakened, their funding models are under permanent pressure, and their place in society no longer seems self-evident. While universities in the Global North have been increasingly strained by managerial logics, standardized evaluation systems, and the retreat of humanist ideals, in the Global South those same forces have advanced as well, though within a much more fragile institutional landscape. In both cases, universities have been forced to adapt to a common pressure: to demonstrate efficiency, justify their existence in terms of performance, and submit their intellectual autonomy to external metrics that rarely capture the deeper meaning of academic work.
But in the Global South, these trends are combined with additional dilemmas. The crisis of the university is inseparable from the crisis of the public sphere: budgets that fluctuate with unstable economic cycles, periods of institutional hollowing-out that erode basic capacities, and a persistent dispute over the place of knowledge in societies marked by structural inequalities. Thus, rather than two distinct processes, North and South share a common diagnosis, albeit traversed by material asymmetries. Both face the same question: how to sustain an institution that produces critical knowledge and civic education? However, they do so under very different conditions, where each global pressure acquires a particular density as it embeds itself in unequal political, economic, and social histories. We are living through a context of public defunding of universities and a retreat of international cooperation more generally. Even institutions such as UNESCO (to mention just one example), which in earlier times were donors and funders of research programs, now compete for funds with the very institutions they once financed. At the same time, as we will see in the Argentine case in particular—but also globally—we are witnessing the rise of extreme political movements that call the role of universities into question. If the modern university, heir to the Enlightenment, saw itself as a generator of “useful” scientific knowledge but also assumed a critical role vis-à-vis society, today it finds itself besieged by a reactionary tsunami that positions the university as a privileged political enemy.
In Latin America, and this is especially the case in Argentina, the public university is not simply a space for professional training nor (only) a gear in the market: it is a political institution, a device in which, over more than a century, the promises, conflicts, and contradictions of Argentine democratic life have been inscribed. The university “convulsion” in this context cannot be reduced to an administrative or budgetary problem (though it is that as well). Rather, it expresses a dispute over the meaning of the common good and over the place that knowledge occupies in the making of a society. Part of this specificity has historical roots. In Argentina, the university predates the state and, in a sense, the nation itself. The National University of Córdoba, founded in 1613, and the University of Buenos Aires, created in 1821, belong to a political time much older than the Republic (1853) or the formation of the modern Argentine state (1880). In other words, they are institutions older than the state and the republic that support them today. They accumulate legitimacies, traditions, and social expectations that no political cycle so far has been able to reconfigure fully. Their persistence through dictatorships, democratizations, economic crises, and institutional reconstructions reveals something important: the university is a repository of dreams that outlive time. But how long can that dream endure?
From this vantage point, in Argentina, the university has not been—at least over the last century—a mere educational device. Rather, it has been—and continues to be—a political form, a privileged space in which the democratic promise of Argentine modernity has been imagined, contested, and also embodied. The university articulates autonomy, equality, and intellectual citizenship, and it is a major producer of public knowledge and common goods. In the social imagination, it has been more a horizon of possible social mobility than a machine for reproducing privilege.
As public opinion studies from the University of San Andrés, a private Argentine university, indicate, Argentine science enjoys a very positive image in society.[1] Even in moments of precarization, the university continues to be one of the few sites where the meritocratic ideal still holds, albeit in partial and conflictive ways. Where other institutions have deteriorated or lost credibility, the university—and the scientific system organized around state institutions such as CONICET—continues to operate as a space where equality seems possible, where a certain idea of the future—so fragile in contemporary Argentina—still retains a place.
