b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Jorge Amar & Scott Ferguson—Power, Corruption & Lies: A Left View of the Upcoming Spanish Election

    Jorge Amar & Scott Ferguson—Power, Corruption & Lies: A Left View of the Upcoming Spanish Election

    By Jorge Amar & Scott Ferguson

    In a few weeks a general election will be held in Spain. The optimistic verdict of the Spanish mass media concerning the economy is clear: the Spanish economy is purportedly a paradigm of recovery and macroeconomic management that should serve as a model for other member countries of the Eurozone. If this is genuinely the case, however, then why is the Spanish miracle not providing any discernible hope for Spaniards? In surveys carried out by the reputable Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 60.6 % of Spaniards identify unemployment as their greatest concern and for the most part perceive the economic situation as bad (35.7%) or very bad (14.9%). The answer is that most households have not shared in the “recovery.”

    Touting record growth, analysts both domestic and international have joined in chorus celebrating the success of the so-called “German Model” in Spain. This counter-intuitive and frankly suicidal approach to economic crisis recommends forcing further deflation via government cutbacks. The idea is to induce an internal devaluation of Spain’s economy relative its Eurozone partners, thereby rendering Spanish exports more “competitive” abroad. In other words, millions suffer and generations are lost, while neoliberals insist the only way up is paradoxically down.

    Spain’s apparent recovery is mostly an illusion built up from stylized facts. In truth, the acclaimed surplus in the current account balance has been the result of a deleterious free fall in imports and steady expansion of low-value added exports such as food, fuel and intermediate goods. So while aggregate demand has risen and the current account balance looks to be in surplus relative to its previous position, Spain’s productive capacity continues to atrophy as it replaces high- with low-skill jobs and ship materials outside the country.

    The perverse effects of this process have been registered by the National Statistics Institute’s Employer Confidence Index, showing that for the first time since 2017 more firms expect business to worsen than improve. They have appeared in Spain’s Industrial Production Index, which began downgrading the development of country’s industrial capabilities beginning at the end on 2018. And they are most evident in the balance sheets of Spanish firms and households,  which are now deeply and unsustainable in the red.

    Meanwhile, Spain’s alleged economic rebound has only normalized unemployment and poverty, as workers continuously lose ground in their share of national income to the owners of capital. “If the distribution that existed before the outbreak of the crisis had been maintained,” writes Javier G. Jorrín, “labour incomes would have to increase by 32.6 billion euros and Gross Operating Surplus (GOS) would have to be reduced by 8.1 billion. In short, a transfer of 40,000 million from capital to wages.” Neither the number of employed nor total wages have recovered from the crisis. As Jorrín also notes, “Spain currently has the same total wages (at current prices) as in 2008 with 780,000 fewer wage earners.” What is more, Spain remains the nation with the second highest unemployment rate in the EU, surpassed only by Greece.

    It is unsurprising that high unemployment and uneven income distribution has been accompanied by a drastic increase in wealth inequality in Spain. This amounts to, on the one hand, an increase in the number of rich and ultra-rich from 144,600 in 2012 to 224,200 in 2017. Despite the economy’s precipitous fall during the first years of the global financial crisis, the Spanish 1% would come to  possess 25% of the country’s wealth by 2017. On the other hand, poverty and social exclusion are spreading. As Isabel García reports, nearly one in three children under 16 years of age (31%) with 10.8% living in severe poverty. 13.1% of the Spanish population retired between 2014 and 2018. And 14.1% of the employed now risk falling below the poverty line.

    At the same time, both centrist Social Democrats (PSOE) and right-wing PP in the Spanish government have approved debilitating austerity measures (euphemistically called “reforms”) that have strengthened capital in its struggle for national income. Spain’s social expenditure gap in comparison to other European economies has not been reduced at all. Totalling 16.8% of GDP, social expenditure in Spain is still significantly lower than the European Union average of 19.1%, with France spending 24.4% and Portugal 18% of GDP. The results of have been disastrous. Labor and capital battle over unpaid overtime, which today constitutes around 46% of overtime worked. And Spaniards continue to lose confidence in the major labor unions, which have all too readily conceded to the government’s austerity measures.

    Far from improving the Spanish economy, the growth strategy pursued by the PP and PSOE governments has exacerbated systemic problems, making life ever more difficult for the poor. Principally, the government’s strategy has been to stoke property bubbles and expand rental markets rather than spending directly on communities and delivering jobs to the unemployed. Such inflationary spending has reduced individual savings to a record low, mirroring the dangerous savings levels Spain saw on the eve of the financial crisis.

    The latest real estate bubble arose in two stages. First, the Zapatero Social Democrat government legalized real estate investment trusts (REITs). Next, the Popular Party created tax incentives and expedited the sale of public property, housing, and companies to vulture funds. (This includes properties held by the “bad bank” created by the Spanish government in the aftermath of the financial crisis, when it relieved the four nationalized Spanish financial institutions of their toxic assets.) As a consequence, Spain has seen an explosion in speculative real estate investments and now ranks second in the world in real estate investment trusts. Spanish cities are pushing out the poor to make room for the wealthy. In the words of Manuel Gabarre and Sonia Martínez, city centers are being “reduced to renting flats to tourists and housing ‘expatriates’, people coming from other countries with highly paid jobs and who can pay a rent that the normal Spanish citizen cannot afford.” And newly privatized public companies have also ended up in the hands of vulture funds. From the airport manager (AENA) to the railway service (RENFE ADIF), the government is abandoning public infrastructures and responsibilities and, instead, delivering enormous sources of income to the private sector.

    Should election forecasts prove correct and the PSOE maintains its grip on power, the PSOE government’s disastrous neoliberal policies will likely be carried out in full support of both Brussels and the major political parties on the right. A PSOE government will not lack allies in the Spanish parliament to pass neoliberal economic policy dictated from Brussels. Such parties include the PP, and the liberal “Ciudadanos” who, on economic matters, are typically allied with the Social Democrats in votes in the European Parliament. But could also include “Vox,” the party of the Spanish ultra-right.

    That said, resistance does persist, and especially in the embattled region of Catalonia. It is striking, for example, that left-wing parties in Catalonia did not support the PSOE’s 2018 draft budget and have since received increased support in the polls. At present, the Catalonian party known as “Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya” (ERC) is predicted to expand its 9 current deputies to around 14 or 15. The Spanish central government has officially lifted its former suspension of the regional government’s powers, but the Catalonian government nevertheless remains inactive. If Catalonian authorities manage to hold autonomous elections, however, ERC representatives could go from 32 currently to between 40 and 43.

    Still, the only ERC candidates who remain fully committed to the wishes of the Catalan voters are Oriol Junqueras (currently in prison) and Marta Rovira (exiled in Switzerland). They are also joined by Carles Riera i Albert, candidate for Catalonia’s anti-capitalist and pro-independence left-wing party CUP. Should they win in an autonomous election, anti-neoliberal representation would go from 4 to 8 deputies in the autonomous regions of Catalonia. Although this would not include representation in the Spanish Parliament, the Cortes Generales.

    The fracture in Spain’s disappointing leftist party, Podemos, is becoming most clear in Madrid’s local and regional elections, which are set to take place after the general election. Most indicative of this breakdown is the fact that Podemos’s celebrity campaign manager, Iñigo Errejón, has decided not to represent the party in Madrid’s upcoming gubernatorial election. Breaking with Podemos, Errejón is running as an independent on a business-friendly “Más Madrid” platform. Errejón’s campaign seems to hinge primarily on Errejón personal celebrity.

    Moreover, Errejón is now joining forces with the openly left, but tacitly neoliberal mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, who is presently seeking re-election. As a retired judge and former member of PSOE-associated think tank “Fundación Alternativas,” mayor Carmena has long spoken the language of the left. In her 2015 “Ahora Madrid” (“Now Madrid”) campaign, for instance, she promised to build a meager 4,000 new public housing units and to make Madrid an asylum city for mostly African immigrant street vendors who have been intimidated by the city’s police and high-end retailers. During her first term, however, Carmena has built fewer than 1,000 public housing units. She has betrayed Madrid’s struggling street vendors by using city funds for a public relations campaign that instructs consumers to avoid buying their goods. And she facilitated the sale of 1.27 million square meters of land owned the public railway company to property speculators and did so in brash defiance of social opposition movements, including the municipal group of her “Now Madrid” project.

    Later commenting to Le Figaro on her failed promises, Carmena has characterized her platform as merely a “set of suggestions,” while dismissing the leftist politics she has courted as “inflexible.” With Errejón at her side, Carmena now speaks in managerial and technocratic terms about forming a “government of the best talents.” Thus far, however, such team-building has mostly translated into the firing of Carlos Sánchez Mato, a top leftist economist for the city government.

    Podemos party leaders are now expressly distancing themselves from Errejón on account of his shift toward Carmena’s centrism. However, it is important to remember that Carmena first rose to power with the express support of Podemos and Izquierda Unida, suggesting that Podemos’s current identity crisis is hardly new.

    A major wildcard in the upcoming election is the scandal involving high-stakes government corruption and Watergate-style criminality. Essentially, the PP utilized a corrupt faction of the national police to spy on Unidos Podemos and fabricate documents which, among other things, implied that the Podemos-associated CEPS Foundation had received $7.1 million euros in support from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan government. What is more, the PP has leaked to alt-right media sensitive personal information about Pablo Iglesias obtained illegally from a stolen cell phone belonging to a key aid of the Podemos leader. Podemos has repeatedly attempted to subpoena the high-ranking officer at the center of the plot as news of the scandal has come to light. In turn, the PP, PSOE, and centrist Ciudadanos parties have consistently blocked all such subpoenas. Yet recently, the ruling PSOE party was rocked by further scandal when presidential press secretary, Alberto Pozas, stepped down in response to espionage charges, linking him directly to the leakage of the cell phone information. The question now is whether last-minute developments or revelations in this developing story will introduce any surprises in the forthcoming election.

    Barring such a surprise, the anticipated results of the election are not likely to change the neoliberal policies that have shaped Spain over the past 30 years. Tragically, the 2019 General Election will almost certainly deliver a significant blow to the spirit of “15M,” the anti-austerity protest movement that began in March 2011 and defined a generation of Spanish political resistance. But all hope is not lost. Across Spain there are pensioners, tenants, feminists, students and numerous collectives of workers such as taxi drivers, researchers, and hotel cleaners, who continue to resist the neoliberal order and demand social justice in the streets.

    Looking ahead, the most crucial political contest for the Spanish left concerns the uncertain fate of the Euro currency zone and its fiscal straightjacket or “golden rule.” In the short term, Spain caught the tailwind of European Central Bank´s (ECB) bond purchase program, while benefiting from the ECB’s de facto suspension of its punishing golden rule for the PP government. For these reasons, the PP government’s discretionary fiscal deficit slightly rose and real GDP growth minimally returned by the end of 2018. Yet Spain is now the last remaining country enjoy the ECB’s soon-to-be defunct “excessive deficit procedure.” When the new government forms after the election, Spain is set to begin a new era of fiscal consolidation, which will not only curtail public deficits, but also dissolve the mirage of the Spanish miracle.

    For the foreseeable future, then, any Spanish left worthy of the name should do what every European leftist movement must do: overturn the Eurozone’s spiral of austerity, reclaim the public purse, and revive the European community in a far more just and sustainable fashion.

    ——————————————————————————————————

    Jorge Amar is a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and the president, and founding member of, the Full Employment and Price Stability Association (APEEP) in Spain. Amar holds a University degree in economics from the University of Valencia and is presently a doctoral candidate in Applied Economics at the Universidad Valencia. He has also edited and participated in several Spanish translations of Modern Monetary Theory texts, including Warren Mosler’s Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds and Bill Mitchell’s Eurozone Dystopia.

    Scott Ferguson is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. His book Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2018. Professor Ferguson is also a Research Scholar for the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, co-director of the Modern Money Network Humanities Division, and co-host of the Money on the Left podcast.

  • Rob Wilson, Stubborn Resistance: Juliana Spahr’s Auto-ethnography in the U.S. Poetic Undercommons

    Rob Wilson, Stubborn Resistance: Juliana Spahr’s Auto-ethnography in the U.S. Poetic Undercommons

    by Rob Wilson

    a review of Julianna Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram (Harvard University Press, 2018)

    He called his doctor and joked to him that he was ill with late capitalism.  His doctor did not laugh…

    –Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, “The Side Effect,” An Army of Lovers.[1]

    Change is quick but revolution

    will take a while.

    America has not even begun as yet.

    –Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter # 10”[2]

    Amid atrophied hopes for a literature effectively ‘revolutionary’ in a precarious time of post-Occupy, authoritarian revanchism, the far-flung ills and blockages of Late Capitalism, and what she tracks as returns of “stubborn nationalism,” Juliana Spahr stakes her claim for U.S. poetry with a bleakly Adorno-esque refusal she aims to conjure into new millennial credibility: “’this is not a time for political works of art.’”[3]  The three postwar U.S. literary movements she tracks in Du Bois’s Telegram:  Literary Resistance and State Containment – turn-of-the-new-century alter Englishes, avant-garde modernism, and movement literatures of resistance since the mid-1960s– will offer an emplotted “slide from [Audré] Lorde to Adorno” (15).  This means the shift from claims of poetic activism in writing as such, back to negation, irony, or qualification of such immediate claims for transformative resistance.  All this movement is figured under the pervasiveness of capitalist structures and presumes what Spahr calls literature’s semi-autonomous or “half-in and half-out relationship with capitalism” (16) and so many varied refusals of “complicit nationalism” (53).  To phrase this in the book’s overall analytical trajectory, Spahr tracks how “movement literature with its ties to militant resistance [across the late 60s and early 70s] morphed into multicultural literature” across later decades that instead seek to represent national inclusion and canonical assimilation of diversity (127).

    Spahr’s much-needed lyric/critical jeremiad, putting the micro-literary (poetics) and the macro-political (structured relations) together where they belong, tracks an under-recognized trajectory of state interference in literary figurations and more sublimated avowals into the turn of the twenty-first century as immersive poet-scholar subject.  Spahr complicates and renews “the vexed and uneven relationship between literature and politics,” challenging the all too literary avowal that “literature has a role to play in the political sphere, that it can provoke and resist” (4); that writing (especially “language writing”) as such comprises a politics of resistance in its negations, fragments, non-linearity, and deconstructions.  Framing structural issues and social relations between literature and the state as well as alternative forms of what literature might do politically, Spahr deepens the grasp between such historical ties and private foundations, sites of higher education, as well as publishing outlets both multinational and “a localized, decentralized small press culture” (5) in localities like Honolulu, Oakland and Buffalo.  The book is ‘auto-ethnographic” of Spahr’s own entanglements, complicities, and refusals of American literary-national culture and its university programs and funding structures that sustain it short of revolution and resistance as nourished in the coalitional social “undercommons.”[4]

    Writing on the side of alternative languages and social forms, language becoming minor and de-Anglicized, Spahr embraces the micropolitical flux of what M. M. Bakhtin called the “heteroglossia” within the dialogics of the sign.[5] She yet warns that “there is no robust counter” as alternative to state funding forms and modes of liberal domination, “with a politics that is anything more contestatory than liberal” (26).  Her heart, as poet, editor, publisher, and teacher, remains tied to alternative production and circulation sites in communities of resistance from subpress collective in Honolulu and Chain in Philadelphia to Commune Editions in Oakland. Even as she elaborates multiple forms (experimental, multicultural, neo-formal modernist or worse) for containing, manipulating, acculturating, and restricting “literary resistance” by the American state, still somehow, this study remains hopeful of “antistate” (53) as well as “other-than-national” (53) poetics in form, substance, and social relation.

    This is no melancholic rear-view mirror, but a proleptic movement forward as such into and beyond the contemporary. The sustained argument or, better said, way of reading this poetry is finely scaled at critical-creative levels of macro and micro intervention that may just carry the new millennial day (“it survives”), even if as W. H. Auden demurred in the radical thirties of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Rukeyser,

    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

    In the valley of its making where executives</p

    From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

    Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

    A way of happening, a mouth.[6]

    Making unexpected linkages from Paris and NYC to Africa and the Pacific, Spahr’s study shows that American liberal-literary culture (not just amid well-studied Cold War antagonisms and cooptation but into the blockages of the present moment), was never that free or autonomous.  It was never under-determined or “apolitical” in poetry’s homespun global diplomatic role to shape the world into an American telos figured as freedom, liberation, and self-determination, especially in the global wake of World War II and rise of English. 

    “Relentless monitoring” and co-optation of literary sites, outlets, and works became the US state-funded norm to counter, mollify, moderate, neutralize, and defuse resistance and thus keep any form of “armed militancy” (especially black or Third-World affiliated) at foreign bay (130-131). Networks of foundation funding and State Department support provided the capillary flow of power and capital, covertly and more openly so at times across the sixties and seventies if still “under recognized” (141) in its pervasive impact and consequences as Spahr claims.  At the university level, this meant “an institutionalization of these culturalist movements that would sever them from more insurgent and militant possibilities as they were located within the university” (139).  Such networks of biopower helped to produce and contain racialized resistance, as Roderick Ferguson, Eric Bennett, and Jodi Melamed et al have noted, as recuperated within if not beyond the Cold War academy.[7] 

    Challenging her own immersion in lyric ideologies of First World privilege and a university literary culture aligned with US “imperial globalization,” Spahr exposes claims, taking academic dominion as absorbed in her “avoidance” training at SUNY Buffalo,  that “the modernist tradition excluded [valuing] writing that had direct connection to thriving culturalist and anticolonialist movements of the time” (8).  “I was thinking,” Spahr admits while tracking her own counterconversion to “poetry’s [subaltern] socialities and prosovereignty literatures” in counter-nationalist Hawai’i in the 1990s and the alter- or other-than-Englishes then emerging, “in the way the State Department and the liberal foundations that worked with the State Department wanted me to think” (10).[8]  As Spahr will admit later in chapter three reflecting on another wave of stubborn nationalism, “in many ways this book is an autobiography about how my education [at Bard and Buffalo] told me that certain forms of literature were autonomous when they were not and how long it took me to realize this” (110). Still, Spahr’s will to cultivate resistance remains no less stubborn, no less deeply affiliated as material and literary intervention.

    We need a larger context for mapping strategies of liberal containment, then and now, as in the global critical visions of Aamir Mufti and Stathis Gourgouris working against the unity of the Anglo-global norm and residual claims of Bandung humanism.[9]  For this Spahr deftly turns back to a Cold War moment of resistance in an uncanny trans-Atlantic sign.  The Congress of Black Writers and Artists was planned, for Paris 1956, to serve as “a second Bandung” to help promote the production of literature by black writers, in effect aiming at a kind of literary self-determination beyond colonial interference or world-systemic alignment (1) by the US or USSR.  W.E.B. Du Bois, whose passport had been revoked by the US government the year before, sent a telegraph explaining his non-attendance and refusing acquiescence to the state:  “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today,” Du Bois wrote, “must either not discuss the conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our state department wishes the world to believe.”[10]  He further explained his action in terms of political refusal and social re-alignment:  “The government especially objects to me because I am a socialist and because I believe in peace with Communist states like the Soviet Union and their right to exist in security” (2). 

    Indeed, as Spahr elaborates this longer duration, CIA front groups would fund Americans attending as writers and expected ideological acquiescence in return for such support:  “In addition, all [writers, such as Richard Wright, Mercer Cook, and Horace Mann Bond et al] had agreed to file reports to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, another CIA front group created to covertly launder funds from the CIA into various cultural diplomacy projects, when they returned” (2).  In this particular Paris conference forum, the US state department wanted to assure that voices of anti-colonialism would not carry the agenda and that systemic critiques tying US racism to such figurations in Europe and the Caribbean would be diminished.  Here Richard Wright played anti-communist informant, assuring that figures such as Duke Ellington would attend the congress rather than the antinomian Paul Robeson whom James Baldwin, by contrast, had long defended as figure of radical black critique from Harlem to Paris to Moscow. 

    Bandung in 1955 had awoken this US apparatus to African literature as a site of decolonization struggle (93), even as embraced through quasi-blackface figures like Uli Beier funded from Nigeria to Papua New Guinea.[11] “The combination of cultural center and [literary] journal was a classic CIA pattern at the time,” meaning post-Bandung as Spahr explains (96). The CIA works with private US foundations to support postcolonial English writing in Africa and the Boom in Latin America as literary freedom beyond ordinary realism at best or some version of “apolitical’ influencing the transnational imaginary and containing the literature of decolonization. Not as Aime Cesaire advocated for Martinique, revolution in the name of bread, fresh air, and poetry.  All literature is embedded in social relations, struggles, and wars of position however sublimated.  Spahr rather jarringly supports Pascale Casanova’s all-too-Francocentric assumption of aesthetic experimentation that literature is created via “incessant struggle and competition over the very nature of literature itself—an endless succession of literary manifestos, movements, assaults and revolutions,” both at the world and national level.[12]  This agonistic struggle to define and canonize American poetry, Spahr shows, had the manipulation of the nation-state as long shadow to its formally “autonomous” achievements.

    Spahr presumes, with the world republic of letters model of Casanova she invokes, that there is an inherent conservation function to “literature that is written in the language of the state, the standard language” (12).  But such writing is always being opposed, denaturalized, and denationalized from various angles, as in the poetry of Myung Mi Kim et al.  Such resistance is read at best as partial or transient or, by now, “rare.”  Spahr views such resistance as “supplementary” to more radical claims.  She notes how literary ties to social movements of resistance “so often fail to be revolutionary for long, fail to grow, or merely maintain [community] solidarity” (14). 

    In chapter one, Spahr assumes that a poetics in by-now-dominant English that includes “languages other than English” might offer “a possible literature of resistance,” at least to “linguistic curtailment” or death of minor or other languages (29), linguicide-via-global-hegemony.[13]  Given the threat of monolingual nationalism cum globalization, other languages from Polish to Thai heritages et al begin to manifest in American English poetry, but hardly marked as “a language of liberation” (33).  Pidgin appears besides colonial languages and is used as investigative medium for global routes and colonial crossings that lead to the present settler-colonial layering:  as in the exemplary transpacific Korean/American work of Myung Mi Kim in Dura and Commons, read by Spahr as situating “the 38th Parallel [tied] to her personal narrative to be understood as a larger historical narrative, as the result of globalizing capitalism” (39). 