The Long Century of the Argentine University (1918–2023)
To think about the Argentine university between 1918 and 2023 is to reconstruct a historical cycle in which the university functioned as one of the symbolic and political lungs of the country. Unlike other systems, in Argentina the public university was not limited to the transmission of knowledge: it was a stage on which models of citizenship were projected, disputes over the meaning of the State unfolded, expectations of social mobility took shape, and, above all, an imaginary of equality traversed generations. In a way, this long century constitutes the political biography of the modern Argentine university. The starting point is 1918. The University Reform of the province of Córdoba was much more than an academic reform: it established a way of understanding the university as a space open to deliberation, equality, and conflict. Co-governance among professors, graduates, and students, together with institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and a distinctive Latin American influence and resonance, introduced a political grammar that continued to radiate throughout the century. The 1918 University Reform emerged as a student insurrection that dismantled the inherited academic order, questioning the concentration of professorial power and the closure of participatory spaces. Its momentum opened the doors to a model of university more receptive to intellectual renewal, with selection mechanisms designed to prevent the stagnation of academic chairs, and with a conception of university life grounded in deliberation and the circulation of new currents of thought. As one of its most emblematic documents states: “Our university system—even the most recent—is anachronistic. It is founded on a kind of divine right: the divine right of the university professorship. It creates itself. It is born in it and dies in it. It maintains an Olympian distance. The University Federation of Córdoba rises up to fight against this system and understands that its life is at stake in doing so. It demands a strictly democratic government and maintains that the demos of the university, sovereignty, the right to self-government, resides principally in the students.”[2]
The Córdoba Reform movement not only reorganized the political life of institutions but also established a generational sensibility that understood the university as a stage for social transformation, capable of projecting debates and demands beyond its own walls. Seen from today, the Reform is not so much an event of the past as an institutional language that made it possible to imagine the university as a place where knowledge circulates without tutelage, where hierarchies must justify themselves, and where power is always already in dispute. This permanent availability of conflict, this “empty place” of power, is one of the most enduring marks of Argentine university culture. As Claude Lefort writes: “where an empty place takes shape, there can be no possible conjunction between power, law, and knowledge.”[3] The university thus lives its internal effervescence while, even as part of the Argentine state, it maintains its autonomy from power.
By the mid-twentieth century, the university entered a period of expansion, modernization, and politicization. Peronism (1945–1955), though in conflict with student organizations, ensured free tuition, and it was followed by the developmentalism of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which sought to turn the university into the engine of the national project. As a consequence, there was budget expansion, new faculties, academic professionalization, and the later creation of CONICET (the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research) as scientific infrastructure.
Understanding the Argentine university also requires taking seriously its intertwining with its scientific system. Since the creation in 1958 of CONICET, inspired by the French CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) and spanning the natural and exact sciences, the humanities, as well as the medical and economic fields, the country experimented with a singular architecture of knowledge: the university as a generator of knowledge and as a territory for teaching, conversation, and transmission; and CONICET as the structure that organizes research, gives it continuity, and projects it beyond political urgency. There emerged research careers, disciplinary commissions, mixed institutes: an ecosystem that breathes at the rhythm of the universities and, at the same time, gives them a depth that would be impossible without that support. Through crises and expansions, withdrawals and re-launches, CONICET maintained its mission of producing public knowledge. For this reason, speaking of the university in Argentina is never only about classrooms and students: it is about that scientific fabric that grants it historical continuity, social prestige, and a forward direction—even when the country seems to lose it.
However, this technical impulse coexisted with a climate of growing political mobilization. Universities became territories where heterodox Marxisms, popular nationalisms, left-wing Christian movements, new social sciences, and a set of intellectual explorations circulated that exceeded the boundaries of the strictly academic. It was a time in which the militant intellectual, the modernizing scientist, and the student as political actor intersected. This politicized density transformed the university into a central battleground with authoritarian projects: intervention, censorship, expulsions, and episodes such as the “Night of the Long Batons” (1966) were attempts to break a university world that was perceived—rightly—as a hub of critical thought and social organization.
The “Night of the Long Batons” was a turning point in the history of Argentine universities. The intervention of the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970) and the police eviction of UBA (University of Buenos Aires) faculties revealed with absolute clarity the conflict between academic autonomy and state power. The operation interrupted research, dismantled research teams, and occurred at a moment of intense intellectual dynamism in Buenos Aires. Spaces such as the Di Tella Institute—a center for social studies and avant-garde art that, with the return of democracy, would later become a university—functioned as laboratories of artistic, scientific, and technological experimentation. This coexistence between a reformist university and an innovative cultural ecosystem, on the one hand, and a growing state desire for control, on the other, shows that the “Night of the Long Batons” was not an isolated event. It was the collision between two models of modernization: one open and experimental; the other vertical and disciplinary. The episode has since delineated the material and normative limits within which the university can produce knowledge and sustain long-term projects.
This politicization accelerated in the 1970s, when the political radicalization of the Peronist left and the non-Peronist left was persecuted by para-state organizations such as the AAA (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), until the 1976 military coup placed the university under direct military control. At that point, persecution intensified, censorship was consolidated, and state violence expanded, culminating in executions, kidnappings, and desaparecidos.
With the return of democracy in 1983, the university regained its place as a laboratory of citizenship. Degree programs were reopened, exiled professors returned, institutional projects were reconstituted, and the idea that the public university was part of the democratic pact was restored. It was a period of massification, expansion into the metropolitan periphery, the creation of new national universities, and science and technology policies aimed at rebuilding a system devastated by years of authoritarianism. However, this momentum coexisted with new tensions: growing bureaucratization, internal fragmentation, budgetary difficulties, a crisis of the academic career, and a certain loss of the reformist horizon that had organized university life for half a century. The democratic university expanded access, but it did not always succeed in producing a new intellectual project capable of replacing either the militant ethos of the 1960s or the modernizing one of the 1950s.
In the twenty-first century, the university system experienced an accelerated and unprecedented expansion. New universities in Greater Buenos Aires—a phenomenon already underway in the 1990s—expanded enrollment, and this period was marked by a renewed protagonism of the university in the public agenda. There was an increase in education spending, and investment in science grew steadily. Institutions were created, staffing expanded, and efforts were made to rebuild a scientific system battered by decades of instability and austerity. But this growth had a flip side: an increasingly unequal system between central and peripheral universities, an administrative structure that grew heavier, research circuits strained by precarization, and a proliferation of institutions, degrees, and initiatives that sometimes made it difficult to articulate a shared horizon. The reformist ethos, which in the past had operated as a motor of transformation, began to survive as a defensive gesture against the advance of a managerial culture that tended to turn the university into a collection of indicators and planning documents rather than a shared intellectual project.
Since 1983, the Argentine student landscape has reorganized itself around a plurality of political traditions that alternated in influence. Reformist and social democratic and Peronist leadership marked the early years of the transition, promoting agendas centered on the defense of autonomy, institutional reconstruction, and the expansion of academic rights. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Reformist and Peronist student groups and independent formations also occupied important spaces, combining university concerns with broader debates on the role of the state and educational policy. By the early twenty-first century, the growth of left-wing groups—from Trotskyist organizations to new movements emerging from social, feminist, and territorial struggles—reconfigured the landscape, introducing a repertoire of demands tied more closely to critiques of the economic model, the democratization of academic life, and the active defense of the public sphere.
By 2023, however, this long cycle seemed to have reached a turning point. Argentina was marking forty years of democracy (1983–2023) after half a century of dictatorships, authoritarian governments, bans, and political violence (1930–1983). The public university still retained its social legitimacy—surprisingly high for an institution subjected to recurrent crises—but it had lost part of its aura of upward mobility, future, and emancipation. The meritocratic imaginary that sustained it for decades is now eroded by a fragmented society, persistent inequalities, and a climate of political disorientation that affects all state institutions. The democratic consensus that once protected the university is no longer unquestionable: today it must justify itself, defend itself, and perhaps once again reimagine itself. This exhaustion of the reformist-democratic cycle defines the threshold from which the current offensive against the public university can be understood. And it turns the period from 1918 to 2023 not into a concluded era, but into a legacy now being disputed under new historical conditions.
The Anarcho-Capitalist Offensive: Milei and the War Against Public Education
The arrival of Javier Milei to government in 2023 marks a turning point not only in Argentine history but in that of the Argentine university in particular. For the first time since 1918, the State is not only reducing its material support for public education—something that has happened many times in the past—but is questioning the university’s social role and its very legitimacy. It’s worth noting that Milei comes to power in 2023, the year that marks forty years of uninterrupted democracy and half a century of erratic economic policies (1973–2023) producing a deterioration in people’s living conditions and successive extreme economic crises (1975, 1982, 1989, 2001, 2009, 2018, etc.) under all kinds of regimes and governments: dictatorships and democracies, right-wing or left-wing, statist or neoliberal. As I noted in a text I wrote with Martín Plot and Daniela Slipak, “2023 was marked by the exhaustion of a democratic regime that made economic uncertainty entirely intolerable and by the emergence of Milei as a leader who articulates critical solutions to the regime born in 1983.”[4] For the first time since 1983, a true outsider—someone outside the traditional political parties and the elite that has governed the Argentine Republic in democracy to varying degrees—had reached power. And it was Milei who knew how to make functional use of the tsunami of public anger that was emerging.[5] In this context, anarcho-capitalism, in its Argentine version, does not simply aim to cut budgets or reorganize ministries: it seeks to dismantle the very idea of the public as the organizing principle of common life. In this way, the public university—one of the most highly valued institutions of Argentine democracy, as we have shown—becomes a privileged ideological target. What is at stake is not only institutional continuity but the survival of a political-cultural model that associated knowledge, equality, and a shared social project.