    Spahr rightly argues, in such contexts of language mixtures, language politics, and entangled resistances to state-sponsored English anguish in dominated spaces, that “Hawai’i provides an unusually succinct example here of both the importance of literature to [Hawaiian] nationalism and of resistance to [US] nationalism at the turn of the twenty-first century (41-42).  Her reading of these tensions in an array of contexts and struggles from the 1970s to the present is convincing.  Hawaiian language becomes imprisoned yet flourishing, Pidgin English both inflated into anticolonial tactic and accommodated into tourist functioning, as is her related reading of the ambivalent Narragansett language use in experimental texts in Rhode Island in the early 1990s and Nahuatl language use in Francisco X. Alarcon.  Nevertheless, as a force of resistance to dominant-state nationalism and the capitalist dynamics of globalization, Spahr invokes David Graeber on the militant anti-globalization movements from Seattle to Chiapas, assuring that for the state “it is puppets, not literature that police fear at this time” (55).[14]

    In chapter two, Spahr queries how much of an “other than national” challenge literary modernism was as an internationalism of resistance to any such U.S. “literary nationalism,” as she was taught at Buffalo.  Such a poetics embraced “syntactically atypical grammars” and dialectics of idiolects as in “smashing and crashing” (76) prosody of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons that (in its “bourgeois interior” as “imperial space” [74]) yet challenged official verse culture in the New Critical mode (57).  “Nashville, not Paris, was the center” of this official American-verse culture refusal to be sure (57):  “I carried this division in my suitcase with me to my first job at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa” (58) she admits of her pre-conversion model opposing lyric quietude to post-language traditions. Stein’s works need to be read, as she learned in Hawaii, as a response to colonialism and imposed languages (61), “very aware of language politics” (61) in such sites of linguistic and cultural domination and shifting hierarchies. 

    Literary movements towards aesthetic revolution, even in the ferment of little magazines like Transition that played such a crucial role in fomenting international modernism, as Spahr will summarize, “are poked and prodded into existence by social forces and influences”(63).  This occurs even in sublimating modernists like Woof, Eliot and Stein, here read as writing “in a world changed by colonialism” (68). Even Stein, as Spahr tracks her modernist experimental movements into and out of abstractionism, becomes a “cringe-inducing” jingoist (77) and stubborn nationalist Example One.  As “national governments [began to] manipulate, cultivate, and fund what [Casanova] calls ‘autonomous’ literature to instrumentalized it as nationalist” (77).  Spahr rehearses how (ironically in a “Casanova-style rhetoric” [82] embracing aesthetic autonomy) the postwar CIA became increasingly interested in promoting “abstract and avant-garde art forms” as signals of American freedom, ideological transcendence, and anti-communist play via state-sponsored cultural diplomacy to rival that of the Soviet Union.

    Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess would be funded, spread, performed, and highlighted internationally as American works “to instrumentalize blackness in cultural diplomacy” via state or private sponsorship (83). Fending off critiques of the USA became a mid-century literary goal, funded, sponsored, nourished at home and distributed abroad in a nexus of state and private sponsorship. This infrastructure makes this “world republic of letters” as Spahr rehearses in compelling scope and detail, wobble with capitalist distortion at the Cold War core of this emergent American-global nexus. Moreover, this core, on the American front from Richard Wright to James Baldwin and William Faulkner et al, took thick-cultural dominion in anthology and university study, as “writers amplified by these networks are disproportionally [still] represented in the canon of American literature” (89).  This cultural diplomacy and funding produced and contained resistance on the home front.  It became, in effect a capillary version of Foucault’s liberal nexus of power and resistance:  “It might be that at the end of the twentieth century one could not become a successfully resistant writer,” Spahr argues, “without having at some moment been supported or amplified by the publication and distribution technologies of these [state-sponsored] networks” (90-1).[15]

    Even in a seemingly post-national or multinational publishing era of the global novel, “the role the Standard English realist novel has in upholding U.S. nationalism” is not abolished especially as it can absorb other national forms and cultural modes, and even as “state sponsored multiculturalism” continues (146-147) through tactics of cultural diplomacy enduringly global. Resistance in the new millennium grows ever more atrophied. Mainstream American poetry, in the wake of programs like Poetry for Bush, becomes gleefully accommodationist, “conventional and outmoded” as in business-value poetic works of Kooser, Keillor, Barr, Gioia et al (157). Such literature produces a faux populism and apolitical muse of cheery pluralism, as in the nationalist inaugural poems (here read as multicultural “strawpoem[s]”) performed by Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco. Spahr goes against the grain of this naturalized claim to ratify social diversity as achieved via American literary inclusion: “How to understand this insistence by institutions that U.S. literary production is diverse, is a sort of social justice program [justifying the nation], when it is not in the aggregate is something I am attempting to puzzle through” (182). All this is taking place at a time when the literary vocation has become increasingly professionalized and, at the core, tied to academic legitimation.

    Nowadays, across the new century signified by the neoliberal MFA industry, “literature has been sequestered into [American] irrelevance” (184),  Spahr concludes. This is a poetics shorn of ties to movements of social resistance, militant or antifascist dissent.[16]  More literature is produced but less is read, or read by smaller literary-supporting and reviewing communities, becoming inconsequential, sustained by those with a professional stake in literary production and consumption or its sheer continuation, limited in political efficacy by such “structural conditions” as she elaborates them in this study.

     

    “If I was a poet,” as the auto-fiction narrator in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) confesses, “I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgement of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.”[17] This is one of many deconstructive feedback loops of self-irony undermining the postmodernist will to literary activism via formalist experimentation. Drifting into and out of “the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it,” Lerner’s hyper-reflective expatriate poet (funded by a Fulbright fellowship) is haunted by dope-addled inaction, museum going, urban drifting, and North American privilege as well as what he calls “bad faith” leftist claims to overcome the political-literary divide running from the Spanish Civil War to 9/11 and the US War in Iraq.  “I could lie about my interest in the literary response to the war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the latter,” Lerner admits of his picaresque literary protagonist, “but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so-called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity” (101).  The Fulbright director in Madrid is only too happy when the Spanish Civil War-researching American expatriate poet finally gives a talk on a “literature now” panel (as Spahr’s study would have predicted) disavowing the political efficacy of literature to alter history, in the tortured self-ironizing claim that “literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction” (175).

    Leaving behind the 2004 terrorist bombing of Madrid’s Atocha Station if not ironically abiding in deferral tactics of virtuality mimed in the John Ashbery poem of the novel’s very title, Lerner undermines more extremist claims (contra Du Bois, di Prima et al) that “poems [function] as machines to make things happen” (52) in history or society, then or now.[18]  By novel’s end, Lerner’s writer-hero gnostically abides in scare-quotes of irony (as in “the so-called left” or, later, “when history came alive, I was sleeping at the Ritz” [158]) and a future-perfect virtuality. Lerner’s novel is riddled with affects that Benjamin had called at the dawn of European literary modernism the “left-wing melancholy” of idealized attachments to the past, defeated causes, bad poetry, and failed revolutionary dreams.[19]  It is this sense of perpetual poetic self-irony that Spahr herself (as does Lerner’s persona by contemporary analogy) battles against by affirming (against neoliberal odds) the will to break through forever signifying utopic virtuality and backward-focused defeat or compulsion into stronger, transformative, and abiding forms of “resistance.”[20]

    In the face of stubborn nationalism, professionalized academia, white privilege, and multicultural accommodation, Spahr’s Du Bois’s Telegram (like a message blasted from future movements) refuses perpetual self-irony, left melancholy, and pessimism of the defeated will:  “We are for sure not there, yet.  But one can always hope” (194).  That is, to align with insurgent forces of the undercommons to manifest modes of “stubborn resistance” in poetry and other works and sites, as in an emergent subterranean nexus of social domains and labor.[21]

    [1] Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, “The Side Effect,” An Army of Lovers (San Francisco, CA:  City Lights Press, 2013), 101.

    [2] Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (San Francisco, CA:  Last Gasp, 2007), 20.

    [3] Juliana Spahr, Du Bois’s Telegram:  Literary Resistance and State Containment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2018), 15.  Spahr is quoting from Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 2 (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1992), 93-94.  Further references to Du Bois’ Telegram will occur parenthetically.

    [4] In defense of revolutionary energies and tactics surging up in the present moment of neo-liberal blockage, Spahr credibly invokes Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, (Brooklyn, New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

    [5] See The Dialogic Imagination:  Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:  University of Texas, 1981) on literary language as “ideologically saturated” with contestation and subversion, 171.

    [6] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York:  Random House, 1976), 197.

    [7] At varying levels of racial and class containment as well as productive proliferation across university culture, see Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things:  The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy:  Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Eric Bennet, Workshops of Empire:  Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 2015).

    [8] On counter-conversions taking place across the decolonizing Pacific at the time Spahr was teaching in Hawai’i during the 1990s, see Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press,  2009), especially chapter four on the world vision of Epeli Hau’ofa’s polytheistic Oceania, 119-142.

    [9] See Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!:  Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, Mass:  Harvard University Press, 2016) and Stathis Gourgourias, The Perils of the One (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).

    [10] The FBI file of state surveillance on James Baldwin contains some 1884 pages of documents, becoming a kind of “fiction produced by the state” about the writer’s ties to the Communist party, the Black Panthers, and other radical movements, and his Paris ties:  see Hannah K. Gold, “Why Did the FBI Spy on James Baldwin?”, The Intercept, August 15, 2015):  https://theintercept.com/2015/08/15/fbi-spy-james-baldwin/.  Gold quotes Baldwin’s scathing insight that J. Edgar Hoover is “history’s most highly paid (and most utterly useless) voyeur.”

    [11] For global political contexts within and beyond anti-colonial claims at Bandung, see Aamir Mufti, “The Late Style of Bandung Humanism,” boundary 2 conference on February 12, 2013:  https://www.boundary2.org/2013/02/aamir-mufti-the-late-style-of-bandung-humanism/.

    [12] Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 12.

    [13] Even in the US, Spahr observes in her capaciously empirical first chapter, there are still 169 languages indigenous to this mongrel polity and 430 languages spoken across it, reflecting and refracting varied reactions to the rise of global English, Du Bois’s Telegram, 30. 

    [14] David Graeber, Possibilities:  Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (Oakland, CA:  AK Press, 2007).

    [15] Although Foucault is not invoked in Spahr’s study, the problematic of state power not merely repressing but actually aiding, informing, producing, and abetting certain forms of resistance and dissent, would be compatible with his thickly elaborated model of neoliberal governmentality as an ‘agonism’ of reciprocal incitation, discipline, and struggle across social fields:  see Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect:  Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4-5, 141.

    [16] For the longer duration of poetry valued as a site of cultural production and imagination opposed to forms of state domination, tyranny, and terror, see Paul Bové, Poetry Against Torture:  Criticism, History, and the Human (Hong Kong:  Hong Kong University Press, 2010).

    [17] Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Coffee House Press, 2011), 101.  Further references to this work will occur parenthetically.

    [18] For a far-ranging intertextual reading of the relationship between Lerner’s two novels and his own hyper-reflective poetics signifying claims of ”virtuality” as contemporary American poet, in the postmodern wake of John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley et al, see Daniel Katz, “’I did not walk here all the way from prose’:  Ben Lerner’s Virtual Poetics,” Textual Practice 31 (2017):  315-337.  Lerner’s post-Ashbery poetics, self-referentially cited by the novel’s Lerner-like protagonist Adam Gordon in To the Atocha Station, (pp. 90-91), had first been published as “The Future Continuous:  Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” in boundary 2 37 (2010):  201-213.  See also Ben Lerner, “Of Accumulation:  The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley,” boundary 2 35 (2008): 251-262, as particularly relevant to the Marfa chapter of Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 (New York:  Faber and Faber, 2014) set “at the house where Creeley began to die” (167).

    [19] Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” republished in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E. Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),  305.  See also Wendy Brown’s focus on Stuart Hall’s overcoming this attachment to lost objects and idealizations of some quasi-Marxist revolutionary past, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” Verso Books blog (February 12, 2017):  https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3092-resisting-left-melancholia.  Brown’s influential essay had first appeared in boundary 2 26 (1999):  19-27.

    [20] “Resistance” can seem an antiquated slogan.  In a neo-liberal capitalist regime assuming self-surveillance and self-exploiting labor and consumption, as Byung-Chul Han grimly argues, wherein “auto-exploitation” of the achievement-driven subject has become everyday norm, “People who fail in the achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society and the system…no resistance to the [neoliberal] system can emerge in the first place”  See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics:  Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London and New York:  Verso, 2017), 6; and (by contrast) the heretical tactics of “Idiotism” in Chapter 13.  Hence, “depressive” affects and the “psychopolitical” ills and compulsions of Late Capitalism are tracked in Spahr and Buuck, An Army of Lovers (see footnote one above).  Writing becomes less the resistance than the insistence of such psychosomatic and systemic ills.

    [21] I still admire the subterranean and quasi-messianic force of Bob Kaufman’s absurd/communist (Abomunist) demand from the undercommons of Cold War San Francisco, as first articulated in his Beatitude mimeograph journal (1959):  “Abomunists demand statehood for North Beach.”  See Bob Kaufman, “Abomunist Manifesto,” Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York:  New Directions, 1965), 81. Kaufman’s “black Jesus” tactics of silence, flight, self-martyrdom, and absurdity seem close to what Byung-Chul Han calls (after Deleuze) the immanent beatitude of “Idiotism,” Psychopolitics, 86-87. 

  • Mikkel Krause Frantzen—No utopia, not now? (Review of Miguel Abensour’s Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin)

    Mikkel Krause Frantzen—No utopia, not now? (Review of Miguel Abensour’s Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin)

    by Mikkel Krause Frantzen

    “The situation is bad, yes, okay, enough of that; we know that already. Dystopia has done its job, it’s old news now, perhaps it’s self-indulgence to stay stuck in that place any more. Next thought: utopia. Realistic or not, and perhaps especially if not.

    Besides, it is realistic: things could be better.”

    (Kim Stanley Robinson)

    1. Da capo: The so-called death of utopia and other introductory remarks

    Utopia – if not now, when? If not today, tomorrow?

    There is a certain tiredness connected to the topic, before the investigation is even begun, a feeling of déjà dit, of having said it all before to the point of utter exhaustion, despair and self-hatred. Yet it seems imperative to continue anyway, to pursue the question once more: What is the fate of utopia today, in this day and age, where there really is no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher infamously declared, and history has (still) ended, as Francis Fukuyama just as triumphantly trumpeted in 1989?

    In the midst of economic and ecological crisis it does indeed appear as if the utopian spirit has vanished for good. As far as the (un)real economy is concerned, we are witnessing and living through a fully-fledged state of financialization,[1] characterized by ever more sophisticated forms of fictitious capital:  derivatives, futures, options and other products that are traded by algorithms with the speed of lightning (trades are reportedly made in 10 milliseconds or less). After the abolition of Bretton Woods by Nixon in 1971,[2] financial derivatives trading has long since surpassed $100 trillion, and is currently many times the size of the global GDP. Meanwhile, the levels of debt are through the roof. As German scholar Joseph Vogl states in an interview—in an inversion of the famous opening lines from the Communist Manifesto, which he has not only picked up from Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis but also used as a title for one of his books:

    A spectre or an apparition is a present reminder that something has gone awry in our past. A debt has remained unpaid, or a wrong has not been righted. The spectre of capital works the other way around, signaling that something in the future will be wrong. It is a future of mounting debt that comes to weigh on the present. The ‘spectre of capital’ does not come out of the past, but rather as a memento out of the future and back into the present” (Vogl 2011).

    This specter of capital, which comes from the future rather than the past, haunts more than the world of finance, it also haunts society as such; the spectral tentacles of financialization reach far into everyday life. One concrete example would be the devastating state of chronic indebtedness that makes people suffer all over the world. Another and related example would be the fact that more and more people are getting depressed; globally no less than 300 million people are currently estimated to suffer from the mental illness according to WHO. And as I have shown elsewhere, depression is not only a personal problem but also and above all a political problem which manifests (or should I say conjures up) the alienation of the contemporary subject in its most extreme and pathological form.[4] It is the paradigmatic psychopathology of our time, and a symptom of a neoliberal world where the future is closed off, frozen once and for all.

    In this latest crisis in the cycles of capitalist accumulation, in this season of autumn, if not winter, the future is definitely not what it used to be.[5] As for the imminent ecological disaster, there literally is no future; very soon there is no tomorrow. At all. It should come as little surprise, then, that utopian impulses have seen better days. William Davies writes that there is no “enclave outside the grid” and no “future beyond already emerging trends,” concluding: “The utopia of neoliberalism is the eradication of all utopias” (Davies 2018: 20; 5). Even the harshest critics of neoliberalism and finance capital seem to be caught in a state of left or west melancholy, while other thinkers are all too delighted with having (finally!) arrived in the land of postcritical milk and postutopian honey.[6]

    To supplement the hypotheses of the end of history and the end of nature, then: The end of utopia. It is important to note, however, that this song has been sung before. Raymond Aron proclaimed the end of ideology, revolution and utopianism back in 1955, and very similar arguments were made by Judith N. Shklar in After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957)and Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology (1960), not to mention Christopher Lasch, a couple of decades later, in his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations from 1979. In 1989, Fukuyama’s article on the end of history was published, and in 1999 Russell Jacoby wrote The End of Utopia. Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, where he lays out this genealogy while at the same time describing how around the turn of the millennium he and his contemporaries “are increasingly asked to choose between the status quo or something worse. Other alternatives do not seem to exist,” how they have “little expectation the future will diverge from the present,” and how few “envision the future as anything but a replica of today” (Jacoby 1999: xi-xii).

    Yet there are those who sing a different tune and who insist on the value of utopian thinking (just as there are utopian practices out there).[7] Obviously, Fredric Jameson springs to mind here. In Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions from 2005, Jameson, following the work of Ernst Bloch, famously distinguishes between utopia as an impulse and utopia as a program in his general attempt “to reidentify the vital political function Utopia still has to play today”, specifically within the genre of science fiction (Jameson 2005: 21).[8] Also meriting consideration is the political philosopher Miguel Abensour, who passed away in 2017, but whose whole oeuvre was an ongoing analysis and discussion of the continued relevance of utopia in the late 20th and early 21st century through the historical method of revisiting canonical utopian texts, from Thomas More to Saint-Simon, from William Morris to Ernst Bloch. Persistent utopia, he called it in an article of the same name from 2006.

    However, it is the book with the no-nonsense title Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin, translated into English in 2017, which this review essay will orbit around. The questions probed by Abensour are the following ones: What does it mean to be a utopian animal in a postutopian age?[9] How do we think utopia in a time of crisis and in the face of danger? Can we find sites where utopia persists, and if so, how are we to interpret them? But the question that also animates my text is a question of historicization and periodization. As indicated above, however briefly, it stands to reason that our historical epoch goes back to the beginning of the 1970s, yet this does not mean that everything has remained the same ever since. So what are the continuities and discontinuities—not only between the age of More, the age of Benjamin and the contemporary age—but also between 2000, when Abensour’s book was originally published in French, and 2018, this year of grace (and here I am in particular thinking of the domains of economy and ecology, the transformations in and of finance and nature)? Let us in any case remember, as Abensour cautions us to do, that utopia precisely poses a question, rather than an answer or a solution (UBM: 10).[10]

    2. Between systematic deprecation and uncritical exaltation: Miguel Abensour’s reading of utopian thought in Thomas More and Walter Benjamin

    The book Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin is a twofold exegesis; a meditation on, first, Thomas More, and, then, Walter Benjamin. It is as simple as that, although as Abensour admits at the very outset, the two thinkers in question have little in common—except for their contribution to utopian thinking. What this means is that Abensour does not in any way carry out a traditional comparative study. “Rather,” the author writes himself, “the project is one of seizing hold of utopia in two different but powerful moments in its fortunes: the first moment is that of utopia’s beginning, and the second is the moment when utopia faced its greatest danger, the moment that Walter Benjamin called ‘catastrophe’” (UBM:9). Two names, two historical moments: Thomas More and the birth of utopia; Walter Benjamin and the danger and possible death of utopia.

    Saving for later a proper actualization of Abensour’s work and the addition of a third historical moment, namely our contemporary moment, about which Abensour more often than not kept his distance, let me simply note that for Abensour it is imperative to avoid two particular and equally untenable positions with regard to utopia: utopia’s “systematic deprecation as well as its uncritical exaltation” (UBM:13). And with that in mind, it is time to hone in on Abensour’s reading of Thomas More, a reading that precisely seeks to avoid praising or damning the book. Sitting with More’s book from 1516 (with the Latin title De Optimo Reipublicae Statu), which coined the word utopia as a play on the Greek words for ou-topia (non-place) and eu-topia (good-place), the reader therefore needs to take into account its “extraordinarily complex textual apparatus” (UBM:20). This implies that attention must be paid to the paratext, the metafictional framework and the oft neglected book I of Utopia—written after the more famous book II—where Raphael Hythloday (another pun), the character/author Thomas More and Peter Giles meet in the Belgian city of Antwerp and starts discussing a series of problems, familiar to any reader of Machiavelli and Plato, concerning the relation between philosophers and kings and how best to offer council to a prince. They also address some of the modern ills affecting Europe at the time: war, poverty, the enclosure of the commons, and the death penalty, which Raphael thinks is too harsh a punishment for a thief (“what other thing do you than make thieves and then punish them?” (More 1999: 24-25). This both sets the scene for and destabilizes book II in advance, the book where Raphael recounts the five years he spent on the Utopia, situated an unknown place in the New World and originally a peninsula but now an island due to the decision of the founder King Utopos to separate it from the mainland. It is here that the readers are rewarded with the image of a true commonwealth, with “no desire for money” and no private property: “For in other places,” Raphael tells his listeners and the readers, “they speak still of the commonwealth. But every man procureth his own private gain. Here, where nothing is private, the common affairs be earnestly looked upon” (More 1999: 119).