This movement is not unique to Argentina. There are resonances, mimicry, and contagion among movements worldwide. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, for example, free universities have come under such pressure that the Central European University in Budapest, founded and financed by George Soros, was forced to relocate its operations to Vienna, Austria’s capital. In the United States, radical figures such as J.D. Vance have openly declared that “university professors are the enemy.” Trumpist rhetoric has constructed the university as a polarizing figure through a convergence of dynamics also visible in Argentina: universities and the media are “hostile elites,” producers of a liberal culture deemed decadent or anti-national. The thought of Curtis Yarvin, with his theory of “The Cathedral,”[6] serves as an intellectual matrix for this worldview: the university and journalism appear as cultural devices that reproduce progressive values and block popular sovereignty. Milei feeds on this repertoire and on this global moment: he translates it into the local idiom, blends it with the media logic of provocation, and transforms it into a political program. And he also accelerates that Zeitgeist.
Milei is a believer and an ideologue who jumped from the margins of the intellectual debate to become a global reference point for anarcho-capitalism. This transition—from professional economist to media panelist and later ideological activist—structures his relationship with knowledge: it is not so much a technical debate as a doctrinal alignment that views the public university as a bastion of “statism” to be dismantled. The problem is not only budgetary. It is philosophical: public education appears as a moral anomaly within a worldview that equates freedom with the market and the state with corruption. Ironically, Milei—a global referent of anarcho-capitalism—is a relative newcomer who found in this ideology a framework for measuring and transforming the world.
Within this entire ideological constellation, paleolibertarianism occupies a central place. Milei came to Murray Rothbard’s work relatively late, in 2013, after which he named one of his dogs Murray. Following this epiphany, he would say: “When I finished reading Rothbard I said: ‘For more than 20 years I’ve been deceiving my students. Everything I taught about market structures is wrong. It’s wrong!’”[7] Another of his “idols” is Hans-Hermann Hoppe,[8] from whom he adopts a simultaneous critique of egalitarianism, the welfare state, and liberal democracy—an intellectual framework within which the public university becomes inconceivable: an institution supported by taxes, organized through collegiate bodies, and permeated by egalitarian values that Hoppe identifies as signs of cultural decadence. Milei takes up this matrix but cultivates it within Argentine public and historical debates, explicitly reclaiming Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), one of the founders of the Argentine constitutional order. Milei argues that the origins of all Argentine evils and of “Argentine decadence” began in 1916: curiously, the year in which “universal suffrage” (for men) was instituted. It is with the arrival of the vote, he claims, that Argentina ceased to be a “world power,” as dictated by the founding myth of the libertarian movement (we call it a myth because although Argentina’s GDP was indeed very high between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is not true that it was a “world power” of any kind). And it is precisely in that democratization process initiated in 1916 that, in 1918, the spark of the aforementioned Argentine University Reform was ignited. Under this anarcho-capitalist logic, the public university is not merely an expense: it is an obstacle to the technocratic reorganization of power and to the ideal of a leader who acts without intermediaries, without checks, and without a public sphere that limits him. Within this framework, the public university—financed by the state, co-governed by professors, graduates, and students and ruled by norms that limit the market—embodies, for this new regime, the epicenter of ideological resistance.
Thus, the offensive against public education must be read in continuity with another idea that Milei repeats insistently: the need to “destroy the State from within.” This formula—which he himself links to his admiration for paleolibertarians, and which echoes the neo-reactionary rhetoric of Silicon Valley—expresses a strategy of accelerated erosion of traditional institutional mechanisms. In this context, the public university appears as a symbol of the kind of state that the regime aims to dismantle: a state with territorial presence, egalitarian vocation, and cultural legitimacy. Rather than administering an education policy, the government seeks to modify the very conditions of possibility for any public knowledge project. The university thus becomes the site where this transformation becomes visible—not because it has been chosen as an enemy, but because it embodies what the new regime seeks to leave behind: the idea that knowledge can be organized collectively and outside the proprietary logic.