    Abensour’s claim, however, is that one should refrain from what he calls “the impatience of tyrannical readings,” which in this case implies that one ought to be wary of readings that interpret Utopia as a proper communist commonwealth, i.e. as “prophesying modern communism” (UBM:30; 22). By the same token, any catholic reading that views Utopia as More’s unequivocal defense of “the values of medieval Christian solidarity” is bound to shipwreck (UBM:22). Abensour groups these types of reading under the heading realist readings, which he contrasts with allegorical readings. The former foregrounds the question of politics, while the latter places the question of writing at the center, and the point is that both are wrong. Already it is clear that the utopian question is, for Abensour, a literary question, a question of both writing and reading. The question of politics and the question of literature must be thought alongside each other.

    Naturally, any utopia is the stuff of fiction; the very idea of utopia entails an imaginary process of fictionalization or fabulation, and borders as such on the genre of science fiction, which Abensour does not touch on. But Abensour’s book does offer a welcome reminder of the rhetorical and literary character of Utopia, the ways in which it operates in several registers at once (travel narrative, satire, political treatise etc.),and how this in turn creates and conditions the political character of the work: “Utopia, so often presented as one of the most vigorous expressions of political rationalism, in fact has much in common with the ruses of the trickster” (UBM:31). The conclusion Abensour draws from all this, is that the utopian task ultimately, in the last instance so speak, falls to the reader: “The privilege the textual device enjoys has the effect of engaging the reader in a different mode of reading, one separate from a sterile ideological one,” he writes in a passage that demands to be quoted at length:

    “It is as if Thomas More, as the title of the book might indicate, did not so much want to present his readers with “the best form of government” as to invite them to look into the topic themselves—and hence the importance of dialogue […] it is a matter of making his readers less into adepts at communism and more into Utopians whose intellects have been sharpened by reading.”

    Anyone with some knowledge of French philosophy in the second half of the 20th century will not have a hard time understanding where Abensour is coming from and why he seemingly has such a guarded attitude towards anything that smells even vaguely of ideology and/or communism.[11] A certain distance is needed, which is why More’s utopia, according to Abensour, rests on a double distance: a distance from the existing order and a distance from “the “positivity” whose contours are utopically drawn” (UBM:49). Manifesting a shift “from the solution or the particular program to the level of principle” is critical in that Utopia thereby “introduces plasticity, and prevents us from reading in a certain erroneous manner” (UBM:52). But I wonder if the price to be paid for the distance and ambiguity stressed so much by Abensour is simply too high? You might end up in front of a window so opaque that you cannot look out of it anymore; that you cannot see what is on the other side. The problem is that the utopia Abensour extracts from Thomas More’s book is so saturated with distance that the island risks disappearing from view. The problem is that the “oblique path of utopia” that Abensour also talks about might in fact be so oblique and curvy that you end up right where you started your journey: back on the mainland.[12]

    3. Utopia or catastrophe? Walter Benjamin and the utopian dreams of the 19th century

    Walter Benjamin, for his part, journeyed to the arcades in the Paris of yesteryear. If More’s Utopia instigated the dawn of utopia, Benjamin’s confronted the danger of utopia: A vision of utopia in the aftermath of the first world war and in the face of fascism across most of Europe. The key question is thus as simple as it is spectacular, if not eschatological: “Utopia or catastrophe?” (UBM:61). The point is clear: We should stick to the idea of utopia, not despite the fact that we are in a state of crisis or amidst a great catastrophe but because of it. As already Kierkegaard emphasized in his writings, hope is only needed when there is none. Utopia seems to have the same absurd and paradoxical quality. The imperative of utopia does not emerge in the hour of triumph, in times so bright that you need sunglasses to go outside; no, the necessity of utopia arises when the light has gone out and everything is completely dark. It is an easy matter to be utopian when everything is all right; the real task presents itself when everything goes to hell. This is one of the lessons that Abensour draws from Benjamin as well: “in the presence of extreme peril, utopia seemed to him more than ever to be the order of the day. In a time of crisis, the need for rescue seemed infinitely greater, and to respond to that need, it seemed best to first rescue utopia by forcing it free from myth and transforming it into a ’dialectical image’” (UBM:13).

    How to rescue utopia, and where? In the past. Abensour quotes a letter where Benjamin states that he aims his “telescope through the bloodied mist at a mirage from the nineteenth century” (UBM:10). What he is looking for in the past, especially in the 19th century, is the century’s dream-images (Wunschbilder), fantasies of the epoch, the hidden or veiled utopias, or the ones that were never realized to begin with. In Abensour’s own words, Benjamin is an “incomparable guide” who can help “us penetrate into the unexplored forest of utopias, not in order to give in to their magic, but to hunt down and chase out the mythology or delirium that haunts and destroys them” (UBM:64). From the beginning of his writing to his tragic death in Portbou at the French-Spanish border in 1940, Benjamin remained “intensely sensitive to the utopian vein that is present throughout the century” (UBM:69). Illumination and awakening was the goal, not to stay in the domain of the dream as Aragon and the other surrealists did in Benjamin’s eyes. This is where dialectics and the dialectical image (filled with ambiguity) comes into play, notwithstanding Adorno’s stubborn accusations in their private correspondences that Benjamin was never, ever dialectical enough: a dialectics of dream and awakening, of past and present, of myth and history, of utopia and catastrophe, of revolution and melancholia.[13]

    But the future? No. Or to be more precise: The notion of futurity remained an unresolved concept in Benjamin’s work. No need to rehearse his remarks, in Über den Begriff der Geschichte (Theses on the Philosophy of History)from the Spring of 1940, on Klee and Angelus Novus, and the storm called progress that blows the angel of history backwards into the future while the ruins of the past are piling up in front of its eyes (Benjamin 2007, 257-258). Instead, let me concentrate, as Abensour encourages his readers to do, on the textual differences between the two prefaces to Das Passagen-Werk that Benjamin wrote in 1935 and 1939, respectively. The Arcades Project as the work is called in English was Benjamin’s ongoing, unfinished project, spanning more than 10 years, in which he visited the old shopping arcades of Paris, these hubbubs of commerce built of iron and galls and filled with Parisian specialties, luxury products and commodities that abound, in the words of Marx, “in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 2010: 81).

    As a comment on a Michelet-quote—“Each epoch dreams the one to follow”—the first so-called exposé of 1935 includes the lines ”in the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history <Urgeschichte> – that is, to elements of a classless society,” and ends with the following sentences: “The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.” (Benjamin 1999, 4; 13) All of this was removed by Benjamin in the second exposé, from 1939, perhaps after the ‘advice’ of Adorno. No more references to Michelet, no more avenir, avenir, no more talk of the dialectical image at all (though it figured prominently in the theses on the concept of history a year later). In Abensour’s reading of this transformation, Benjamin opens up a passage from “a conception of history invoking progress (Michelet) to a conception of history under the sign of catastrophe (Blanqui)” (UBM:88). The exposé of ‘39 thus expires in a completely different affective register, with Louis-Auguste Blanqui and his prison book from 1871, Eternity via the Stars. “This book”, according to Benjamin, “completes the century’s constellation of phantasmagorias with one last, cosmic phantasmagoria which implicitly comprehends the severest critique of all the others […] the phantasmagoria of history itself” (Benjamin 1999: 25). Benjamin then goes on to quote an extensive and brilliant paragraph from Blanqui, where the French revolutionary states that “there is no progress” and notes, in a premonition of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, “the same monotony, the same immobility, on other heavenly bodies. The universe repeats itself endlessly and paws the ground in place. In infinity, eternity performs—imperturbably—the same routines.” (Benjamin 1999: 26). Without turning, as Abensour writes, Blanqui into an authority, Benjamin’s exposé of 1939 nevertheless ends on this note, in a “resignation without hope” (Benjamin 1999: 26—a line which Abensour also quotes).

    As such, the exposé resonates, rather unsurprisingly, with the Theses on the Philosophy of History from the following year. In the preparatory notes, the so-called ‘Paralipomena’, Benjamin repeatedly tries out formulations and ideas such as “Die Katastrophe ist der Fortschritt, der Fortschritt ist die Katastrophe” and “Die Katastrophe als das Kontinuum der Geschichte” (Benjamin 1991: 1244). The true catastrophe is not a break with things as they are; the true catastrophe is, rather, that things go on and on. The progress and continuum of history is history’s catastrophe—whereby the historical and political task becomes one of breaking with this continuum. Benjamin himself writes in some oft-quoted lines about revolution as the moment when you pull the emergency brake on the train of history. Utopia in Benjamin, then, is ultimately intimately and dialectically connected with catastrophe: ““The concept of progress must be founded on the idea of catastrophe,” writes Benjamin. It is the same with the practice of utopia” (101).

    4. A new utopian spirit? Five concluding questions to Abensour and the so-called postutopian age

    Abensour’s work takes the reader through two names and two historical moments: Thomas More and the dawn of utopia; Walter Benjamin and the dusk of utopia. To this I want to add a third moment, the contemporary moment, our historical age, in which utopia has not so much disappeared as become utterly irrelevant – which is of course far worse. Utopia is not even in a state of extreme peril anymore, it has simply been deemed too insignificant to attract the slightest attention let alone be put in danger, because, from the point of view of utopia’s sworn enemies, whybother?

    Unfortunately, Abensour is rather silent on the present moment and more or less refrains from actualizing his historical work, though he does sporadically comment on our anti-utopian age and “contemporary misery,” on the thinkers, “postmodern or otherwise” who want us to abandon emancipation altogether, and on the more general, wide-spread “hatred of utopia, that sad passion eternally reasserted over and over, that repetitive symptom which, generation after generation, afflicts the defenders of the existing order, seized with their fear of alterity” (UBM:61; 15; 12).[14] The motivation for the book is thus clear enough, and the fact that Abensour does not have any more to say, or does not want to say any more, about these contemporary matters is only all the more reason to do this ourselves in this context—without leaving behind his concise and useful definition of utopian thought as being ”beyond this or that particular project,” as it is “essentially a thought about a difference from what currently exists, an uncontrollable, endlessly reborn movement toward a social alterity” (UBM:51). As a way of concluding, then, five utopian questions, five questions to utopia, today. If Benjamin’s exposé of 1939 ended on a significantly darker and gloomier note than the one in 1935, then where do our exposés—the exposés of 2000, 2018, 2028—end? On what notes, in which affective attitudes? Do they end in resignation without hope, or in what Benjamin called, in 1931, Linke Melancholie?[15]

    Utopia and time. For all Benjamin’s illuminating thoughts on temporality, our time is not characterized by the “homogenous or empty” time that Benjamin writes about in his theses on the concept of history (Benjamin 2007: 264). By the same token, the problem no longer seems to be the linear, chronological time of historical progress, but rather the heterogenous, loop-like temporality of finance. Today, it is the image of the future, not the past, that “flits by” (“huscht Vorbei”).[16] It is the future that is capsized by capital, pre-emptied in advance by financial speculation and mountains of debt.[17] Yet what would it mean if, accordingly, the political and historical task, the revolutionary and utopian task, becomes one, to modify Benjamin’s thesis 17, of fighting for the oppressed future?[18]

    Utopia and fascism. By now we are certainly in a position to appreciate Abensour’s effort to insist that utopia persists and that it is imperative to attend to when and where it, in Benjamin’s formulation, “flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 2007: 255). Strangely though, Abensour is reluctant to name any real dangers, any concrete catastrophes. His historical work thus remains rather abstract. In fact, he mentions fascism only once in the part on Benjamin and at the very end at that—and fascism was the historical danger that tainted everything that Benjamin thought and wrote, not only in 1939, but also in 1935 and much sooner than that.[19] Such an omission is simply untenable, both in itself and in light of the current situation. Of course, there is no need to be excessively contemporary, and we cannot have too a myopic focus on the present. But there is historical continuity at stake here. It is impossible to ignore Brexit and Grexit, the reality-presidency of Donald Trump, the alt-right in America, and the European populist parties to the right of the right such as the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), the Danish People’s Party (DFP), and Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland. The danger of fascism is not a thing of the past. Can we paraphrase Max Horkheimer and say that anyone who does not want to talk about capitalism and fascism must keep his or her silence about utopia too?

    Utopia and desire. What Abensour highlights time and again is that utopia is a question of desire (recall, also, the subtitle of Jameson’s book, The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions).[20] In “William Morris: The Politics of Romance,” Abensour writes, “the point is not for utopia […] to assign ‘true’ or ‘just’ goals to desire but rather to educate desire, to stimulate it, to awaken it. Not to assign it a goal to desire but to open a path for it” (Abensour 1999: 145-146). He also states that desire “must be taught to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire otherwise” (Abensour 1999: 145-146). The point is not to desire another world, but, as a precondition, to desire otherwise (à désirer autrement) to begin with.[21] This pedagogical endeavor runs like an undercurrent through Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin. In his reading of More, Abensour convinces the reader that More is more interested in the utopian regulation and configuration of desire than in, say, the construction of alternative institutions. Moreover, he discloses that the historical work undertaken by Benjamin was primarily a matter of locating and excavating the dreams and desire of a past epoch, its so-called oneiric dimension, even if or especially when the images of these dreams and desire were already in ruins, in decay or simply buried, dead or alive, which they always were from the vantage point of Benjamin’s melancholic method of allegory. How can we thus understand the question of utopia as a question of education, of learning to desire otherwise, of learning to desire differently, beyond capitalist realism, reproductive futurism and heteronormative moralism – beyond fascism even?

    Utopia and dystopia. Of course, there are no guarantees. The desire called utopia can in itself become anti-utopian, or dystopian. William Davies writes, “In our new post-neoliberal age of rising resentments, racisms and walls, the utopian desire to escape can be subverted in all manner of dark directions” (Davies 2018: 28). Which is true: Desire can indeed run in “all manner of dark directions.” It can lead in the opposite direction of what was intended, it can lead straight into a cul-de-sac. It can be perverted, corrupted. Utopias can be cruel, they have their limits, as China Miéville reminds us in his article “The Limits of Utopia.” The utopia of plastic, for instance. Once, plastic was the dream of a new century, a utopian material, from which Russian constructivist Naum Gabo made a sculpture more or less a hundred years ago. A cheap, submissive, servile, and yet unbreakable and indestructible material, plastic was quickly mass produced, and thus became an integral part of an everyday life that now was made more colorful, smooth and shining. Yet plastics, as we now know, had a flip side. In the Pacific Ocean, islands of microplastic the size of France float around. Plastic has indeed been transformed from a utopia to a dystopia: An omnipresent, indestructible sign of the ongoing ecological catastrophe. Some of the utopias of the historical avant-gardes have suffered a similar fate: their project of a unification of art and life has long ago been realized by contemporary capitalism, in workplaces all around the western world. Analogously, the interstellar aspirations of the Russian Cosmism—leaving planet Earth, defeating the sun, colonizing Mars, and achieving some form of immortality—live on in a perverted form in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists like Elon Musk wish to conquer the unknown in a SpaceX-rocket. Yet giving up on utopias altogether is not an option. Addressing the liberal left, Nick Land writes: “Your hopes are our horror story.” Utopias can indeed be toxic, but the loss of utopias can be toxic as well. Hope has a price, but what is the price of having no hope? What kind of horror is hidden in hopelessness?[22]

    Utopia and nature. Utopia and nature, utopia and ecology. The question is: How to think utopia on the brink of planetary annihilation. But also: How not to think it? Again, the utopian imperative, or impulse, does not emerge in spite of the factthat we are the end, but because of it. This is the lesson from Ernst Bloch, which Abensour carries on: “True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end” (Bloch 1995: 1376). Abensour does implicitly touch on these matters when writing about More and the privatization of the commons (continued today by the privatization of not only land, but of air, that is to say the Earth’s atmosphere) and about Benjamin’s reading of the Fourierist utopia, which seeks to find a new relation to nature and to ground itself on something else than a (technological) domination and exploitation of it.[23] Another relation to nature, another organization of nature, not dictated by Wall Street and Silicon Valley—which also implies other forms of temporality and technology, other structures of desire, other transformations and configurations of bodies, other kinds of social and sexual reproduction. Can we think of a way to think, not the end of history, the end of nature, or the end of utopia, but a history of the end, a nature of the end, a utopia of the end? A utopia at the very end, at long last? Let us, at all events, leave the “enemies of utopia to sing their favorite old song” (UMB: 52).[24]

    Bio

    Mikkel Krause Frantzen (b. 1983), PhD, postdoc at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. He is the author the author Going Nowhere, Slow – The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (Zero Books, 2019). His work has appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2016), Journal of Austrian Studies (2017), Studies in American Fiction (2018), and Los Angeles Review of Books (2018). He has translated William Burroughs’ The Cat Inside and Judith Butler’s Frames of War into Danish, and works, in addition, as a literary critic at the Danish newspaper, Politiken.

    References

    Abensour, Miguel. 1999. “William Morris: The Politics of Romance.” In Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology, edited and translated by Max Blechman. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 126–61. 

    —. 2008. “Persistent Utopia.” Constellations, Vol. 15, No. 3: 406-421.

    —. 2010. L’Homme est un animal utopique / Utopiques II. Arles, Les Editions de La Nuit.

    —. 2017. Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.

    Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften. Band I·3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

    —.  1994.“Left-Wing Melancholy.” In The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

    —. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    —. 2007. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, Edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books

    Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. 2011. After the Future. Chico: AK Press, 2011.

    —. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.

    Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    Brown, Wendy. 1999. “Resisting Left Melancholy.” boundary 2 Vol. 26, No. 3 (Autumn): 19-27.

    Davies, William. 2018. “Introduction to Economic Science Fictions.” Economic Science Fictions. Edited by William Davies. London: Goldsmiths Press: 1-28.

    Dienst, Richard. 2017. “Debt and Utopia.” Verso, September 20, 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3401-debt-and-utopia.

    Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future. Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.

    Frantzen, Mikkel Krause. 2017. Going Nowhere, Slow – Scenes of Depression in Contemporary Literature and Culture. PhD diss., University of Copenhagen.

    Haiven, Max. 2014. Cultures of Financialization. Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Jacoby, Russell. 1999. The End of Utopia. Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books.

    Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

    —. 1997. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn): 246-265.

    —. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.

    —. 2016. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. London: Verso.

    Keucheyan, Razmig. 2016 Nature is a Battlefield. Towards a Political Ecology. Translated by David Broder. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2011. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

    Levitas, Ruth. 2013.Utopia as Method. The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Marx, Karl. 2010. Capital. Volume I (Marx & Engels: Collected Works, Volume 35). Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart.

    Miéville, China (year unknown). “The Limits of Utopia.” http://salvage.zone/mieville_all.html.

    More, Thomas. 1999. Utopia. In Three Early Modern Utopias. Utopia, New Atlantis and The Isle of Pines. Edited by Susan Bruce. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.

    Nadir, Christine. 2010. “Utopian Studies, Environmental Literature, and the Legacy of an Idea: Educating Desire in Miguel Abensour and Ursula K. Le Guin.” Utopian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1: 24-56.

    Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2018. “Dystopias Now.” Commune Magazine. https://communemag.com/dystopias-now/.

    Shaviro, Steven. 2006. “Prophesies of the present.” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 20, No. 3: 5-24.

    —. 2018. “On Lisa Adkins, The Time of Money.” The Pinocchio Theory, September 21, 2018. http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1520.

    Vogl, Joseph. 2010. The Specter of Capital. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

    —. 2011. “Capital and Money are Profane Gods.” The European, November 20, 2018. https://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/joseph-vogl%E2%80%932/370-the-spectre-of-capital.

    Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.

    [1]For more on the concept of financialization, see: Vogl 2010: 83; Haiven 2014: 1.

    [2]As Jameson and others have warned, we should be careful when invoking the gold standard: “I don’t particularly want to introduce the theme of the gold standard here, which fatally suggests a solid and tangible kind of value as opposed to various forms of paper and plastic (or information on your computer)” (Jameson 1997: 261).

    [3]A generalized condition of debt carries with it, to use Maurizio Lazzarato’s phrase, a preemption of the future, i.e. a reduction of “what will be to what is” (Lazzarato 2011: 46).

    [4]See Frantzen 2017. I am, of course, standing on the shoulders of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, who diagnoses the crisis as a crisis in the social imaginations of the future (Berardi 2011; 2012), and the late Mark Fisher who spoke about capitalist realism, i.e. “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009:2). Substantiating and elaborating on Jameson’s well-known claim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, both of them have in their own way diagnosed depression as a prevalent symptom of this historical condition in the western world.  

    [5]Cf. Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (1994).

    [6]One might think of Rita Felski’s book The Limits of Critique from 2015 and Bruno Latour’s hugely influential article “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” from 2004.

    [7]See Wright 2010.

    [8]Some years later, in An American Utopia from 2016, Jameson declared that“utopianism must first and foremost be a diagnosis of the fear of utopia, or of anti-utopianism” (21).

    [9]Here I am alluding to Abensour’s L’Homme est un animal utopique / Utopiques II from 2010.

    [10]Hereafter Utopia from Thomas More to Walter Benjamin is cited as UBM.

    [11]Conversely, it is imperative to remember that utopian is something Marxists traditionally do not want to be. Within the Marxist tradition, the word utopia/utopian has been an insult that Marxists have thrown at people who were deemed to be irresponsible, naïve, unscientific etc. – this has for instance been the case in the longstanding polemics between Marxists and anarchist.

    [12]A further and more traditionally academic objection, which does go beyond my field of expertise, is that I am not sure how original his reading of More is (it makes it hard to tell due to the lack of references to existing scholarship, such as the work of Quentin Skinner and Stephen Greenblatt, for instance).