The intellectual constellation surrounding Silicon Valley adds a decisive layer to the contemporary offensive against the public university—not only in the United States but also in Argentina under Milei. This is not a unified doctrine but a cultural milieu that associates innovation with deregulation, speed with virtue, and bureaucracy with decadence. Here we find extreme entrepreneurs, technolibertarians, accelerationists, and media figures such as Elon Musk, whose worldview rests on a simple premise: progress occurs best when there are no institutions to moderate it. In this vision, academia functions as a device that is too slow, normative, and attentive to collective procedures. The critique of scientific “slowness,” the exaltation of rapid motion, and the suspicion toward any deliberative instance shape an idea of knowledge in which the university appears as an artifact of the past. Faced with the epic of code, global scale, and technical solutionism, the public university is cast as an anachronistic world, organized in another temporality and faithful to values the new technological order deems obsolete. The meeting between the Argentine president and Peter Thiel at the Casa Rosada in March 2024—an event of which there are no photos, something that’s unusual for a government that constantly flaunts encounters with “great men”—symbolizes this convergence between technological acceleration and the politics of exception: two different ways of imagining the dismantling of the state converging in a shared anti-public logic.
A more immediate gesture complements this ideological background: the de-hierarchization of expert knowledge. Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public: The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,[9] who, during his visit to Argentina, was struck by Milei’s rise, offers in his book a valuable lens for thinking about the cultural clash between the university and the anti-establishment political activism that in Argentina is dominated by mileísmo. His thesis is simple: we are living through a collision between a Center rooted in the industrial era and a digital Frontier that has not yet constituted itself as an order. The Center is hierarchical and professionalized; the Frontier is fragmentary, egalitarian, and corrosive. What collides are not political actors but two ways of organizing the world. The decisive element in this situation is information. Digital flow breaks the monopoly that sustained modern authority: there are no longer mediators, but a public that chooses, contradicts, ridicules, and multiplies narratives without limit. Any technical decision or expert knowledge can become the subject of suspicion within hours. It is no coincidence that the information age coincides with the rise of conspiracy theories. It is the price of deregulating the truth market. In this context, Gurri situates the university within the Center: a hierarchical institution, guardian of legitimate knowledge, dependent on a vertical chain of validation. The Frontier erodes that regime. It amplifies flaws, exposes errors, and turns criticism into a constant impulse toward dismantling. It is not an organized opposition; it is a multitude without a project of its own. The paradox is that the Frontier destroys more than it can replace. The Center resists out of inertia; the Frontier destabilizes without offering an alternative architecture. The result is a prolonged interregnum: an old order that does not fully recede and a new one that does not fully arrive. In this uncertain space, the university must reconfigure its legitimacy, because authority has ceased to be a value and has become another object of suspicion.
As Gurri said during his visit, “Milei is the most interesting of the populists, because he has a proposal,”[10] thus distinguishing the Argentine president from Donald Trump’s first term. With Trump’s return to power in 2025, Gurri would later say: “Today Trump has a governing program derived from Milei’s influence.”[11]
Within the intellectual ecosystem of the new Latin American right, the philosopher Agustín Laje functions as a strategic popularizer: someone who organizes scattered diagnoses, simplifies them into intervention-ready language, and projects them toward mass audiences. Author of highly circulated books across social media and traditional media—books that attempt to translate global debates on hegemony, subjectivity, and discourse into the local political terrain—Laje, born in 1989, is viewed by many as Milei’s heir and a potential presidential candidate in 2031. For Laje, drawing on readings from the new right in the Global North, since the late 1960s politics has reorganized itself around the dispute over culture. In his framework, this is not merely a rhetorical intuition but a structural shift: central conflicts are no longer defined by economic distribution but by the struggle over the codes that organize the perception of the world. The left, he argues, grasped this mutation earlier than anyone and oriented its strategy toward identities, language, and social sensibilities. The right, by contrast, remained attached to a technocratic reflex, trusting in the persuasive capacity of economic arguments.