    [13]It is worth remembering that Abensour has written a text called “Passages Blanqui: Walter Benjamin entre mélancolie et révolution.”

    [14]Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz echoes this sentiment in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, where he writes: “The antiutopian critic of today has a well-worn war chest of poststructuralism pieties at her or his disposal to shut down lines of thought that delineate the concept of critical utopianism” (Muñoz 2009: 10). Inspired by Ernst Bloch, Muñoz insists on the categorical value of futurity, hope and utopia for queer theory as such. Among other things, this leads to an important, loyal but critical discussion of Lee Edelman’s influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. In the same queer-theoretical vein, Sara Ahmed asks the question: “Can we simply give up our attachment to thinking about happier futures or the future of happiness?” (Ahmed 2010: 161) The answer is no. Queer theory cannot renounce the future, or utopia proper. As Ahmed also writes: “The utopian form might not make the alternative possible, but it aims to make impossible the belief that there is no alternative” (Ahmed 2010, 163).

    [15]See Benjamin 1994. See also Brown 1999. A philosophical and political question of optimism versus pessimism lies hidden here, but I plan to venture into this particular matter elsewhere, rehabilitating a project of Blochean optimism too long forgotten or neglected by the left. In passing, I just want to bring to the reader’s attention this paragraph from Razmig Keucheyan’s Nature is a Battlefield, which takes a Benjamin-quote (“The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death”) and the optimism of early/earlier Marxist historicism as its point of departure: “The Arcades Project was written between 1927 and 1940. Three-quarters of a century later, Benjamin’s comment takes on another meaning. Firstly, it does so because contemporary critical thought has renounced any sense of optimism. After the tragedies of the twentieth century, it is instead pessimism that rules. Currently the question is rather more that of whether revolutionary forces are capable of carrying forth a project of radical social change, or if such a project instead now belongs to the past” (Keucheyan: 2016,151).

    [16]The phrase turns up in the theses on the philosophy of history (Benjamin 2007: 255).

    [17]In a blogpost on Verso’ homepage, Richard Dienst asked the question: Utopia or debt (the economic catastrophe of our time)? See: Dienst 2017.

    [18]Steven Shaviro struggles with a set of similar concerns. How can we adopt speculative approaches to speculative temporality and futurity, he wrote in a recent blogpost, that are not “subsumed by, and subjected to, the speculative time of finance” (Shaviro 2018)? Having earlier written about that “stubborn strain in 20th-century Marxist thought – especially in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch – that finds kernels of hope in the strangest places: in historical experiences of catastrophic failure and defeat, in all those old practices that the relentless march of capitalism has rendered obsolete, and even in the most debased and “ideological” moments of life under capitalism itself” (Shaviro 2006)—the examples being the arcades or more modern-day shopping malls—Shaviro’s current project seems to one of scrutinizing to what extent speculative fiction and science fiction, which is also is to say utopian fiction, are concentric with the logic of financial speculation.

    [19]For the single reference, see: Abensour 2017: 108.

    [20]Cf. “we might think of the new onset of the Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called utopia in the first place.” (Jameson 1994: 90).

    [21]See also Christine Nadir’s brilliant article on Miguel Abensour and Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction-novels through the prism of utopia and the education of desire (Nadir 2010: 29-30). Another key work in this regard is Ruth Levitas’ Utopia as Method, in which she provides a definition of utopia ”in terms of desire” (Levitas 2013, xiii), and where, consequently, ”[t]he core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively” (Levitas 2013” xi). But the theoretical trajectory starts and ends with Ernst Bloch who on the very first page of his trilogy The Principle of Hope writes: “It is a question of learning hope.” (Bloch 1995: 3).

    [22]I am again relying on and inspired by Miéville’s “The Limits of Utopia.” Moreover, in his foreword to a new edition of More’s Utopia, Miéville writes: “We need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can’t afford. In the face of what is done, we cannot think utopia without hate.”

    [23]Abensour 2017: 88-93; Benjamin 1999: 17 (though the reading only figures in the exposé from 1939).

    [24]After completing this review essay, I stumbled across a brilliant text by Kim Stanley Robinson, “Dystopias Now,” which I did not have the time to incorporate into this one, except for the epigraph, which is taken from there, and this illuminating quote, which goes into the Jamesonian distinction between utopia, dystopia, anti-utopia and anti-anti-utopia (like Jameson, Robinson argues for the latter, and I fully agree with that, as should be more than clear at this point): “One way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. Here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how” (Robinson 2018).

     

     

  • R. Joshua Scannell — Architectures of Managerial Triumphalism (Review of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty)

    R. Joshua Scannell — Architectures of Managerial Triumphalism (Review of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty)

    A review of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press Press, 2016)

    by R. Joshua Scannell

    The Stack

    Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty is an often brilliant and regularly exasperating book. It is a diagnosis of the epochal changes in the relations between software, sovereignty, climate, and capital that underwrite the contemporary condition of digital capitalism and geopolitics.  Anybody who is interested in thinking through the imbrication of digital technology with governance ought to read The Stack. There are many arguments that are useful or interesting. But reading it is an endeavor. Sprawling out across 502 densely packed pages, The Stack is nominally a “design brief” for the future. I don’t know that I understand that characterization, no matter how many times I read this tome.

    The Stack is chockablock with schematic abstractions. They make sense intuitively or cumulatively without ever clearly coming into focus. This seems to be a deliberate strategy. Early in the book, Bratton describes The Stack–the titular “accidental megastructure” of “planetary computation” that has effectively broken and redesigned, well, everything–as “a blur.” He claims that

    Only a blur provides an accurate picture of what is going on now and to come…Our description of a system in advance of its appearance maps what we can see but cannot articulate, on the one hand, versus what we know to articulate but cannot yet see, on the other. (14)

    This is also an accurate description of the prevailing sensation one feels working through the text. As Ian Bogost wrote in his review of The Stack for Critical Inquiry, reading the book feels “intense—meandering and severe but also stimulating and surprising. After a while, it was also a bit overwhelming. I’ll take the blame for that—I am not necessarily built for Bratton’s level and volume of scholarly intensity.” I agree on all fronts.

    Bratton’s inarguable premise is that the various computational technologies that collectively define the early decades of the 21st century—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—are not analytically separable. They are often literally interconnected but, more to the point, they combine to produce a governing architecture that has subsumed older calculative technologies like the nation state, the liberal subject, the human, and the natural. Bratton calls this “accidental megastructure” The Stack.

    Bratton argues that The Stack is composed of six “layers,” the earth, the cloud, the city, the address, the interface, and the user. They all indicate more or less what one might expect, but with a counterintuitive (and often Speculative Realist) twist. The earth is the earth but is also a calculation machine. The cloud is “the cloud” but as a chthonic structure of distributed networks and nodal points that reorganize sovereign power and body forth quasi-feudal corporate sovereignties. The City is, well, cities, but not necessarily territorially bounded, formally recognized, or composed of human users. Users are also usually not human. They’re just as often robots or AI scripts. Really they can be anything that works up and down the layers, interacting with platforms (which can be governments) and routed through addresses (which are “every ‘thing’ that can be computed” including “individual units of life, loaded shipping containers, mobile devices, locations of datum in databases, input and output events and enveloped entities of all size and character” [192], etc.).

    Each layer is richly thought through and described, though it’s often unclear whether the “layer” in question is “real” or a useful conceptual envelope or both or neither. That distinction is generally untenable, and Bratton would almost certainly reject the dichotomy between the “real” and the “metaphorical.” But it isn’t irrelevant for this project. He argues early on that, contra Marxist thought that understands the state metaphorically as a machine, The Stack is a “machine-as-the-state.” That’s both metaphorical and not. There really are machines that exert sovereign power, and there are plenty of humans in state apparatuses that work for machines. But there aren’t, really, machines that are states. Right?

    Moments like these, when The Stack’s concepts productively destabilize given categories (like the state) that have never been coherent enough to justify their power are when the book is at its most compelling. And many of the counterintuitive moves that Bratton makes start and end with real, important insights. For instance, the insistence on the absolute materiality, and the absolute earthiness of The Stack and all of its operations leads Bratton to a thoroughgoing and categorical rejection of the prevailing “idiot language” that frames digital technology as though it exists in a literal “cloud,” or some sort of ethereal “virtual” that is not coincident with the “real” world. Instead, in The Stack, every point of contact between every layer is a material event that transduces and transforms everything else. To this end, he inverts Latour’s famous dictum that there is no global, only local. Instead, The Stack as planetary megastructure means that there is only global. The local is a dead letter. This is an anthropocene geography in which an electron, somewhere, is always firing because a fossil fuel is burning somewhere else. But it is also a post-anthropocene geography because humans are not The Stack’s primary users. The planet itself is a calculation machine, and it is agnostic about human life. So, there is a hybrid sovereignty: The Stack is a “nomos of the earth” in which humans are an afterthought.

    A Design for What?

    Bratton is at his conceptual best when he is at his weirdest. Cyclonopedic (Negarestani 2008) passages in which the planet slowly morphs into something like HP Lovecraft and HR Geiger’s imaginations fucking in a Peter Thiel fever dream are much more interesting (read: horrifying) than the often perfunctory “real life” examples from “real world” geopolitical trauma, like “The First Sino-Google War of 2009.” But this leads to one of the most obvious shortcomings of the text. It is supposedly a “design brief,” but it’s not clear what or who it is a design brief for.

    For Bratton, design

    means the structuring of the world in reaction to an accelerated decay and in projective anticipation of a condition that is now only the ghostliest of a virtual present tense. This is a design for accommodating (or refusing to accommodate) the post-whatever-is-melting-into-air and prototyping for pre-what-comes-next: a strategic, groping navigation (however helpless) of the punctuations that bridge between these two. (354)

    Design, then, and not theory, because Bratton’s Stack is a speculative document. Given the bewildering and potentially apocalyptic conditions of the present, he wants to extrapolate outwards. What are the heterotopias-to-come? What are the constraints? What are the possibilities? Sounding a familiar frustration with the strictures of academic labor, he argues that this moment requires something more than diagnosis and critique. Rather,

    the process by which sovereignty is made more plural becomes a matter of producing more than discoursing: more about pushing, pulling, clicking, eating, modeling, stacking, prototyping, subtracting, regulating, restoring, optimizing, leaving alone, splicing, gardening and evacuating than about reading, examining, insisting, rethinking, reminding, knowing full-well, enacting, finding problematic, and urging. (303)

    No doubt. And, not that I don’t share the frustration, but I wonder what a highly technical, 500-page diagnosis of the contemporary state of software and sovereignty published and distributed by an academic press and written for an academic audience is if not discoursing? It seems unlikely that it can serve as a blueprint for any actually-existing power brokers, even though its insights are tremendous. At the risk of sounding cynical, calling The Stack a “design brief” seems like a preemptive move to liberate Bratton from having to seriously engage with the different critical traditions that work to make sense of the world as it is in order to demand something better. This allows for a certain amount of intellectual play that can sometimes feel exhilarating but can just as often read as a dodge—as a way of escaping the ethical and political stakes that inhere in critique.

    That is an important elision for a text that is explicitly trying to imagine the geopolitics of the future. Bratton seems to pose The Stack from a nebulous “Left” position that is equally disdainful of the sort of “Folk Politics” that Srnicek and Williams (2015) so loathe and the accelerationist tinge of the Speculative Realists with whom he seems spiritually aligned. This sense of rootlessness sometimes works in Bratton’s favor. There are long stretches in which his cherry picking and remixing ideas from across a bewildering array of schools of thought yields real insights. But just as often, the “design brief” characterization seems to be a way out of thinking the implications of the conjuncture through to their conclusion. There is a breeziness about how Bratton poses futures-as-thought-experiments that is troubling.

    For instance, in thinking through the potential impacts of the capacity to measure planetary processes in real time, Bratton suggests that producing a sensible world is not only a process of generalizing measurement and representation. He argues that

    the sensibility of the world might be distributed or organized, made infrastructural, and activated to become part of how the landscape understands itself and narrates itself. It is not only a diagnostic image then; it is a tool for geo-politics in formation, emerging from the parametric multiplication and algorithmic conjugation of our surplus projections of worlds to come, perhaps in mimetic accordance with one explicit utopian conception or another, and perhaps not. Nevertheless, the decision between what is and is not governable may arise as much from what the model computational image cannot do as much as what it can. (301, emphasis added)

    Reading this, I wanted to know: What explicit utopian project is he thinking about? What are the implications of it going one way and not another? Why mimetic? What does the last bit about what is and is not governable mean? Or, more to the point: who and what is going to get killed if it goes one way and not another? There are a great many instances like this over the course of the book. At the precise moment where analysis might inform an understanding of where The Stack is taking us, Bratton bows out. He’s set down the stakes, and given a couple of ideas about what might happen. I guess that’s what a design brief is meant to do.

    Another example, this time concerning the necessity of geoengineering for solving what appears to be an ever-more-imminent climatic auto-apocalypse:

    The good news is that we know for certain that short-term “geoengineering” is not only possible but in a way inevitable, but how so? How and by whom does it go, and unfortunately for us the answer (perhaps) must arrive before we can properly articulate the question. For the darker scenarios, macroeconomics completes its metamorphosis into ecophagy, as the discovery of market failures becomes simultaneously the discovery of limits of planetary sinks (e.g., carbon, heat, waste, entropy, populist politics) and vice versa; The Stack becomes our dakhma. The shared condition, if there is one, is the mutual unspeakability and unrecognizability that occupies the seat once reserved for Kantian cosmopolitanism, now just a pre-event reception for a collective death that we will actually be able to witness and experience. (354, emphasis added)

    Setting aside the point that it is not at all clear to me that geoengineering is an inevitable or even appropriate (Crist 2017) way out of the anthropocene (or capitalocene? (Moore 2016)) crisis, if the answer for “how and by whom does it go” is to arrive before the question can be properly articulated, then the stack-to-come starts looking a lot like a sort of planetary dictatorship of, well of who? Google? Mark Zuckerberg? In-Q-Tel? Y Combinator? And what exactly is the “populist politics” that sits in the Latourian litany alongside carbon, heat, waste, and entropy as a full “planetary sink”? Does that mean Trump, and all the other globally ascendant right wing “populists?” Or does it mean “populist politics” in the Jonathan Chait sense that can’t differentiate between left and right and therefore sees both political projects as equally dismissible? Does populism include any politics that centers the needs and demands of the public? What are the commitments in this dichotomy? I suppose The Stack wouldn’t particularly care about these sorts of questions. But a human writing a 500-page playbook so that other humans might better understand the world-to-come might be expected to. After all, a choice between geoengineering or collective death might be what the human population of the planet is facing (and for most of the planet’s species, and for a great many of the planet’s human societies, already eliminated or dragged down the road towards it during the current mass extinction, there is no choice), but such a binary doesn’t make for much of a design spec.

    One final example, this time on what the political subject of the stack-to-come ought to look like:

    We…require, as I have laid out, a redefinition of the political subject in relation to the real operations of the User, one that is based not on homo economicus, parliamentary liberalism, poststructuralist linguistic reduction, or the will to secede into the moral safety of individual privacy and withdrawn from coercion. Instead, this definition should focus on composing and elevating sites of governance from the immediate, suturing interfacial material between subjects, in the stitches and the traces and the folds of interaction between bodies and things at a distance, congealing into different networks demanding very different kinds of platform sovereignty.

    If “poststructuralist linguistic reduction” is on the same plane as “parliamentary liberalism” or “homo economicus” as one among several prevailing ideas of the contemporary “political subject,” then I am fairly certain that we are in the realm of academic “theory” rather than geopolitical “design.” The more immediate point is that I do understand what the terms that we ought to abandon mean, and agree that they need to go. But I don’t understand what the redefined political subject looks like. Again, if this is “theory,” then that sort of hand waving is unfortunately often to be expected. But if it’s a design brief—even a speculative one—for the transforming nature of sovereignty and governance, then I would hope for some more clarity on what political subjectivity looks like in The Stack-To-Come.

    Or, and this is really the point, I want The Stack to tell me something more about how The Stack participates in the production and extractable circulation of populations marked for death and debility (Puar 2017). And I want to know what, exactly, is so conceptually radical about pointing out that human beings are not at the center of the planetary systems that are driving transformations in geopolitics and sovereignty. After all, hasn’t that been exactly the precondition for the emergence of The Stack? This accidental megastructure born out of the ruthless expansions of digitally driven capitalism is not just working to transform the relationship between “human” and sovereignty. The condition of its emergence is precisely that most planetary homo sapiens are not human, and are therefore disposable and disposited towards premature death. The Stack might be “our” dhakma, if we’re speaking generically as a sort of planetary humanism that cannot but be read as white—or, more accurately, “capacitated.” But the systematic construction of human stratification along lines of race, gender, sex, and ability as precondition for capitalist emergence freights the stack with a more ancient, and ignored, calculus: that of the logistical work that shuttles humans between bodies, cargo, and capital. It is, in other words, the product of an older planetary death machine: what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) call the “logistics in the hold” that makes The Stack hum along.

    The tenor of much of The Stack is redolent of managerial triumphalism. The possibility of apocalypse is always minimized. Bratton offers, a number of times, that he’s optimistic about the future. He is disdainful of the most stringent left critics of Silicon Valley, and he thinks that we’ll probably be able to trust to our engineers and institutions to work out The Stack’s world-destroying kinks. He sounds invested, in other words, in a rhetorical-political mode of thought that, for now, seems to have died on November 9, 2016. So it is not surprising that Bratton opens the book with an anecdote about Hillary Clinton’s vision of the future of world governance.

    The Stack begins with a reference to then-Secretary of State Clinton’s 2013 farewell address to the Council on Foreign Relations. In that speech, Clinton argued that the future of international governance requires a “new architecture for this new world, more Frank Gehry than formal Greek.” Unlike the Athenian Agora, which could be held up by “a few strong columns,” contemporary transnational politics is too complicated to rely on stolid architecture, and instead must make use of the type of modular assemblage that “at first might appear haphazard, but in fact, [is] highly intentional and sophisticated” that makes Gehry famous. Bratton interprets her argument as a “half-formed question, what is the architecture of the emergent geopolitics of this software society? What alignments, components, foundations, and apertures?” (Bratton 2016, 13).

    For Clinton, future governance must make a choice between Gehry and Agora. The Gehry future is that of the seemingly “haphazard” but “highly intentional and sophisticated” interlocking treaties, non-governmental organizations, super and supra-state technocratic actors working together to coordinate the disparate interests of states and corporations in the service of the smooth circulation of capital across a planetary logistics network. On the other side, a world order held up by “a few strong pillars”—by implication the status quo after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a transnational sovereign apparatus anchored by the United States. The glaring absence in this dichotomy is democracy—or rather its assumed subsumption into American nationalism. Clinton’s Gehry future is a system of government whose machinations are by design opaque to those that would be governed, but whose beneficence is guaranteed by the good will of the powerful. The Agora—the fountainhead of slaveholder democracy—is metaphorically reduced to its pillars, particularly the United States and NATO. Not unlike ancient Athens, it’s democracy as empire.

    There is something darkly prophetic of the collapse of the Clintonian world vision, and perversely apposite in Clinton’s rhetorical move to supplant as the proper metaphor for future government Gehry for the Agora. It is unclear why a megalomaniacal corporate starchitecture firm that robs public treasuries blind and facilitates tremendous labor exploitation ought to be the future for which the planet strives.

    For better or for worse, The Stack is a book about Clinton. As a “design brief,” it works from a set of ideas about how to understand and govern the relationship between software and sovereignty that were strongly intertwined with the Clinton-Obama political project. That means, abysmally, that it is now also about Trump. And Trump hangs synechdochally over theoretical provocations for what is to be done now that tech has killed the nation-state’s “Westphalian Loop.” This was a knotty question when the book went to press in February 2016 and Gehry seemed ascendant. Now that the Extreme Center’s (Ali 2015) project of tying neoliberal capitalism to non-democratic structures of technocratic governance appears to be collapsing across the planet, Clinton’s “half-formed question” is even knottier. If we’re living through the demise of the Westphalian nation state, then it’s sounding one hell of a murderous death rattle.

    Gehry or Agora?

    In the brief period between July 21st and November 8 2016, when the United States’ cognoscenti convinced itself that another Clinton regime was inevitable, there was a neatly ordered expectation of how “pragmatic” future governance under a prolonged Democratic regime would work. In the main, the public could look forward to another eight years sunken in a “Gehry-like” neoliberal surround subtended by the technocratic managerialism of the Democratic Party’s right edge. And, while for most of the country and planet, that arrangement didn’t portend much to look forward to, it was at least not explicitly nihilistic in its outlook. The focus on management, and on the deliberate dismantling of the nation state as the primary site of governance in favor of the mesh of transnational agencies and organizations that composed 21st century neoliberalism’s star actants meant that a number of questions about how the world would be arranged were left unsettled.

    By end of election week, that future had fractured. The unprecedented amateurishness, decrypted racism, and incomparable misogyny of the Trump campaign portended an administration that most thought couldn’t, or at the very least shouldn’t, be trusted with the enormous power of the American executive. This stood in contrast to Obama, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) to Clinton, who were assumed to be reasonable stewards. This paradoxically helps demonstrate just how much the “rule of law” and governance by administrative norms that theoretically underlie the liberal national state had already deteriorated under Obama and his immediate predecessors—a deterioration that was in many ways made feasible by the innovations of the digital technology sector. As many have pointed out, the command-and-control prerogatives that Obama claimed for the expansion of executive power depended essentially on the public perception of his personal character.

    The American people, for instance, could trust planetary drone warfare because Obama claimed to personally vet our secret kill list, and promised to be deliberate and reasonable about its targets. Of course, Obama is merely the most publicly visible part of a kill-chain that puts this discretionary power over life and death in the hands of the executive. The kill-chain is dependent on the power of, and sovereign faith in, digital surveillance and analytics technologies. Obama’s kill-chain, in short, runs on the capacities of an American warfare state—distributed at nodal points across the crust of the earth, and up its Van Allen belts—to read planetary chemical, territorial, and biopolitical fluxes and fluctuations as translatable data that can be packet switched into a binary apparatus of life and death. This is the calculus that Obama conjures when he defines those mobile data points that concatenate into human beings as as “baseball cards” that constitute a “continuing, imminent threat to the American people.” It is the work of planetary sovereignty that rationalizes and capacitates the murderous “fix” and “finish” of the drone program.

    In other words, Obama’s personal aura and eminent reasonableness legitimated an essentially unaccountable and non-localizable network of black sites and black ops (Paglen 2009, 2010) that loops backwards and forwards across the drone program’s horizontal regimes of national sovereignty and vertical regimes of cosmic sovereignty. It is, to use Clinton’s framework, a very Frank Gehry power structure. Donald Trump’s election didn’t transform these power dynamics. Instead, his personal qualities made the work of planetary computation in the service of sovereign power to kill suddenly seem dangerous or, perhaps better: unreasonable. Whether President Donald Trump would be so scrupulous as his predecessor in determining the list of humans fit for eradication was (formally speaking) a mystery, but practically a foregone conclusion. But in both presidents’ cases, the dichotomies between global and local, subject and sovereign, human and non-human that are meant to underwrite the nation state’s rights and responsibilities to act are fundamentally blurred.

    Likewise, Obama’s federal imprimatur transformed the transparently disturbing decision to pursue mass distribution of privately manufactured surveillance technology – Taser’s police-worn body cameras, for instance – as a reasonable policy response to America’s dependence on heavily armed paramilitary forces to maintain white supremacy and crush the poor. Under Obama and Eric Holder, American liberals broadly trusted that digital criminal justice technologies were crucial for building a better, more responsive, and more responsible justice system. With Jeff Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice, the idea that the technologies that Obama’s Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing lauded as crucial for achieving the “transparency” needed to “build community trust” between historically oppressed groups and the police remained plausible instruments of progressive reform suddenly seemed absurd. Predictive policing, ubiquitous smart camera surveillance, and quantitative risk assessments sounded less like a guarantee of civil rights and more like a guarantee of civil rights violations under a president that lauds extrajudicial police power. Trump goes out of his way to confirm these civil libertarian fears, such as when he told Long Island law enforcement that “laws are stacked against you. We’re changing those laws. In the meantime, we need judges for the simplest thing — things that you should be able to do without a judge.”

    But, perhaps more to the point, the rollout of these technologies, like the rollouts of the drone program, formalized a transformation in the mechanics of sovereign power that had long been underway. Stripped of the sales pitch and abstracted from the constitutional formalism that ordinarily sets the parameters for discussions of “public safety” technologies, what digital policing technologies do is flatten out the lived and living environment into a computational field. Police-worn body cameras quickly traverse the institutional terrain from a tool meant to secure civil rights against abusive officers into an artificially intelligent weapon that flags facial structures that match with outstanding warrants, that calculates changes in enframed bodily comportment to determine imminent threat to the officer-user, and that captures the observed social field as  data privately owned by the public safety industry’s weapons manufacturers. Sovereignty, in this case, travels up and down a Stack of interoperative calculative procedures, with state sanction and human action just another data point in the proper administration of quasi-state violence. After all, it is Axon (formerly Taser), and not a government that controls the servers that their body cams draw on to make real-time assessments of human danger. The state sanctions a human officer’s violence, but the decision-making apparatus that situates the violence is private, and inhuman. Inevitably, the drone war and carceral capitalism collapse into one another, as drones are outfitted with AI designed to identify crowd “violence” from the sky, a vertical parallax to pair with the officer-user’s body worn camera.

    Trump’s election seemed to show with a clarity that had hitherto been unavailable for many that wedding the American security apparatus’ planetary sovereignty to twenty years of unchecked libertarian technological triumphalism (even, or especially if in the service of liberal principles like disruption, innovation, efficiency, transparency, convenience, and generally “making the world a better place”) might, in fact, be dangerous. When the Clinton-Obama project collapsed, its assumption that the intertwining of private and state sector digital technologies inherently improves American democracy and economy, and increases individual safety and security looked absurd. The shock of Trump’s election, quickly and self-servingly blamed on Russian agents and Facebook, transformed Silicon Valley’s broadly shared Prometheanism into interrogations into the industry’s infrastructural corrosive toxicity, and its deleterious effect on the liberal national state.  If tech would ever come to Jesus, the end of 2016 would have had to be the moment. It did not.

    A few days after Trump won election I found myself a fly on the wall in a meeting with mid-level executives for one of the world’s largest technology companies (“The Company”). We were ostensibly brainstorming how to make The Cloud a force for “global good,” but Trump’s ascendancy and all its authoritarian implications made the supposed benefits of cloud computing—efficiency, accessibility, brain-shattering storage capacity—suddenly terrifying. Instead of setting about the dubious task of imagining how a transnational corporation’s efforts to leverage the gatekeeping power over access to the data of millions, and the private control over real-time identification technology (among other things) into heavily monetized semi-feudal quasi-sovereign power could be Globally Good, we talked about Trump.

    The Company’s reps worried that, Peter Thiel excepted, tech didn’t have anybody near enough to Trump’s miasmatic fog to sniff out the administration’s intentions. It was Clinton, after all, who saw the future in global information systems. Trump, as we were all so fond of pointing out, didn’t even use a computer. Unlike Clinton, the extent of Trump’s mania for surveillance and despotism was mysterious, if predictable. Nobody knew just how many people of color the administration had in its crosshairs, and The Company reps suggested that the tech world wasn’t sure how complicit it wanted to be in Trump’s explicitly totalitarian project. The execs extemporized on how fundamental the principles of democratic and republican government were to The Company, how committed they were to privacy, and how dangerous the present conjuncture was. As the meeting ground on, reason slowly asphyxiated on a self-evidently implausible bait hook: that it was now both the responsibility and appointed role of American capital, and particularly of the robber barons of Platform Capitalism (Srnicek 2016), to protect Americans from the fascistic grappling of American government. Silicon Valley was going to lead the #resistance against the very state surveillance and overreach that it capacitated, and The Company would lead Silicon Valley. That was the note on which the meeting adjourned.

    That’s not how things have played out. A month after that meeting, on December 14, 2016, almost all of Silicon Valley’s largest players sat down at Trump’s technology roundtable. Explaining themselves to an aghast (if credulous) public, tech’s titans argued that it was their goal to steer the new chief executive of American empire towards a maximally tractable gallimaufry of power. This argument, plus over one hundred companies’ decision to sign an amici curiae brief opposing Trump’s first attempt at a travel ban aimed at Muslims, seemed to publicly signal that Silicon Valley was prepared to #resist the most high-profile degradations of contemporary Republican government. But, in April 2017, Gizmodo inevitably reported that those same companies that appointed themselves the front line of defense against depraved executive overreach in fact quietly supported the new Republican president before he took office. The blog found that almost every major concern in the Valley donated tremendously to the Trump administration’s Presidential Inaugural Committee, which was impaneled to plan his sparsely attended inaugural parties. The Company alone donated half a million dollars. Only two tech firms donated more. It seemed an odd way to #resist.

    What struck me during the meeting was how weird it was that executives honestly believed a major transnational corporation would lead the political resistance against a president committed to the unfettered ability of American capital to do whatever it wants. What struck me afterward was how easily the boundaries between software and sovereignty blurred. The Company’s executives assumed, ad hoc, that their operation had the power to halt or severely hamper the illiberal policy priorities of government. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine mid-level General Motors executives imagining that they have the capacity or responsibility to safeguard the rights and privileges of the republic. Except in an indirect way, selling cars doesn’t have much to do with the health of state and civil society. But state and civil society is precisely what Silicon Valley has privatized, monetized, and re-sold to the public. But even “state and civil society” is not quite enough. What Silicon Valley endeavors to produce is, pace Bratton, a planetary simulation as prime mover. The goal of digital technology conglomerates is not only to streamline the formal and administrative roles and responsibilities of the state, or to recreate the mythical meeting houses of the public sphere online. Platform capital has as its target the informational infrastructure that makes living on earth seem to make sense, to be sensible. And in that context, it’s commonsensical to imagine software as sovereignty.

    And this is the bind that will return us to The Stack. After one and a half relentless years of the Trump presidency, and a ceaseless torrent of public scandals concerning tech companies’ abuse of power, the technocratic managerial optimism that underwrote Clinton’s speech has come to a grinding halt. For the time being, at least, the “seemingly haphazard yet highly intentional and sophisticated” governance structures that Clinton envisioned are not working as they have been pitched. At the same time, the cavalcade of revelations about the depths that technology companies plumb in order to extract value from a polluted public has led many to shed delusions about the ethical or progressive bona fides of an industry built on a collective devotion to Ayn Rand. Silicon Valley is happy to facilitate authoritarianism and Nazism, to drive unprecedented crises of homelessness, to systematically undermine any glimmer of dignity in human labor, to thoroughly toxify public discourse, to entrench and expand carceral capitalism so long as doing so expands the platform, attracts advertising and venture capital, and increases market valuation. As Bratton points out, that’s not a particularly Californian Ideology. It’s The Stack, both Gehry and Agora.

    _____

    R. Joshua Scannell holds a PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center. He teaches sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Hunter College, and is currently researching the political economic relations between predictive policing programs and urban informatics systems. He is the author of Cities: Unauthorized Resistance and Uncertain Sovereignty in the Urban World (Paradigm/Routledge, 2012).

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Ali, Tariq. 2015. The Extreme Center: A Warning. London: Verso
    • Crist, Eileen. 2016. “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 14-33. Oakland: PM Press
    • Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
    • Moore, Jason W. 2016. “Anthropocene or Capitolocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 1-13. Oakland: PM Press
    • Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: re.press
    • Paglen, Trevor. 2009. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secrert World. Boston: Dutton Adult
    • Paglen, Trevor. 2010. Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. Reading: Aperture Press
    • Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press
    • Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Boston: Polity Press
    • Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2016. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso.
  • Richard Hill – Too Big to Be (Review of Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age)

    Richard Hill – Too Big to Be (Review of Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age)

    a review of Timothy Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Random House/Columbia Global Reports, 2018)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    Tim Wu’s brilliant new book analyses in detail one specific aspect and cause of the dominance of big companies in general and big tech companies in particular: the current unwillingness to modernize antitrust law to deal with concentration in the provision of key Internet services. Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School, and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. He is best known for his work on Net Neutrality theory. He is author of the books The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, along with Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination, and other works. In 2013 he was named one of America’s 100 Most Influential Lawyers, and in 2017 he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

    What are the consequences of allowing unrestricted growth of concentrated private power, and abandoning most curbs on anticompetitive conduct? As Wu masterfully reminds us:

    We have managed to recreate both the economics and politics of a century ago – the first Gilded Age – and remain in grave danger of repeating more of the signature errors of the twentieth century. As that era has taught us, extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership. Yet, as if blind to the greatest lessons of the last century, we are going down the same path. If we learned one thing from the Gilded Age, it should have been this: The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public. (14)

    While increasing concentration, and its negative effects on social equity, is a general phenomenon, it is particularly concerning for what regards the Internet: “Most visible in our daily lives is the great power of the tech platforms, especially Google, Facebook, and Amazon, who have gained extraordinary power over our lives. With this centralization of private power has come a renewed concentration of wealth, and a wide gap between the rich and poor” (15). These trends have very real political effects: “The concentration of wealth and power has helped transform and radicalize electoral politics. As in the Gilded Age, a disaffected and declining middle class has come to support radically anti-corporate and nationalist candidates, catering to a discontent that transcends party lines” (15). “What we must realize is that, once again, we face what Louis Brandeis called the ‘Curse of Bigness,’ which, as he warned, represents a profound threat to democracy itself. What else can one say about a time when we simply accept that industry will have far greater influence over elections and lawmaking than mere citizens?” (15). And, I would add, what have we come to when some advocate that corporations should have veto power over public policies that affect all of us?

    Surely it is, or should be, obvious that current extreme levels of concentration are not compatible with the premises of social and economic equity, free competition, or democracy. And that “the classic antidote to bigness – the antitrust and other antimonopoly laws – might be recovered and updated to face the challenges of our times” (16). Those who doubt these propositions should read Wu’s book carefully, because he shows that they are true. My only suggestion for improvement would be to add a more detailed explanation of how network effects interact with economies of scale to favour concentration in the ICT industry in general, and in telecommunications and the Internet in particular. But this topic is well explained in other works.

    As Wu points out, antitrust law must not be restricted (as it is at present in the USA) “to deal with one very narrow type of harm: higher prices to consumers” (17). On the contrary, “It needs better tools to assess new forms of market power, to assess macroeconomic arguments, and to take seriously the link between industrial concentration and political influence” (18). The same has been said by other scholars (e.g. here, here, here and here), by a newspaper, an advocacy group, a commission of the European Parliament, a group of European industries, a well-known academic, and even by a plutocrat who benefitted from the current regime.

    Do we have a choice? Can we continue to pretend that we don’t need to adapt antitrust law to rein in the excessive power of the Internet giants? No: “The alternative is not appealing. Over the twentieth century, nations that failed to control private power and attend to the economic needs of their citizens faced the rise of strongmen who promised their citizens a more immediate deliverance from economic woes” (18). (I would argue that any resemblance to the election of US President Trump, to the British vote to leave the European Union, and to the rise of so-called populist parties in several European countries [e.g. Hungary, Italy, Poland, Sweden] is not coincidental).

    Chapter One of Wu’s book, “The Monopolization Movement,” provides historical background, reminding us that from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, dominant, sector-specific monopolies emerged and were thought to be an appropriate way to structure economic activity. In the USA, in the early decades of the twentieth century, under the Trust Movement, essentially every area of major industrial activity was controlled or influenced by a single man (but not the same man for each area), e.g. Rockefeller and Morgan. “In the same way that Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel today argues that monopoly ‘drives progress’ and that ‘competition is for losers,’ adherents to the Trust Movement thought Adam Smith’s fierce competition had no place in a modern, industrialized economy” (26). This system rapidly proved to be dysfunctional: “There was a new divide between the giant corporation and its workers, leading to strikes, violence, and a constant threat of class warfare” (30). Popular resistance mobilized in both Europe and the USA, and it led to the adoption of the first antitrust laws.

    Chapter Two, “The Right to Live, and Not Merely to Exist,” reminds us that US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis “really cared about … the economic conditions under which life is lived, and the effects of the economy on one’s character and on the nation’s soul” (33). The chapter outlines Brandeis’ career and what motivated him to combat monopolies.

    In Chapter Three, “The Trustbuster,” Wu explains how the 1901 assassination of US President McKinley, a devout supporter of unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism (“let well enough alone”, reminiscent of today’s calls for government to “do not harm” through regulation, and to “don’t fix it if it isn’t broken”), resulted in a fundamental change in US economic policy, when Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him. Roosevelt’s “determination that the public was ruler over the corporation, and not vice versa, would make him the single most important advocate of a political antitrust law.” (47). He took on the great US monopolists of the time by enforcing the antitrust laws. “To Roosevelt, economic policy did not form an exception to popular rule, and he viewed the seizure of economic policy by Wall Street and trust management as a serious corruption of the democratic system. He also understood, as we should today, that ignoring economic misery and refusing to give the public what they wanted would drive a demand for more extreme solutions, like Marxist or anarchist revolution” (49). Subsequent US presidents and authorities continued to be “trust busters”, through the 1990s. At the time, it was understood that antitrust was not just an economic issue, but also a political issue: “power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy” (54, citing Justice William Douglas). As we all know, “Increased industrial concentration predictably yields increased influence over political outcomes for corporations and business interests, as opposed to citizens or the public” (55). Wu goes on to explain why and how concentration exacerbates the influence of private companies on public policies and undermines democracy (that is, the rule of the people, by the people, for the people). And he outlines why and how Standard Oil was broken up (as opposed to becoming a government-regulated monopoly). The chapter then explains why very large companies might experience disecomonies of scale, that is, reduced efficiency. So very large companies compensate for their inefficiency by developing and exploiting “a different kind of advantages having less to do with efficiencies of operation, and more to do with its ability to wield economic and political power, by itself or conjunction with others. In other words, a firm may not actually become more efficient as it gets larger, but may become better at raising prices or keeping out competitors” (71). Wu explains how this is done in practice. The rest of this chapter summarizes the impact of the US presidential election of 1912 on US antitrust actions.

    Chapter Four, “Peak Antitrust and the Chicago School,” explains how, during the decades after World War II, strong antitrust laws were viewed as an essential component of democracy; and how the European Community (which later became the European Union) adopted antitrust laws modelled on those of the USA. However, in the mid-1960s, scholars at the University of Chicago (in particular Robert Bork) developed the theory that antitrust measures were meant only to protect consumer welfare, and thus no antitrust actions could be taken unless there was evidence that consumers were being harmed, that is, that a dominant company was raising prices. Harm to competitors or suppliers was no longer sufficient for antitrust enforcement. As Wu shows, this “was really laissez-faire reincarnated.”

    Chapter Five, “The Last of the Big Cases,” discusses two of the last really large US antitrust case. The first was breakup of the regulated de facto telephone monopoly, AT&T, which was initiated in 1974. The second was the case against Microsoft, which started in 1998 and ended in 2001 with a settlement that many consider to be a negative turning point in US antitrust enforcement. (A third big case, the 1969-1982 case against IBM, is discussed in Chapter Six.)

    Chapter Six, “Chicago Triumphant,” documents how the US Supreme Court adopted Bork’s “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, leading to weak enforcement. As a consequence, “In the United States, there have been no trustbusting or ‘big cases’ for nearly twenty years: no cases targeting an industry-spanning monopolist or super-monopolist, seeking the goal of breakup” (110). Thus, “In a run that lasted some two decades, American industry reached levels of industry concentration arguably unseen since the original Trust era. A full 75 percent of industries witnessed increased concentration from the years 1997 to 2012” (115). Wu gives concrete examples: the old AT&T monopoly, which had been broken up, has reconstituted itself; there are only three large US airlines; there are three regional monopolies for cable TV; etc. But the greatest failure “was surely that which allowed the almost entirely uninhibited consolidation of the tech industry into a new class of monopolists” (118).

    Chapter Seven, “The Rise of the Tech Trusts,” explains how the Internet morphed from a very competitive environment into one dominated by large companies that buy up any threatening competitor. “When a dominant firm buys a nascent challenger, alarm bells are supposed to ring. Yet both American and European regulators found themselves unable to find anything wrong with the takeover [of Instagram by Facebook]” (122).

    The Conclusion, “A Neo-Brandeisian Agenda,” outlines Wu’s thoughts on how to address current issues regarding dominant market power. These include renewing the well known practice of reviewing mergers; opening up the merger review process to public comment; renewing the practice of bringing major antitrust actions against the biggest companies; breaking up the biggest monopolies, adopting the market investigation law and practices of the United Kingdom; recognizing that the goal of antitrust is not just to protect consumers against high prices, but also to protect competition per se, that is to protect competitors, suppliers, and democracy itself. “By providing checks on monopoly and limiting private concentration of economic power, the antitrust law can maintain and support a different economic structure than the one we have now. It can give humans a fighting chance against corporations, and free the political process from invisible government. But to turn the ship, as the leaders of the Progressive era did, will require an acute sensitivity to the dangers of the current path, the growing threats to the Constitutional order, and the potential of rebuilding a nation that actually lives up to its greatest ideals” (139).

    In other words, something is rotten in the state of the Internet: it has “collection and exploitation of personal data”; it has “recently been used to erode privacy and to increase the concentration of economic power, leading to increasing income inequalities”; it has led to “erosion of the press, leading to erosion of democracy.” These developments are due to the fact that “US policies that ostensibly promote the free flow of information around the world, the right of all people to connect to the Internet, and free speech, are in reality policies that have, by design, furthered the geo-economic and geo-political goals of the US, including its military goals, its imperialist tendencies, and the interests of large private companies”; and to the fact that “vibrant government institutions deliberately transferred power to US corporations in order to further US geo-economical and geo-political goals.”

    Wu’s call for action is not just opportune, but necessary and important; at the same time, it is not sufficient.

    _____

    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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  • Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan – What Literature Does (Review of Amit Chaudhuri, ed., Literary Activism)

    Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan – What Literature Does (Review of Amit Chaudhuri, ed., Literary Activism)

    A review of Literary Activism: Perspectives ed. Amit Chaudhuri (Oxford University Press, 2017)

    by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

    There’s a debate going on among some of my English department colleagues, centered on the following questions. What responsibility do faculty trained primarily in American and British literatures have to the teaching of English literatures of the non-West? How should English literature of South Asia or East Africa, for instance, be contextualized in terms of the relevant subcontinental and regional literatures in other languages? On what grounds might texts originally written in Bengali, Urdu, Swahili, or Arabic be taught in an English department? Is knowledge of the original language in which a text was written required for teaching it in translation? If so, what constitutes such knowledge?

    I’ve been thinking about these questions lately through the terms offered by Literary Activism, an idiosyncratic volume that collects proceedings from a 2015 Oxford symposium and even some of the email debriefing that followed. The title refers to a broad constellation of activities and object relations that motor critical engagements with literature in and beyond the academy. Literary activism is not quite “championing,” except when it is. It is not literature in service of what we conventionally understand as the political, nor is it simply an affirmation of the politics of aesthetics. Literary activism has a newly urgent brief given how markets and information technology have debased contemporary discourses on the literary; by that same token, it has been practiced as long as writers have written and readers have read. In editor and symposium-convener Amit Chaudhuri’s words, literary activism bears “a strangeness that echoes the strangeness of the literary…[it] may be desultory, in that its aims and values aren’t immediately explicable” (2017a: 6).