In this landscape, the university occupies a crucial place. As he writes, for example in his book Globalismo: “Western universities function increasingly as apparatuses for legitimizing woke derangement.”[12] For Laje, the university is not merely an educational device: it is an organizer of worldviews, a machinery of symbolic legitimization, and a vector for disseminating interpretive frameworks that then radiate outward into society. Hence his insistence on characterizing it as a space where the ideological direction of the era is defined. According to his diagnosis, a progressive hegemony consolidated in that territory, sustained by critical traditions—from French theory to contemporary feminism—and by transnational funding networks that promote specific agendas. Regardless of whether one agrees with his reading, Laje crystallizes a climate that permeates much of the new right: the idea that contemporary politics is, above all, a struggle over the production of meaning, and that universities—given their ability to shape languages, expectations, and sensibilities—are one of its decisive arenas.
In its strategy against the university, mileísmo replaces academic debate with media impact, argumentation with performance, evidence with conviction. The criticism of “indoctrinating professors” does not aim to correct content but to disable the very idea that a legitimate sphere of autonomous knowledge production could exist. In this movement, the public university appears as the residue of an order that must be surpassed, a structure that operates according to a temporality incompatible with the immediacy demanded by the new regime. More than a confrontation between two educational models, this is a clash between two conceptions of political time: the university as a space of duration, accumulation, and critique; anarcho-capitalism as the accelerated time of rupture and permanent deinstitutionalization.
Accusations of indoctrination, the denial of scientific knowledge on climate issues (the prohibition of discussing climate topics in official documents), economics (never-implemented economic ideas such as dissolving the central bank), or public health (denial of the usefulness of vaccines), and the systematic reduction of university and scientific budgets all fit within this framework. These are not isolated measures but part of a broader process of reconfiguring the internal enemy. The university no longer appears as a space of education but as an enclave supposedly producing “statist,” “socialist,” or “communist” ideas. Confrontation becomes inevitable: while anarcho-capitalist logic conceives the property-owning individual as the sole legitimate moral unit, the university belongs to an order that affirms the existence of public goods, shared languages, and collective ways of constructing the future.
The clash became visible in the massive university mobilizations of 2024 and 2025, which were among the largest demonstrations of Argentina’s democratic era in recent years. There, the university reappeared as a political subject: open classrooms, assemblies, academic and student communities moving through the streets under the conviction that public education is a right, a common good, and a form of future. This reactivation of the reformist spirit—now defensive rather than expansive—exposed the symbolic dimension of the university: when it is attacked, it reemerges as one of the last places in which a significant part of Argentine society recognizes itself.
Argentina’s public sphere became traversed by a persistent phenomenon: massive mobilizations that overflow any routine reading of social protest. A tide of people that surprised the government itself and produced the first rupture in the official narrative that labels universities as “elitist” or “privileged.” The sheer size of the demonstration in the center of Argentina’s capital—between 400,000 and 800,000 people[13]—forced even traditional opinion leaders who typically support the government to express reservations about its austerity toward universities. Along this trajectory, the marches in defense of the public university and public health occupied a decisive place: not only because of their scale—among the largest since the start of Milei’s presidency—but also because of the kinds of actors they mobilized and the way they revealed the symbolic role these institutions play in Argentine life.
This collective gesture reactivated something that goes beyond the budgetary conflict. It expressed the idea that the public university is not merely a service that deteriorates or improves depending on the year’s budget: it is an institution that organizes life trajectories, defines horizons of mobility, and functions as a republican promise passed across generations. The social pressure had concrete effects. In this context, the National Congress approved a law granting public universities a larger budget, with adjustments for inflation and improvements in scholarships and salaries.[14] President Javier Milei vetoed the measure, arguing that funding sources were not defined. Subsequently, Congress rejected the veto and reinstated the law.[15] Despite this, the government did not implement the allocated funds, prompting universities to take the matter to court. The conflict is now in the judicial realm, and the Executive branch is, in effect, in rebellion against a law approved by both chambers.[16]
But the paradox is evident. The attempt to defund the public university did not diminish its symbolic weight; it placed it at center stage. Where the government sought a cultural rupture, a latent fact emerged: the public university remains one of the broadest consensuses in Argentine society. However, the electoral dynamic followed another path. Despite the confrontation with university and scientific institutions, the government managed to prevail in the October 2025 midterm elections, strengthening its position while advancing its agenda of reducing educational spending.