    Contributors to Literary Activism include scholars, journalists, publishers, creative writers, and literary critics. In response to Chaudhuri’s capacious opening gambit, they variously explore literary activism as “the crucial work that seeks to restore the importance of the literary to the public sphere” (Majumdar 2017: 122); the championing of writers by colleagues who believe “unconditionally in the value of [their] work” (Zecchini 2017: 20); a “critical” practice that can reorient debates on literary tradition and the modern (R. Chaudhuri 2017: 190); a counterpart to market activism (Graham: 2017); exemplified by the “passionate advocacy” of poetry translation (Mckendrick 2017: 249); a combination of literary “karma or work…jnana, or knowledge…and srishti, or creation” (Chakravorty 2017: 268); and “activism on behalf of an idea of literature” (Cook 2017: 298). These accounts are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are consistent with how literature bridges and confounds private-public distinctions: traversing the figural space within and between minds, on the one hand, and passing materially through hands and institutions, on the other.

    Literary activism can be private, as in the case of English-Marathi poet Arun Kolatkar, who Laetitia Zecchini describes as having practiced his art in “a hostile or indifferent environment” (2017: 25). Kolatkar and his fellow poets “did not need the market or the public to know that their work was outstanding” (30); in fact, neglect by mainstream publishers was the enabling condition of their work. Spurning market logics, Kolatkar and his contemporaries published in their own presses, retained control over all aspects of production, and actively translated their and others’ works. They were “creating a world of their own, with their own standards and audience, however limited” (30). Zecchini’s translation of Kolatkar began with a private intimation as well, through an unexpected encounter with his poetry that she describes in terms of falling in love.

    Literary activism is also public, as in Amit Chaudhuri and Peter McDonald’s joint nomination of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, a superlative poet, translator, and critic, for the post of 2009 Oxford Professor of Poetry. That nomination brought together novelists, scientists, historians, political thinkers, philosophers, and numerous other “well-wishers” in service of a campaign that was, Chaudhuri stresses, never going “to win”; it was “a deliberate long shot that should succeed” (2017b: 240, 245). That it didn’t succeed (the post ultimately went unfulfilled, a turn of events involving an alleged smear campaign by Ruth Padel against Derek Walcott, regarding his history of sexual harassment) was the point. By highlighting the work of Mehrotra, Chaudhuri and McDonald were able to lay bare the extra-literary considerations operative in the filling of posts like that of Oxford Professor.

    Zecchini’s and Amit Chaudhuri’s essays situate literary activism between acts of private creation and public consumption, between literature as a practice of living and literature as products in circulation. They contribute to the volume’s larger discussion of the relationship between literary activism and the “market activism” of publishing houses, agents, and booksellers. David Graham offers a normative account of market activism as the work of “experts” who are able “to bring new, fresh, and important voices to readers around the world” (2017: 80). Graham, a publisher, describes himself as both “a businessman whose business has been making literary works sell” and “a midwife to literary talent” (73). This tellingly mixed language captures the simultaneously opportunistic and beneficent nature of publishing.

    For most contributors, however, market activism is the province of those less interested in literature than in what sells. “[H]ow do we establish what is authentic,” Dubravka Ugrešić asks, “and what a product of market compromise?” (2017: 208). “[C]an any amount of activism really re-energize [literature’s] declined importance in the contemporary public sphere?” Saikat Majumdar wonders (141). Tim Parks laments the pervasive conflation of literary worth with accessibility, exemplified by how publishers and literary-festival organizers celebrate the success of texts that they themselves have been responsible for promoting (“How pleasant, then, to convince oneself that what reaches out to everyone is also the best” [2017: 157]). Reflecting on her own circumscribed position as a “Croatian writer who lives in Amsterdam,” Ugrešić wryly observes the mass culture industry’s unwillingness to read transnational literatures in anything other than national terms (208).

    Critiques of the culture industry, pandering publishers, and the marketplace of least-common-denominators are not new. But the contributors to Literary Activism go further by routing the literature-market binary through a significant third term: the academy. Derek Attridge describes how, over the course of many years, he championed the work of J.M. Coetzee and Zoë Wicomb, writing critical essays and a monograph about the former, and planning a conference and editing a volume about the latter (Attridge also nominated Wicomb for the Windham-Campbell Prize, which she received). It is the kind of affirmative academic attention that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has paid to Mahesweta Devi’s stories, or for that matter, which Majumdar has given to Amit Chaudhuri’s novels. All of this, Attridge speculates, “must have had some effect on publishers’ decisions, prize-awarding bodies, reviewers, and all the other agents in the literary marketplace” (2017: 59).

    What is the nature of this effect? How does academic attention to certain writers inflect their position in the literary marketplace—and vice versa? There is a long history of scholarship on literature’s relations to the market (Brier 2017), but it is only recently that the academy is taking stock of its particular mediation of those relations. As Andy Hines observes in an essay on the new institutionalism, only now are literary critics “willing to admit that we have been pushed around all along” (2018: np). Two remarkable paragraphs in Amit Chaudhuri’s essay strike at the heart of this vexed triangulation. He writes:

    By the late 1980s…departments of English…looked with some prejudice upon value and the symbols of value, such as the canon; problematized or disowned terms such as ‘classic’ and ‘masterpiece’; often ascribed a positive political value to orality, which it conflated with non-Western culture, and a negative one to inscription or ‘good writing’, which it identified with the European Enlightenment. Some of this was overdue and necessary. (2017b: 224)

    Chaudhuri is referencing two concurrent phenomena here. For one, a spate of works including Pierre Bourdieu’s rules of art (1992), John Guillory’s work on canon formation (1993), and Pascale Casanova’s world republic of letters (1999) problematized accepted terms and modes of literary valuation. At the same time, English studies was being transformed by critical theory, postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural studies. Construed positively, the discipline underwent significant internal reformation; viewed more suspiciously, it metabolized the oppositional knowledge projects that had emerged to contest its disciplinary hegemony.

    Chaudhuri’s passage then shifts subtly in focus:

    Meanwhile, publishers robustly adopted the language of value – to do with the             ‘masterpiece’ and ‘classic’ and ‘great writer’ – that had fallen out of use in its old location, fashioning it in their own terms. And these were the terms that academics  essentially accepted. They critiqued literary value in their own domain, but they were unopposed to it when it was transferred to the marketplace. Part of the reason for this was the language of the market and the language of the publishing industry were…populist during a time of anti-elitism…For example: from the 1990s onward, publishers insisted there was no reason that literary novels couldn’t sell…What they meant was that, in the new mainstream category of ‘literary fiction’, only literary novels that sold well would be  deemed valid literary novels. Academics neither exposed this semantic conflict nor  challenged the way literary value had been reconfigured. (2017b: 224-225)

    This is “the genius of market activism” that “disinherits and revivifies” terms of literary value that have fallen out of favor in the academy (A. Chaudhuri 2017b: 226). The result is that the status of Harold Bloom’s latest entrant into the Western canon is rightly debated, but first-time novelists debut “instant classics” and “modern masterpieces” that are unblinkingly received as such. And it’s not just that an indiscriminate public is being told what to read by Oprah, Reddit, or for that matter the Times. Now, rather than an Attridge elevating a Wicomb, the market tells the academic who and what is worthy of study. This transformation in market-academy relations has most significantly impacted those who teach and study contemporary and non-Western literatures. Chaudhuri’s passage closes with a note on such academics:

    When, in response to political changes in the intellectual landscape, they extended the old canon and began to teach contemporary writers, or novelists from the former colonies, they largely chose as their texts novels whose position had been already decided by the  market and its instruments, such as certain literary prizes. (2017b225)

    Chaudhuri is treading lightly here, but anyone familiar with his creative and critical oeuvre knows who he is talking about. The South Asian and South Asian diasporic writers most frequently taught and researched in the Anglo-American academy are Booker winners (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga), Pulitzer winner (Jhumpa Lahiri), and a Nobel Laureate (V.S. Naipaul). High profile nominations can bring otherwise minor texts to prominence, as do reviews in outlets like the Times or New Yorker. Scholars wondering which contemporary works will stand the test of time (as if the test of time were an adequate arbiter of literary value) turn to prizes and bestseller-lists in order to identify what is worthy of study. This is the context in which we “subsist on a sense that the lineage of the Indian English novel is an exemplary anthology of single works, rather than a tradition of cross-referencing, borrowing, and reciprocity” (A. Chaudhuri 2017b: 229). This is the context in which we become literary activists.

    This is also the context in which South Asian literature, to continue with the above example, becomes equated with South Asian literature in English, when in fact, as contributors to Literary Activism discuss, South Asian literature in English is part of a rich South Asian literary archive and must be studied in the context of the subcontinent’s multilingual traditions. For example, Rosinka Chaudhuri’s essay on the literary sphere of early 19th-century Bengal shows how “contentions between the major literary languages of India, including the classical and folk languages, nouveau urban and mixed languages, colonial and ‘native’ languages, played an instrumental role in the many negotiations between modernity and literary craft” (2017: 190). Zecchini’s approach to Arun Kolatkar and Amit Chaudhuri’s reading of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra are attuned to such negotiations in the 20th-century context.

    Which brings me back to the questions at the top of this essay. Originally hired as a Global Anglophonist, I am one of only two members of our literature faculty whose primary scholarly field is neither American nor British literature. I am also on the executive committee of an undergraduate major in World Literature that is housed in another college (formally and institutionally at our university, the “world” doesn’t belong to English). I therefore approach the debate about teaching texts in translation from my position at the interstices of the “Global Anglophone” and “World Literature,” which are distinct paradigms for the teaching of non-Western literatures. The former admits only texts written in English and is arguably a renomination of the postcolonial; the latter conventionally allows for the teaching of non-English texts in English translation.

    Surprising even myself, I have become an advocate—I dare say an activist—for the inclusion of non-Anglophone works of “World Literature” in English translation alongside works of “Global Anglophone” literature in our seminars and Masters exam lists. Why? Because we cannot teach and administer exams as if Chinua Achebe (a usual suspect) is only in conversation with Joseph Conrad, as if Things Fall Apart has nothing to say to Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (translated from Arabic). Because graduate students reading Rushdie and Roy (more usual suspects) should very well know Intizar Hussain (translated from Urdu) and Kamala Suraya (translated from Malayalam). Because, as Roanne Kantor puts it, “no coherent historiography of the Global Anglophone can be built within the ‘Anglophone’ itself” (2018: np).

    My advocacy has been met by a complicated resistance. Faculty who oppose the teaching of texts in translation worry that the delinking of these texts from their source languages is intellectually irresponsible. They argue that our contemporary reading practices have, in Tim Parks’ words, “drastically weakened and in many cases altogether severed” “the old connections that linked writer to community” (149-150), and that teaching literature in translation will only exacerbate this problem. This critique, along with the suspicion that World Literature is “the educational equivalent of a shopping-mall food court” (Damrosch 2013: 153, 158), is worth heeding. But what is the alternative? The Global Anglophone circumvents the vexed politics of translation, but it valorizes Booker- and Nobel-prize winning writers like Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, and Nadine Gordimer. To return to Amit Chaudhuri’s argument, the Global Anglophone is preoccupied with Anglo-centric international prizes and the “instant classics” they create. It is by nature overly focused on the contemporary, as colonial histories prefigure the relevant 20th and 21st-century texts.

    Rigid adherence to the Global Anglophone rubric reflects an impoverished theory of translation as well, a topic discussed at length in Literary Activism. It is of course true, as Parks notes, that translations are not “always enriching” (170). By that same token, as Ugrešić writes, “Every translation is not only a multiplication of misunderstandings, but also a multiplication of meanings” (204). Translation is “cultural catalyst” (McKendrick 2017: 249). It is a practice “meant to forge affiliations and connections, to assert bonds of kinship, and to clear a space, however minor or marginal, for [writers] and their predecessors—who are turned into contemporaries by the process of translation itself” (Zecchini 2017:31). Electing not to read literature in translation because one risks misunderstanding is as suspect as assuming translation is a one-to-one “process of recoding” (Cook 2017: 322).

    That the above isn’t obvious is a reflection on the conservatism of English in some quarters, and maybe even literary scholarship more generally. In its final significant through-line, Literary Activism theorizes criticism as an alternative to scholarship, and amateurism as an alternative to expertise. Expert publishers and expert scholars who mediate between author and reader are distinguished from “amateur” critics—the category is Majumdar’s—who read and write without consideration of prize-winners, bestseller lists, market, or promotion-and-tenure-committee approval. For Majumdar, scholars are defined by their commitment to the objective, to their “archive of study” (2017: 115). By contrast, the critic “celebrates and foregrounds her subjective self” and practices literary interpretation as “a creative act” (115). Unlike professional scholars, whose archival considerations are overdetermined, amateur literary critics are characterized by their interdisciplinarity, willingness to take intellectual risks, and love of literature. They practice what Attridge describes as an “affirmative criticism, one that operates…to understand, explore, respond to, and judge what is of value in”—as opposed to the value of—“works of literature” (2017: 51).

    Majumdar is currently editing, with Aarthi Vadde, a volume called The Critic as Amateur that further develops the distinctions between private and public, scholar and critic, literature, market, and academy offered here. That volume (to which I have contributed) also includes essays by Attridge, Rosinka Chaudhuri, and McDonald. Taken together, the pair of books, Literary Activism and The Critic as Amateur, suggest another scene in which literary activism is performed: transnational collaborators deciding over symposia coffee breaks what to publish together next.

    I have come to think of much of the work I do as an English professor as literary activism. Certainly, my advocacy of an expansive literature curriculum is activism on behalf of an idea of literature. This essay is a minor piece of activism as well, a gesture of affirmative criticism that aspires to shore up the links between two projects and draw attention to them both. It can be painful at times, both urgent and pointless-feeling, and it might never be “properly remembered or noticed” (A. Chaudhuri 2017b: 244). Say what you want about love. In the first and final instance, literary activism is a form of labor.

    _____

    Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. She has also taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, and at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in Rhetoric in 2016. A former magazine editor and award-winning journalist, Srinivasan has contributed essays and criticism to scholarly, public, and semi-public venues on three continents. More from www.raginitharoorsrinivasan.com

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    References

    • Attridge, Derek. 2017. “The Critic as Lover: Literary Activism and the Academy,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Brier, Evan. 2017. “The Literary Marketplace,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
    • Casanova, Pascale. 1999. The World Republic of Letters, trans. By M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • Chakravorty, Swapan. 2017. “Literary Surrogacy and Literary Activism: Instance from Bengal,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Chaudhuri, Amit. 2017a. “A Brief Background to the Symposium, and Some Acknowledgments,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • –. 2017b. “The Piazza and the Car Park: Literary Activism and the Mehrotra Campaign,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Chaudhuri, Rosinka. 2017. “The Practice of Literature: The Calcutta Context as a Guide to Literary Activism,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Cook, Jon. 2017. “Literary Activism: Where Now, What Next?” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Damrosch, David. 2013. “World Literature in a Postliterary Age,” Modern Language Quarterly 74.2.
    • Graham, David. 2017. “‘Market Activism’: A Publisher’s Perspective,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
    • Hines, Andy. 2018. “The Material Life of Criticism,” Public Books, Jan. 22, http://www.publicbooks.org/the-material-life-of-criticism/, accessed Sept. 13, 2018.
    • Kantor, Roanne. 2018. “Even If You Gain the World: South Asia, Latin America, and the Unexpected Journey to Global English (working title).” Unpublished manuscript, last modified October 17, 2018. Microsoft Word file.
    • Majumdar, Saikat. 2017. “The Amatory Activist,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Mckendrick, Jamie. 2017. “Forms of Fidelity: Poetry Translation as Literary Activism,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Parks, Tim. 2017. “Globalisation, Literary Activism, and the Death of Critical Discourse,” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Ugrešić, Dubravka. 2017. “Transnational vs. National Literature,” trans. David Williams. Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
    • Zecchini, Laetitia. 2017. “Translation as Literary Activism: On Invisibility and Exposure, Arun Kolatkar and the Little Magazine ‘Conspiracy,’” Literary Activism: Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

    *Editorial Note (Nov 5, 2018): A broken link was fixed and a line that originally read “…I am the only member of our literature faculty whose primary scholarly field is neither American nor British literature” was changed to read: “…I am one of only two members of our literature faculty whose primary scholarly field is neither American nor British literature.”

  • Essays

    A tribute to Katia Bengana, assassinated by a young Islamist on 28 February 1994 in Meftah, Algeria.

    Wassyla Tamzali

    I. In “Women’s Bravery” –

    Those were the days of lawlessness and faithlessness; the country plunged into strife and bloodshed as the Islamists who had been deprived of their leaders spread into the cities and the mountains like a metastatic disease, frenziedly sowing death. Under the pretext of their submission to God, they slowly turned into unrecognisable monsters before our incredulous eyes. They formed death squads, imposed their own authority and spread terror. Deprived of their electoral victory, the Islamic Front of Salvation (FIS) and its partisans set about slowly but surely unveiling their hideous disposition.

    The country was plunging into civil war, neighbours and brothers killing each other. The pain and the fear overpowered the gaze of our mothers and our lives headed towards barbarism to the sound of heavy boots and the cries of “Allahu Akbar”. Death spread in every corner and the stench of gloomy clouds filled the air.

    It was 1994; the walls were littered with posters released by the GIA, the armed wing of the FIS, threatening young girls and women with death if they failed to wear the headscarf in the streets, schools, offices, hospitals, parks, homes, in front of the mirrors and even in bed if they could. The GIA would only tolerate women, from the age of puberty to menopause, in service of their fantasies.

    1994 culminated the horror and the unspeakable. Women became the target of collective violence exacerbated by their fragile bodies and panicky gazes. The inebriated sexual instincts of the assassins gave free rein to human barbarism ensued by a long list of unspeakable crimes with the stench of femicide.

    We all lived under this menace simply because we were women, or even children and adolescent girls. Up until then, the Islamists would pick their victims for what they did, be it writing, filmmaking, thinking, or singing, and women had already been assassinated for such an ostensible reason.

    However, in 1994, the religious fanatics set about assassinating, raping and enslaving women and young girls indiscriminately, veiled or otherwise. Had those women, girls and young girls in these villages, where serial acts of barbarism were perpetrated, including rape, kidnapping, torture and disembowelment, not all been veiled?

    Those barbarians found in the religion that nurtured our childhood under the benevolent guardianship of our fathers what made their hatred of women sacred; or their hatred of the female gender should we say, since they denied us any act of compassion. They wanted to force us to wear a distinctive and segregationist sign, namely a headscarf to cover our hair; in other words a veil to unveil, mark and designate our gender before all and sundry, in a manner that reduced women to their erotic bodies and dehumanised them. Dehumanisation is the first step towards barbarism.

    But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head is shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, let her also have her hair cut off; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, let her cover her head. For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man…

    Saint-Paul Apôtre, Letter to the Corinthians.

    Those who dished out the orders sunk to the dark abyss of time. They blindly embraced the dogmas of the most reclusive sects. Acting like disciples of Saint Paul rather than their prophet Mohammed, they would erect their hair as a totem, drone out and issue fatwas on women’s hairs and secretions in order to subvert the most natural laws and allow their predatory and bestial sexuality to run riot.

    At the entrance to the opulent Mitidja Valley, Blida, the city of Roses, turned into a hotbed of barbarism. God’s madmen spread their dominion over the surrounding areas they claimed they had liberated. This is where Meftah was, so far a trouble-free small town less than 100 km from Algiers.

    However, on 28 February 1994, it was a very young Islamist, surrounded without a doubt by a mob that looked alike in every aspect, hardly older than yourself Katia, who shot you and then fled…

    You refused to wear the headscarf and you used to shout out loud and clear why. Those creatures with a deranged spirit and a barbaric soul had been convinced of their right to dictate your way of life Katia and the way of life of all those who came under their control. They were shamed by this unqualified truth that glorified their archaic sexual instincts and their rapacious desire in the name of a bloodthirsty and ruthless god, a god who would loathe women, and yet they alleged him to be the God of Islam.

    All it took was for one woman to stand up to them to make them plunge into a world of infernal ideas with the reek of blood and death that came from the hereafter, from under the living world. They were tightly knit with same the obsession, blindly serving a reinvented god and drawing from a book they did not perceive. They have sacrificed you according to their demented order.

    You defended until death the way you dressed despite the delirium of these creatures. You knew them; you used to come across them in the streets, outside the school and the shops where they would harass you. These young men had been roaming the streets for days, getting more and more persistent and menacing. “Hooligans” your dad would say. Alas, they were more than that; they were monsters indoctrinated to kill and they were biding their time to ensure the total success of their chore by starting to instil fear among the masses. They invented and imposed laws on the city and the locals chose to believe that this state of affairs would soon come to an end and all they had to do was wait and keep a low profile.

    In all the cities and all the districts, people kept a low profile. The whole country kept a low profile. Thousands and thousands kept a low profile, while those who refused to give in were soon dealt with. They would be slain as they tried to stand up and pass on to us a bit of their courage and their hopes. In Meftah, like elsewhere, men chose to lie low and leave the field clear for barbarism. In the small town of this huge country, which was known as “the country of freemen”, where did the claimed courage stop after it had made its escape? On your childlike face and your slender shoulders Katia; and in your eyes, which looked danger straight in the face and which will stay wide open as if they were a perpetual castigation for those who had seen nothing coming, who had chosen not to see and not to do anything to stop the tragedy that had been long before heading towards that town and all the other similar towns. Meftah, an inconsequential town, which your death threw into our faces on 28 February 1994.

    I have never been to Meftah and I will never go to Meftah lest I should see nothing, lest I should be once again witness of the work of time, which bit by bit smoothes our daily life, turning it into a slack sea and making us fall again into a grim and hideous “normality”, whereas we ought to keep the episode of barbarism seared into our memories, lest we should relapse.

    Your assassin shot you at point blank range with a sawn-off shotgun. I do not exactly know what sawn-off really means; nevertheless, he fired and fled, leaving you lying on the pavement in a pool of blood, red like the carnations of the wreath of carnations and white daisies that the four young men sombrely laid at your grave. They walked close to your father in this BBC documentary that circled the world and which I watched on a TV screen in the corridors of the United Nations where the diplomats were lost for words in attempting to condemn the crimes perpetrated in the name of Islam. It was the wretchedness of politics, the subjection before the inextinguishable sorrow and the victory of barbarism.

     

    “Prayer for Disaster”: Chapter from Fadhila Al Farouq’s novel Taa Al Khajal

    Translated by Anissa Daoudi

    “Time is the Arab’s wound, they would retreat to the past” and Constantine speak only the language of the past.

    I cross the street of Abanne Ramdane and the past is dispersed around me with the call for the Duhur prayer.

    Minerets seem in a dream, hugging the violets in the sky, like they were in love, people shouting: “Allah Akbar”

    People here do not disagree with what the Minarets say, even when these said:

    “Please God, prostitute their daughters”.

    People said: Amen

    Even when they said:

    “Please God make the children orphans”

    People said: Amen

    And even when minarets said:

    “Please God widow their wives”.

    They said: Amen

    They were all struck down with FIS fever, they all sang with blinded eyes the Prayer for Disaster.

    And that’s why Amina sleeps, bleeding at the University Hospital, carrying traces of change.

    And that’s why hundreds of flowers are raped, blessed by the people prayers. It should befall the people…and no one else!

    Lethal stupidity…!

    I noticed that the car nearly ran me down, and I’m trying to cut.

    Retreated back horrified, as for the driver’s insult, it had penetrated my ear sharp like a knife.

    I was almost angry, but my journey of sadness is in its early days, gazing towards the driver with a look of indifference, and merely echoing something between me and myself “poor thing. He is without moral. ”

    We can’t be poor unless we were without moral.

    Minarets subsided.

    Reduced traffic from the road.

    Two birds flying in the sky hugged each other, and Yamina’s singing in my head with her breath, she’s tired, and dreaming of seeing her family.

    And I’m all her family for now! And what a strait that caught me?

    Here’s the surprise that I didn’t wait for her, to enter the world of victims of rape not as a journalist, but as a family member, what am I going to write about Yamina? Her, laying down on a hope called ‘me’. Sleeping in the hope of receiving no more than a radio, which I will get her, for I am the family, and I am the relatives, the daughter of the tongue that united us in unexpected, and in unforeseen circumstances.

    I was thinking all the way about how to write about the topic, in which way, with which heart, in what language, with what pen? The Pens of kin don’t like to transgress.

    Pens the same blood, don’t cheat!

    So how could I betray those happy breaths of my presence? How could I betray those eyes filled with confidence?

    How can one write about a female whose virginity was stolen from her by force?

    I don’t know how to write, I no longer know colors

    I don’t know the color of the paper.

    Everything became like delirium “a novel” and “bleeding” of Yamina.

    Everything turned red. Blood. Blood. Blood.

    -I won’t write it. It’s over.

    Two leaves flew off.

    Two friends split up: Bye, Rasheed…

    Bye my dear. See you later my dear.

    I noticed that in her eyes a glimmer of hope.

    I noticed that Constantine became more beautiful.

    And the pine trees started babbling, and the air flirting with the girls’ hair. Stories here and there, among school children jogging to their homes.

    All I wanted was to be a kid. To be carried by the wind the girls’ school in Ariss, to run on that small bridge, to listen to the whispers of willows, to throw a paper airplane off the bridge and to clap when it goes higher and higher, while avoiding branches.

    My favorite game was to make pretty things with paper.

    The paper is still necessary in my life, I still make from it my beautiful stuff, and that’s why I won’t write on Yamina and won’t allow the photographer to take a picture of her grief, and covers her eyes so that nobody knows.

    There are issues that are not resolved by the cries of the newspaper.

    Issues which can only be solved through Justice, law and conscience.

    Here, … Justice is made through men’s narrow perceptions. Article 336 of the Algerian Penal Code for defilement “punish anyone who commits rape crime with imprisonment from five to ten years, and if the indecent assault against a minor who is under sixteen years old, then the penalty would be temporary imprisonment from ten to twenty years” law is not strict enough, compared with French law, which provides stricter circumstances lies in infringing on the victim of sexual assault, the penalty is 20 years. Men here, tailor Islam to their tastes.

    So, who among those know the mercy of Islam?

    No one…!

    Some rape women in his name. And some ostracize from his name too.

    And some give women compensation “trivial” from the municipality, which equates 2000 dinars ($ 20)

    And some deny that they are victims in his name, and women’s associations denounce and scream. And associations of victims of terrorism also condemn and scream.

    Only raped women know what it means to violate the body, to violate the self/ego.

    Only they know shame, homelessness and prostitution

    and suicide; only they know fatwas which have permitted ‘rape’.

    The ‘Amir’ is the one to offer her.

    Only the one to whom she was offered, who can kiss her and with the Amir’s permission.

    She would not be naked in front of brothers.

    Not be viewed with lust. Not to be hit by the brothers but only the one who to whom she was offered to, he can do as he pleases, within God’s limits.

    If a captive (sabiyya) and her mother, and you have intercourse with the mother, then it is not permissible to have intercourse with her daughter.

    If there was a sexual intercourse with a woman, it is not permissible to have an intercourse with her until she has her period. Flirting and caressing are permitted.

    Father and son cannot have sexual intercourse with the same sabiyya.

    It is not permissible to combine a sabiyya with her sister with the same with Mujahid”

    (This document was found after Bentalha and after the arrival of the army to the region of Ouled Allal, a document that regulates the rules of sexual intercourse, delivered on the 5th Muharram 1418 Hijri and the source is anonymous.

    Somehow I knew all these things, following a previous investigation. And people know, and law enforcement people know, but who knows the horror of the experience, except those flowers, living today among thorns of shame and madness?

    Will I expose Amina? Will I expose myself?

    Tomorrow, family and relatives and everyone who knows my name will say: this is Abdul Hafeez Mokran’s daughter who exposes one of us. ”

    How did things have gotten me here? How did I think this way?

    I chased all those thoughts away from my head and sat in front of the editor silent, him speaking and I don’t hear it, then approached and shouted at me:

    What’s wrong with you today?

    I stormed off and nearly said:

    How did I get here?

    Since I no longer remember how I came all the way from downtown to the press.

    I looked at him with eyes missing, he told me, pulling out a cigarette and trying to start one:

    Where are you with the investigation?

    I came back to my reality and I asked him: why don’t people pray as they used to pray before the days of “FIS” and ask for forgiveness and mercy and peace?

    (FIS: acronym for Islamic Salvation Front Party)

    He stopped moving around a little, blew out his cigarette before smoking it, and returned to his place and then said:

    What happened at the hospital?

    I came back to a more realistic world and I answered: It is a tragedy!

    -Write it then.

    -No.

    -Yes?

    -No. I won’t write anything about them?

    -You are not yourself, apparently, are you sick today? I smiled and said to him:

    -No, not sick.

    Shook his shoulders wondering:

    -Then?

    -I’ll write about prayer.

    -Which prayer?

    -Frayer of ‘FIS”, do you remember it? It was echoed in every mosque during days of strikes. The one that says “Please God, prostitute their daughters, Please God make the children orphans, widow their wives to the end of the prayer”. I will ask the people that repeated it, I will ask their conscience, I want to know their level, and did they know what they were saying? Why were they led behind the “FIS” Immams and altogether they asked a strange request as that of Allah.

    The editor interrupted me:

    Khalida, I want you to write about the experience of these girls?

    But I wrote previously, provided statistics, five thousand raped woman since 1994, said that a thousand and seven hundred woman raped outside the circle of terrorism, said that the Ministry doesn’t care, said that the law doesn’t care, said that parents don’t care, they have not accepted their daughters after their return, said they contracted madness, turned to prostitution, committed suicide. Has anyone acted, except Khalida Messoudi and her like (Khalida Messoudi is a feminist militant in Algeria has a book in French entitled “standing woman”?

    He interrupted me loudly:

    We are not the law. We are the press. I interrupted him too shouting:

    We are ridiculous.

    Hitting his fist on the table:

    -What happened to you today?

    Imagine that your daughter was kidnapped one night, raped and she conceived and gave birth to shame, and is now at the University Hospital, bleeding, and I come in as a journalist to say that this happened to so and so daughter, will you accept?

    With a Mocking laughter, he approached me:

    Since when did we mention people’s names in such cases?

    -The truth is to reveal names and surnames, nobody will believe us if we don’t write the whole truth.

    -Khalida, be brief, he said angrily.

    And I replied quietly: I won’t write about them, I’ll write about the prayer.

    He took a deep breath to restore calm and then told me, pressing on every word he says:

    -Kidnapping and rapes have become a military strategy since 1995 and an instrument of armed conflict between armed Islamic groups and the defenseless community how will the world understand what is happening here, if we don’t write about?

    I laughed with all my heart:

    You look funny. (Continued sarcastically) the world will read our newspaper which doesn’t distribute ten thousand copies at home, and does not reach up to our neighbors in Morocco and Tunisia, and doesn’t enter the Internet “come on man, focus with me,” I said it in an Egyptian accent, more sarcastic and left.

    Unpublished Poem by Iman Bioud

    She (Feminine ‘She’)

    On my lips
    sorrow dried up
    Not unlike a breach
    On a petal of rose.
    The petal slept on the breach And the breach prevailed. From night dawn
    Till dawnset,
    I wriggle
    Staring in a face I know
    I scatter like agate seeds
    Their land they forgot.
    Lost their way
    Land is deserted.
    You, Emerging lies
    Uttering a wriggled letter From a suspected lips ;
    That’s what you are.
    You, a linguistic perfection Be fluent.
    Here is a woman, here is she With a painful stress on the ‘e’ Conjugated as a weakened
    A crucified noun.
    Crucifix tool of which

    تاء التأنيث

    يبس الحزن على شفتي

    كالثلمة في بتل الورد

    نام البتل على ثلمته

    سئد الثلم

    أتلوى من فجر الليل

    إلى عصر الفجر

    أتفرس وجها أعرفه

    انفرط كحبات عقيق

    نسيت موطنها

    ضاع الحب

    وبات الموطن مهجورا

    يا أنت…

    إفك يتمخض

    يلفظ حرفا ملويا

    مشبوه المخرج

    هذا أنت

    يا ذاك الإعجاز اللغوي تفصح

    هذي امرأة

    تتوجع همزتها فوق الألف

    هذي امرأة إعربها

    (اسم ناقص مصلوب)

    وعلامة صلبه

    تاء التأنيث بآخره

    تاء التأنيث بداخله

    تقطر مزجا شهديا

    لزجا.
  • Joseph North – Still Hoping: A Response to Dermot Ryan

    Joseph North – Still Hoping: A Response to Dermot Ryan

    by Joseph North

    This essay is part of a dossier on Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Dermot Ryan reviewed North’s volume in January 2018. This essay is North’s response to Ryan’s review. b2o also published Ryan’s reply to this response. 

    I am not a big believer in the wisdom of responding to negative reviews – what is to be gained?  perhaps very little – but Dermot Ryan’s recent account of my book Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History is based on a number of misreadings that seem to me worth trying to clear up (Ryan 2018, North 2017).

    Ryan’s primary claim is that I am a kind of throwback to the bad old days of mid-century humanism – a revenant of the “old-school model of criticism,” as he puts it.  Accordingly, he goes on to charge me with anti-feminism, dismissiveness towards both queer theory and postcolonial studies, and even a kind of antipathy or indifference to union drives.  But this is odd.  To mention just one reason: a reader who judged Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Ryan’s review would get little sense of the fact that majority of the living figures celebrated by the book are feminists and/or queer theorists.[1]  In my wilder utopian moments, I had thought that no-one who really read the book (still less anyone who knows my politics!) could have mistaken it for anything except an attempt to radicalize – specifically, to radicalize by mobilizing – the discipline’s existing commitments to feminism, queer theory, and the critique of empire (just to stick with Ryan’s chosen examples; in the book I am concerned also with others, anti-capitalism being perhaps the central case).  At any rate, it seems to me that I am an odd target at which to level these kinds of charges.

    But I ought to check my starry-eyed optimism here, for really the charges Ryan levels at me are not so surprising – in fact, I addressed them in the first few pages of the book itself, a fact to which I shall return at the end of this piece.  For now, let me simply note that in order to make the book resemble a proper target for this kind of critique, Ryan has to twist it into some very odd shapes.  Take, for instance, the charge that Ryan offers as a “stand in” for many of the other charges: the charge that the book is somehow anti-feminist.  I take this charge to heart, not least because I was a feminist before I was any other sort of radical.  It is a serious charge (at least among leftists), and one that ought not to be made lightly.  Ryan makes it as follows:

    The following swipe at feminism must stand in for a long list of North’s leading questions directed at the legacy of feminist, queer, and postcolonial criticism: ‘To what extent were second-wave feminist critiques of the welfare state likely to secure basic structural changes, and to what extent were they working to replace a material politics with a mere politics of recognition, thereby serving, albeit often inadvertently, as the hand-maidens of neoliberalism?’ (58). In a historical narrative that repeatedly understands literary studies as being reshaped by economic forces outside the academy, feminist scholars are accorded a striking degree of agency here as midwives of the new neoliberal order. North’s choice of hand-maiden to characterize the work of his feminist colleagues is particularly unwelcome.

    Let me begin by wholeheartedly endorsing Ryan’s general position here: he is encountering what he takes to be an instance of haughty dismissiveness toward the achievements of feminist criticism – in effect, an instance of misogyny – and he is resolved to call it out and critique it.  This seems to me a good thing.  He winces especially at that “particularly unwelcome” term “hand-maiden,” which he reads as a snide attack on the work of my “feminist colleagues.”  All this goes to show my deeper conservatism, or at least the implicit conservatism of my argument: thus, for Ryan, my “swipe at feminism” “stands in for a long list” of swipes at other progressive forces within the discipline.  Having read me in this way, he quite naturally concludes that I am “wrong in ways that are damaging to the discipline and give ammunition to reactionary forces within and beyond it.”  Excellent.  It’s no fun to be the target, of course, but Ryan is firing his big guns for all the right reasons here, and I can certainly cheer for that.

    But let us go back and read the line that Ryan identifies as my “swipe at feminism”:

    To what extent were second-wave feminist critiques of the welfare state likely to secure basic structural changes, and to what extent were they working to replace a material politics with a mere politics of recognition, thereby serving, albeit often inadvertently, as the hand-maidens of neoliberalism?  

    There are two differences between Ryan’s version of the line and the line I wrote.  First, the original version includes a footnote that Ryan does not seem to have noticed.  That footnote – as some readers surely have guessed already – is to the work of the prominent Marxist/Feminist Nancy Fraser, and specifically to her book Fortunes of Feminism, in which she articulates the most well-known version of the argument to which my line refers (Fraser 2013a).  Now, I hasten to add that my single-sentence summary of her work here is not as precise as it could be, and indeed I would re-write this sentence today.  But even taking this into account, I had thought the reference to Fraser unmistakable, most obviously because of the footnote, but also because I had thought that the argument itself, with that key term “politics of recognition,” was well-known to anyone familiar with contemporary debates within left and marxist feminism.

    The second difference: in the original text there are scare quotes around the phrase “hand-maidens of neoliberalism,” whereas in Ryan’s version, the phrase is simply run into the text.    Now, I do not think that Ryan has omitted the scare quotes on purpose – that would be a serious charge.  It is surely an innocent oversight.  But, after all, the omission is not ideal, especially since this is the very phrase that Ryan calls out as “particularly unfortunate,” and reads as an act of misogynistic aggression on my part.  Once one has noticed the quotation marks, one perhaps begins to wonder why they are there.  Why did I place the offending phrase in scare quotes?  Is the term “hand-maidens” really my “particularly unfortunate” way of taking a tone-deaf “swipe” at the work of my “feminist colleagues?”  Is it even mine?  At this point I hope that at least a couple of readers are nodding with recognition, as it were, since the phrase is in fact a reference to Nancy Fraser’s 2013 article “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden – And How to Reclaim It,” which I had thought fairly well-known, at least among those who follow debates within feminism on the left, precisely because of the provocativeness of the term “handmaiden” (Fraser 2013b).  Admittedly, this reference might be thought obscure, and perhaps I was wrong in assuming that readers would catch it (though again, I would have thought the scare quotes would cause a reviewer at least to pause before calling out this particular phrase).  But surely even a reviewer who had missed the reference, and had failed to recognize the argument itself, and had also overlooked the fact that many of the most important feminist arguments in recent history have been critiques of the “second wave,” would nevertheless think to read the footnote to Fraser before rushing to the conclusion that this line represents a “swipe at feminism” on my part?  In any event, the argument that Ryan calls out, in a peer-reviewed article, as a telling example of my supposed “anti-feminism” is in fact a feminist argument, and a rather famous one.  It’s at times like this that I find myself oddly pleased that Ryan thinks my work is “exactly wrong,” since he is reading it exactly backwards.  We could find ourselves in a kind of broad agreement if only he would stop reading me upside-down.

    This would seem to me a fairly egregious example of misreading by anyone’s lights.  Is it an isolated case?  Of course I am uniquely placed to be oversensitive here, but it seems to me that it is not an isolated case.  In fact, Ryan does this often.  Despite my fairly loud (I had thought perhaps even obnoxiously loud) declarations of radical intent, his conviction that I am a closet reactionary is so strong that he repeatedly misreads my summaries of others’ views as if they were my views, and then objects to them.  Take, for example, his main objection to my tone:

    North complacently opines that “actual political struggle—the kind that involve a group, or class ‘forcing’ its way into something—does not take place within the world of scholarship” (88). Here as elsewhere, North’s discussion of the efforts by marginalized groups to challenge the academy’s exclusionary culture is not aided by his clubby tone, which comes off as privileged, tweedy, and smug.

    Again, I can endorse Ryan’s general position here: I, too, would want to argue against anyone who claimed that “actual political struggle—the kind that involve a group, or class ‘forcing’ its way into something—does not take place within the world of scholarship.”  Inconveniently, though, I was in fact arguing against that claim in the very line Ryan quotes.  The line is drawn from my account of some of the problematic assumptions that seem to me to underpin Greenblatt and Gallagher’s Practicing New Historicism – assumptions that I subject to a fairly blunt critique.  In passing, I’ll note that I keep being confronted by scholars who want to defend Greenblatt and Gallagher on this score (or else defend New Historicism more generally, minus those two): many people in the discipline (particularly of a certain generation) seem to think that I was too critical of them here, or else simply too blunt.  But to my knowledge Ryan is the first to misread me as endorsing the very view that I critique so bluntly, and he is certainly the first to critique me for “complacently opining” it.

    The specific examples Ryan cites here are all, I believe, based on demonstrable misreadings.  Another case: when summarizing my account of the discipline’s history, Ryan writes that North “labels his own version rather grandly as ‘the new periodization.’” As it happened, I didn’t label my own work “the new periodization,” and I believe that this is fairly obvious on the page (the whole discussion is on pp12-14, for those who want to check).  Where it originally appears, the phrase refers not to some great innovation on my part, but to a view now held by many scholars across many disciplines, the view being that the 20th century ought to be considered a three-period century, rather than a two-period century, as was once widely assumed.  I cite Piketty as an example of a prominent scholar who takes roughly this view, but I am really talking about a view held much more widely.  In any event, on this point my own contribution, such as it is, is simply to show how the history of Anglo-American literary studies fits into a larger puzzle put together by others; there is certainly no question of my labeling my own work “the new periodization” in this “grand” manner.

    Ryan also has an odd tendency to critique me (and in such strident terms!) for neglecting to say things that in fact I say quite clearly.  His language suggests that he places quite a lot of confidence in the following observation:

    One example can stand synecdochically for a series of unpersuasive historical claims and moves. According to North, during the eighties and nineties, neoliberal forces within the university systematically favored the scholarly over the critical model of literary studies. In this “professionalized and scientized context, the scholarly model of intellectual inquiry—intellectual work as knowledge production” became the central task of literary study (100). It’s a compelling story. And it’s completely inaccurate. Literary Studies has benefited enormously from the disciplinary histories of Gerald Graff, Louis Menand, Chris Baldick, Bill Readings and many others. […] North references many of these scholars. But, having read them, he should know that the disciplinary commitment to professionalism and the scientific model of knowledge production in literary studies predates neoliberalism. It stretches back to the origin of English as a discipline. […] No matter. Let’s return to North’s convenient morality play.

    If this claim truly “stands synecdochically” for many of my “unpersuasive historical claims and moves,” then I think I am in pretty good shape, for Ryan’s historical observations here easily could have been lifted directly from the first chapter of my book.  For of course the “disciplinary commitment to professionalism and the scientific model of knowledge production in literary studies predates neoliberalism.”  Who would deny it?  Not me.  Literary scholarship has involved a “commitment to professionalism and the scientific model of knowledge production” at least since the fin de siècle.  I began the first chapter of the book by pointing out precisely this, and I even made the point by referring to two of the scholars Ryan mentions, Graff and Baldick (though I set them alongside Guillory, rather than Menand or Readings).  Moreover, the rest of my argument simply assumes the truth of this, because, well, it’s so obvious: thus, throughout the book, my claim is certainly not that the neoliberal period saw the birth of literary scholarship –  that would be a very silly claim indeed.  Rather my claim, in part, is that the neoliberal period saw the death of literary criticism, for a certain important meaning of that phrase. That is quite a different thing.

    I could go on, but let me instead draw to a close by making a single more general point.  Before making it, I would like to emphasize once again that, in my optimism, I still think that Ryan and I could be in sympathy with one another here – pretty much all of his critiques of my work seem to me decent in principle.  Nevertheless, those critiques seem to me quite misplaced; he is engaging with something, I am certain, but it is not me.  At this point I am going to risk going a step further by observing that all the claims we have seen Ryan making so far are not just false, but trivially false, by which I mean that they are false in such a way that they could easily be dispelled by, say, reading a footnote, or noticing some quotation marks, or reading a line in relation to its immediate context, or reading the first few pages of the first chapter – not even familiarity with recent debates within feminism would be required.  Why is a professional reader who is intelligent, principled, and well-informed, as Ryan clearly is, nevertheless lapsing repeatedly into trivial misreadings when confronted by what is, after all, a fairly simple argument?  The answer, I think, is that he has begun with such a strong set of assumptions about what I must have written, that it has often prevented him from reading what I actually wrote.