In this scenario, the Argentine university is situated in a particular zone of tension: it maintains high social legitimacy but operates under a political climate that distrusts its function and structure. The challenge is not only financial but conceptual: sustaining the production of knowledge and critical thought in an environment where the value of academic expertise is publicly disputed and where the figure of the intellectual loses centrality to influencers. The university thus moves between the need to ensure its institutional continuity and the difficulty of maintaining its place as a cultural reference in a country where the coordinates of public debate are being altered. The challenge was described by Michel Foucault when rethinking the question of Enlightenment half a century ago: “I would say that critique is the movement by which the subject grants itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects, and power concerning its truth discourses: critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility.”[17]
Defending the University Through More Experimentation
We can read the current crisis of the university not only as an external attack or a misunderstanding, but also as a test of its own experimental capacity. If democracy survives only when it conceives of itself as an open, everyday, and revisable process, the same holds for the university. Following John Dewey and William James, the Brazilian philosopher and Harvard professor Roberto Unger revives the concept of experimentalism. The point is that it is not enough to appeal to past credentials or insist on being “indispensable”: any institution that claims centrality in a time of generalized distrust must once again justify its place. That requires risking new forms of teaching, research, engagement with the broader community, and interaction with the world of work, and accepting that certain inherited rituals and hierarchies, rather than protecting the institution, now make it opaque and unreadable to a significant part of society.
In this sense, the alternative is not between preserving the old model intact or resigning ourselves to its destruction, but between a corporatist defense of the existing order and a reinvention that seeks new legitimacies. An experimentalist university is not one that meekly adapts to managerial language nor one that retreats into nostalgia for the lost welfare state, but one that explores new forms of student and faculty participation, new modes of evaluation, and new ways of producing and circulating knowledge in dialogue with publics who are no longer passive recipients. In a saturated informational ecosystem, authority no longer comes from the scarcity of knowledge but from the capacity to organize shared experiences, to create spaces where conversation has rules but not gag orders. The challenge is precisely this: to recognize that the university can defend itself only if it dares to change. To reimagine it not as a prestigious vestige of the Middle Ages or the twentieth century, but as one of the few places where it is still possible to rehearse—calmly, at least to some degree—forms of democratic life that outside appear overwhelmed by polarization and fury. If the future of democracy depends on combining stable institutions with devices for experimentation and openness, the university is uniquely positioned to embody that tension.
What is at stake, then, is not merely the budgetary continuity of a set of buildings, but the possibility that there exists, in the midst of the storm, a collective laboratory where it still makes sense to learn together what to do with the time that has befallen us. As Unger says once again, “we need a set of decentralized, pluralistic, participatory, and experimental forms of coordination.”[18] For an experimentalist and democratizing response cannot be a “corporate” defense of the “old order.” Our near future will determine whether what we are living through today is a terminal crisis, a decline, or a profoundly vital metamorphosis of the university to come.
Tomás Borovinsky is a researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina) and a professor at EIDAES–UNSAM (the Interdisciplinary School of Social Sciences at the National University of San Martín). His latest collective volume is ¿Hay algo que no esté en crisis? Arte y pensamiento en la era del cambio acelerado y sin fin (Siglo XXI). He is also the editorial director of the publishing imprint Interferencias (Adriana Hidalgo Editora), focused on contemporary thought, and the editor-in-chief of Supernova, a magazine of ideas and public debate.
[2] Manifiesto Liminar. La juventud argentina de Córdoba a los hombres libres de Sud América
Manifiesto de la Federación Universitaria de Córdoba – 1918.
[3] Lefort, Claude, “¿Permanencia de lo teológico-político?”, en La invertidumbre democrática. Ensayos sobre lo político. Anthropos, Barcelona, 2005.
[4] Borovinsky, Tomás, Plot, Martín and Slipak, Daniela, “Milei y los horizontes de lo político. Crisis de régimen y anhelo de clausura de la incertidumbre democrática”, en Alejandro Grimson, Desquiciados, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2024, p. 162.
[5] Borovinsky, Tomás, “Tsunamis de ira pública”, junio de 2023, Revista Panamá.
[8] Hoppe, Hans-Hermann, Democracy: The God That Failed, Transactions, 2001.
[9] Gurri, Martin, The Revolt Of The Public And The Crisis Of Authority, Stripe Press, 2018. For further uses of these concepts in the Argentine context, see Borovinsky, Tomás, “Presentación”, La rebelión del público, Interferencias, Buenos Aires-Madrid, 2023.
[10] Entrevista de mayo de 2024 en diario La Nación:
Image: Spectra of Marks – Ferdinand Altenburg, 2024 