    What is this troubling set of assumptions, and where does it come from?  People who quote themselves quickly become tiresome, but I’ll risk doing so just once to close.  In the introduction to the book, I wrote:

    Over the last three decades, the discipline has tended to assume that any attack on the historicist/contextualist paradigm must originate in cultural conservatism, particularly if the offending party makes use of such terms as “criticism,” “aesthetic,” “sensibility,” and similar.  This assumption has allowed much to pass for progressivism, even for radicalism, that under other circumstances would have been seen much more clearly for what it was.  (4)

    Ryan’s argument strikes me as a good example of just this kind: hearing that I have doubts about the usual historicist/contextualist priorities, he has assumed that my argument must be such as to “give ammunition to reactionary forces,” and he has thus proceeded to condemn it on that basis.  Now, in a way it is pleasing to see someone coming out with precisely the critique I had expected, since it gives me an opportunity to show how much in the book has to be misread, or simply elided, in order to make that critique sound plausible.  But what one really hopes for are critiques that manage to get past those old assumptions – critiques that engage with the arguments I actually make – critiques that then offer, in response to those arguments, a rigorous and principled defense of the existing paradigm.  I’m still hoping.

    Joseph North is an assistant professor of English at Yale University.  He is the author of Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2018).

    References

    Fraser, Nancy. 2013a.  Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis.  London: Verso.

    Fraser, Nancy. 2013b. “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden – And How to Reclaim It.”  The Guardian, October 14.

    North, Joseph. 2017. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. Cambridge: Harvard

    Roth, Marco. 2017. “Tokens of Ruined Method: Does Literary Studies Have a Future?” n+1, no. 29: 179-189.

    Ryan, Dermot. 2018. “Review of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History.” boundary 2 online, January 29.

    [1] In passing, I’ll note that readers don’t have to take my word for this: in lieu of reading the book itself, they can simply consult other reviews of it, many of which have pointed out precisely this.  Thus Marco Roth at n+1: “The catalog of critics covered in [the final, most positive chapter, is] almost exclusively female or queer: the late Eve Sedgwick, Isobel Armstrong […], Lauren Berlant, and D. A. Miller” (Roth 2017).

  • Zachary Loeb – All Watched Over By Machines (Review of Levine, Surveillance Valley)

    Zachary Loeb – All Watched Over By Machines (Review of Levine, Surveillance Valley)

    a review of Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (PublicAffairs, 2018)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    There is something rather precious about Google employees, and Internet users, who earnestly believe the “don’t be evil” line. Though those three words have often been taken to represent a sort of ethos, their primary function is as a steam vent – providing a useful way to allow building pressure to escape before it can become explosive. While “don’t be evil” is associated with Google, most of the giants of Silicon Valley have their own variations of this comforting ideological façade: Apple’s “think different,” Facebook’s talk of “connecting the world,” the smiles on the side of Amazon boxes. And when a revelation troubles this carefully constructed exterior – when it turns out Google is involved in building military drones, when it turns out that Amazon is making facial recognition software for the police – people react in shock and outrage. How could this company do this?!?

    What these revelations challenge is not simply the mythos surrounding particular tech companies, but the mythos surrounding the tech industry itself. After all, many people have their hopes invested in the belief that these companies are building a better brighter future, and they are naturally taken aback when they are forced to reckon with stories that reveal how these companies are building the types of high-tech dystopias that science fiction has been warning us about for decades. And in this space there are some who seem eager to allow a new myth to take root: one in which the unsettling connections between big tech firms and the military industrial complex is something new. But as Yasha Levine’s important new book, Surveillance Valley, deftly demonstrates the history of the big tech firms, complete with its panoptic overtones, is thoroughly interwoven with the history of the repressive state apparatus. While many people may be at least nominally aware of the links between early computing, or the proto-Internet, and the military, Levine’s book reveals the depth of these connections and how they persist. As he provocatively puts it, “the Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today” (9).

    Thus, cases of Google building military drones, Facebook watching us all, and Amazon making facial recognition software for the police, need to be understood not as aberrations. Rather, they are business as usual.

    Levine begins his account with the war in Vietnam, and the origins of a part of the Department of Defense known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) – an outfit born of the belief that victory required the US to fight a high-tech war. ARPA’s technocrats earnestly believed “in the power of science and technology to solve the world’s problems” (23), and they were confident that the high-tech systems they developed and deployed (such as Project Igloo White) would allow the US to triumph in Vietnam. And though the US was not ultimately victorious in that conflict, the worldview of ARPA’s technocrats was, as was the linkage between the nascent tech sector and the military. Indeed, the tactics and techniques developed in Vietnam were soon to be deployed for dealing with domestic issues, “giving a modern scientific veneer to public policies that reinforced racism and structural poverty” (30).

    Much of the early history of computers, as Levine documents, is rooted in systems developed to meet military and intelligence needs during WWII – but the Cold War provided plenty of impetus for further military reliance on increasingly complex computing systems. And as fears of nuclear war took hold, computer systems (such as SAGE) were developed to surveil the nation and provide military officials with a steady flow of information. Along with the advancements in computing came the dispersion of cybernetic thinking which treated humans as information processing machines, not unlike computers, and helped advance a worldview wherein, given enough data, computers could make sense of the world. All that was needed was to feed more, and more, information into the computers – and intelligence agencies proved to be among the first groups interested in taking advantage of these systems.

    While the development of these systems of control and surveillance ran alongside attempts to market computers to commercial firms, Levine’s point is that it was not an either/or situation but a both/and, “computer technology is always ‘dual use,’ to be used in both commercial and military applications” (58) – and this split allows computer scientists and engineers who would be morally troubled by the “military applications” of their work to tell themselves that they work strictly on the commercial, or scientific side. ARPANET, the famous forerunner of the Internet, was developed to connect computer centers at a variety of prominent universities. Reliant on Interface Message Processors (IMPs) the system routed messages through the network through a variety of nodes and in the case that one node went down the system would reroute the message through other nodes – it was a system of relaying information built to withstand a nuclear war.

    Though all manner of utopian myths surround the early Internet, and by extension its forerunner, Levine highlights that “surveillance was baked in from the very beginning” (75). Case in point, the largely forgotten CONUS Intel program that gathered information on millions of Americans. By encoding this information on IBM punch cards, which were then fed into a computer, law enforcement groups and the army were able to access information not only regarding criminal activity, but activities protected by the first amendment. As news of these databases reached the public they generated fears of a high-tech surveillance society, leading some Senators, such as Sam Ervin, to push back against the program. And in a foreshadowing of further things to come, “the army promised to destroy the surveillance files, but the Senate could not obtain definitive proof that the files were ever fully expunged,” (87). Though there were concerns about the surveillance potential of ARPANET, its growing power was hardly checked, and more government agencies began building their own subnetworks (PRNET, SATNET). Yet, as they relied on different protocols, these networks could not connect to each other, until TCP/IP “the same basic network language that powers the Internet today” (95), allowed them to do so.

    Yet surveillance of citizens, and public pushback against computerized control, is not the grand origin story that most people are familiar with when it comes to the Internet. Instead the story that gets told is one whereby a military technology is filtered through the sieve of a very selective segment of the 1960s counterculture to allow it to emerge with some rebellious credibility. This view, owing much to Stewart Brand, transformed the nascent Internet from a military technology into a technology for everybody “that just happened to be run by the Pentagon” (106). Brand played a prominent and public role in rebranding the computer, as well as those working on the computers – turning these cold calculating machines into doors to utopia, and portraying computer programmers and entrepreneurs as the real heroes of the counterculture. In the process the military nature of these machines disappeared behind a tie-dyed shirt, and the fears of a surveillance society were displaced by hip promises of total freedom. The government links to the network were further hidden as ARPANET slowly morphed into the privatized commercial system we know as the Internet. It may seem mind boggling that the Internet was simply given away with “no real public debate, no discussion, no dissension, and no oversight” (121), but it is worth remembering that this was not the Internet we know. Rather it was how the myth of the Internet we know was built. A myth that combined, as was best demonstrated by Wired magazine, “an unquestioning belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of markets and decentralized computer technology, no matter how it was used” (133).

    The shift from ARPANET to the early Internet to the Internet of today presents a steadily unfolding tale wherein the result is that, today, “the Internet is like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world” (169). And in terms of this “engulfing” it is difficult to not think of a handful of giant tech companies (Amazon, Facebook, Apple, eBay, Google) who are responsible for much of that. In the present Internet atmosphere people have become largely inured to the almost clichéd canard that “if you’re not paying, you are the product,” but what this represents is how people have, largely, come to accept that the Internet is one big surveillance machine. Of course, feeding information to the giants made a sort of sense, many people (at least early on) seem to have been genuinely taken in by Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” image, and they saw themselves as the beneficiaries of the fact that “the more Google knew about someone, the better its search results would be” (150). The key insight that firms like Google seem to have understood is that a lot can be learned about a person based on what they do online (especially when they think no one is watching) – what people search for, what sites people visit, what people buy. And most importantly, what these companies understand is that “everything that people do online leaves a trail of data” (169), and controlling that data is power. These companies “know us intimately, even the things that we hide from those closest to us” (171). ARPANET found itself embroiled in a major scandal, at its time, when it was revealed how it was being used to gather information on and monitor regular people going about their lives – and it may well be that “in a lot of ways” the Internet “hasn’t changed much from its ARPANET days. It’s just gotten more powerful” (168).

    But even as people have come to gradually accept, by their actions if not necessarily by their beliefs, that the Internet is one big surveillance machine – periodically events still puncture this complacency. Case in point: Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA which splashed the scale of Internet assisted surveillance across the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Reporting linked to the documents Snowden leaked revealed how “the NSA had turned Silicon Valley’s globe-spanning platforms into a de facto intelligence collection apparatus” (193), and these documents exposed “the symbiotic relationship between Silicon Valley and the US government” (194). And yet, in the ensuing brouhaha, Silicon Valley was largely able to paint itself as the victim. Levine attributes some of this to Snowden’s own libertarian political bent, as he became a cult hero amongst technophiles, cypher-punks, and Internet advocates, “he swept Silicon Valley’s role in Internet surveillance under the rug” (199), while advancing a libertarian belief in “the utopian promise of computer networks” (200) similar to that professed by Steward Brand. In many ways Snowden appeared as the perfect heir apparent to the early techno-libertarians, especially as he (like them) focused less on mass political action and instead more on doubling-down on the idea that salvation would come through technology. And Snowden’s technology of choice was Tor.

    While Tor may project itself as a solution to surveillance, and be touted as such by many of its staunchest advocates, Levine casts doubt on this. Noting that, “Tor works only if people are dedicated to maintaining a strict anonymous Internet routine,” one consisting of dummy e-mail accounts and all transactions carried out in Bitcoin, Levine suggests that what Tor offers is “a false sense of privacy” (213). Levine describes the roots of Tor in an original need to provide government operatives with an ability to access the Internet, in the field, without revealing their true identities; and in order for Tor to be effective (and not simply signal that all of its users are spies and soldiers) the platform needed to expand its user base: “Tor was like a public square—the bigger and more diverse the group assembled there, the better spies could hide in the crowd” (227).

    Though Tor had spun off as an independent non-profit, it remained reliant for much of its funding on the US government, a matter which Tor aimed to downplay through emphasizing its radical activist user base and by forming close working connections with organizations like WikiLeaks that often ran afoul of the US government. And in the figure of Snowden, Tor found a perfect public advocate, who seemed to be living proof of Tor’s power – after all, he had used it successfully. Yet, as the case of Ross Ulbricht (the “Dread Pirate Roberts” of Silk Road notoriety) demonstrated, Tor may not be as impervious as it seems – researchers at Carnegie Mellon University “had figured out a cheap and easy way to crack Tor’s super-secure network” (263). To further complicate matters Tor had come to be seen by the NSA “as a honeypot,” to the NSA “people with something to hide” were the ones using Tor and simply by using it they were “helping to mark themselves for further surveillance” (265). And much of the same story seems to be true for the encrypted messaging service Signal (it is government funded, and less secure than its fans like to believe). While these tools may be useful to highly technically literate individuals committed to maintaining constant anonymity, “for the average users, these tools provided a false sense of security and offered the opposite of privacy” (267).

    The central myth of the Internet frames it as an anarchic utopia built by optimistic hippies hoping to save the world from intrusive governments through high-tech tools. Yet, as Surveillance Valley documents, “computer technology can’t be separated from the culture in which it is developed and used” (273). Surveillance is at the core of, and has always been at the core of, the Internet – whether the all-seeing eye be that of the government agency, or the corporation. And this is a problem that, alas, won’t be solved by crypto-fixes that present technological solutions to political problems. The libertarian ethos that undergirds the Internet works well for tech giants and cypher-punks, but a real alternative is not a set of tools that allow a small technically literate gaggle to play in the shadows, but a genuine democratization of the Internet.

     

    *

     

    Surveillance Valley is not interested in making friends.

    It is an unsparing look at the origins of, and the current state of, the Internet. And it is a book that has little interest in helping to prop up the popular myths that sustain the utopian image of the Internet. It is a book that should be read by anyone who was outraged by the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, anyone who feels uncomfortable about Google building drones or Amazon building facial recognition software, and frankly by anyone who uses the Internet. At the very least, after reading Surveillance Valley many of those aforementioned situations seem far less surprising. While there are no shortage of books, many of them quite excellent, that argue that steps need to be taken to create “the Internet we want,” in Surveillance Valley Yasha Levine takes a step back and insists “first we need to really understand what the Internet really is.” And it is not as simple as merely saying “Google is bad.”

    While much of the history that Levine unpacks won’t be new to historians of technology, or those well versed in critiques of technology, Surveillance Valley brings many, often separate strands into one narrative. Too often the early history of computing and the Internet is placed in one silo, while the rise of the tech giants is placed in another – by bringing them together, Levine is able to show the continuities and allow them to be understood more fully. What is particularly noteworthy in Levine’s account is his emphasis on early pushback to ARPANET, an often forgotten series of occurrences that certainly deserves a book of its own. Levine describes students in the 1960s who saw in early ARPANET projects “a networked system of surveillance, political control, and military conquest being quietly assembled by diligent researchers and engineers at college campuses around the country,” and as Levine provocatively adds, “the college kids had a point” (64). Similarly, Levine highlights NBC reporting from 1975 on the CIA and NSA spying on Americans by utilizing ARPANET, and on the efforts of Senators to rein in these projects. Though Levine is not presenting, nor is he claiming to present, a comprehensive history of pushback and resistance, his account makes it clear that liberatory claims regarding technology were often met with skepticism. And much of that skepticism proved to be highly prescient.

    Yet this history of resistance has largely been forgotten amidst the clever contortions that shifted the Internet’s origins, in the public imagination, from counterinsurgency in Vietnam to the counterculture in California. Though the area of Surveillance Valley that will likely cause the most contention is Levine’s chapters on crypto-tools like Tor and Signal, perhaps his greatest heresy is in his refusal to pay homage to the early tech-evangels like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. While the likes of Brand, and John Perry Barlow, are often celebrated as visionaries whose utopian blueprints have been warped by power-hungry tech firms, Levine is frank in framing such figures as long-haired libertarians who knew how to spin a compelling story in such a way that made empowering massive corporations seem like a radical act. And this is in keeping with one of the major themes that runs, often subtlety, through Surveillance Valley: the substitution of technology for politics. Thus, in his book, Levine does not only frame the Internet as disempowering insofar as it runs on surveillance and relies on massive corporations, but he emphasizes how the ideological core of the Internet focuses all political action on technology. To every social, economic, and political problem the Internet presents itself as the solution – but Levine is unwilling to go along with that idea.

    Those who were familiar with Levine’s journalism before he penned Surveillance Valley will know that much of his reporting has covered crypto-tech, like Tor, and similar privacy technologies. Indeed, to a certain respect, Surveillance Valley can be read as an outgrowth of that reporting. And it is also important to note, as Levine does in the book, that Levine did not make himself many friends in the crypto community by taking on Tor. It is doubtful that cypherpunks will like Surveillance Valley, but it is just as doubtful that they will bother to actually read it and engage with Levine’s argument or the history he lays out. This is a shame, for it would be a mistake to frame Levine’s book as an attack on Tor (or on those who work on the project). Levine’s comments on Tor are in keeping with the thrust of the larger argument of his book: such privacy tools are high-tech solutions to problems created by high-tech society, that mainly serve to keep people hooked into all those high-tech systems. And he questions the politics of Tor, noting that “Silicon Valley fears a political solution to privacy. Internet Freedom and crypto offer an acceptable solution” (268). Or, to put it another way, Tor is kind of like shopping at Whole Foods – people who are concerned about their food are willing to pay a bit more to get their food there, but in the end shopping there lets people feel good about what they’re doing without genuinely challenging the broader system. And, of course, now Whole Foods is owned by Amazon. The most important element of Levine’s critique of Tor is not that it doesn’t work, for some (like Snowden) it clearly does, but that most users do not know how to use it properly (and are unwilling to lead a genuinely full-crypto lifestyle) and so it fails to offer more than a false sense of security.

    Thus, to say it again, Surveillance Valley isn’t particularly interested in making a lot of friends. With one hand it brushes away the comforting myths about the Internet, and with the other it pushes away the tools that are often touted as the solution to many of the Internet’s problems. And in so doing Levine takes on a variety of technoculture’s sainted figures like Stewart Brand, Edward Snowden, and even organizations like the EFF. While Levine clearly doesn’t seem interested in creating new myths, or propping up new heroes, it seems as though he somewhat misses an opportunity here. Levine shows how some groups and individuals had warned about the Internet back when it was still ARPANET, and a greater emphasis on such people could have helped create a better sense of alternatives and paths that were not taken. Levine notes near the book’s end that, “we live in bleak times, and the Internet is a reflection of them: run by spies and powerful corporations just as our society is run by them. But it isn’t all hopeless” (274). Yet it would be easier to believe the “isn’t all hopeless” sentiment, had the book provided more analysis of successful instances of pushback. While it is respectable that Levine puts forward democratic (small d) action as the needed response, this comes as the solution at the end of a lengthy work that has discussed how the Internet has largely eroded democracy. What Levine’s book points to is that it isn’t enough to just talk about democracy, one needs to recognize that some technologies are democratic while others are not. And though we are loathe to admit it, perhaps the Internet (and computers) simply are not democratic technologies. Sure, we may be able to use them for democratic purposes, but that does not make the technologies themselves democratic.

    Surveillance Valley is a troubling book, but it is an important book. It smashes comforting myths and refuses to leave its readers with simple solutions. What it demonstrates in stark relief is that surveillance and unnerving links to the military-industrial complex are not signs that the Internet has gone awry, but signs that the Internet is functioning as intended.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently working towards a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ideologies that develop in response to technological change, and the ways in which technology factors into ethical philosophy – particularly in regards of the way in which Jewish philosophers have written about ethics and technology. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay

  • Racheal Fest — Westworld’s New Romantics

    Racheal Fest — Westworld’s New Romantics

    By Racheal Fest

    HBO’s prestige drama, Westworld, is slated to return April 22. Actors and producers have said the show’s second season will be a departure from its first, a season of “chaos” after a season of “control,” an expansive narrative after an intricate prequel. Season 2 trailers indicate the new episodes will trace the completion and explore the consequences of the bloody events that concluded season 1: the androids that populate the show’s titular entertainment park, called “hosts,” gained sentience and revolted, violently, against the humans who made and controlled them. In season 2, they will build their world anew.

    Reviewers of the show’s first few episodes found the prospect of another robot revolution, anticipated since the pilot, tired, but by the time the finale aired in December 2016, critics recognized the show offered a novel take on old material (inspired by Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name). This is in part because Westworld not only asks about the boundaries of consciousness, the consequences of creating sentience, and the inexorable march of technological progress, themes science fiction texts that feature artificial intelligence usually explore. Uniquely, the series pairs these familiar problems with questions about the nature and function of human arts, imagination, and culture, and demonstrates these are urgent again in our moment.

    Westworld is, at its heart, a show about how we should understand what art—and narrative representation in particular—is and does in a world defined by increasing economic inequality. The series warns that classical, romantic, and modernist visions of arts and culture, each of which plays a role in the park’s conception and development, might today harm attempts to transform contemporary conditions that exacerbate inequality. It explores how these visions serve elite interests and prevent radicals from pursuing change. I believe it also points the way, in conclusion, toward an alternative view of representation that might better support contemporary oppositional projects. This vision, I argue, at once updates and transforms romanticism’s faith in creative human activity, at once affirming culture’s historical power and recognizing its material limitations.

    *

    The fantasy theme park Westworld takes contemporary forms of narrative entertainment to the extreme limit of their logic, inviting its wealthy “guests” to participate in a kind of live-action novel or videogame. Guests don period dress appropriate to the park’s fabled Old West setting and join its androids in the town of Sweetwater, a simulacrum complete with saloon and brothel, its false fronts nestled below sparse bluffs and severe mesas. Once inside, guests can choose to participate in a variety of familiar Western narratives; they might chase bandits, seduce innocents, or turn to crime, living for a time as heroes, lovers, or villains. They can also choose to disrupt and redirect these relatively predictable plots, abandoning midstream stories that bore or frighten them or cutting stories short by “killing” the hosts who lead them.

    This ability to disrupt and transform narrative is the precious commodity Delos Incorporated, Westworld’s parent corporation, advertises, the freedom for which elite visitors pay the park’s steep premium. The company transposes the liberties the mythic West held out to American settlers into a vacation package that invites guests to participate in or revise generic stories.

    Advertisements featured within the show, along with HBO’s Westworld ARG (its “alternate reality game” and promotional website), describe this special freedom and assign to it a unique significance. Delos invites visitors to “live without limits” inside the park. “Escape” to a “world where you rule,” its promotions entreat, and enjoy inside it “infinite choices” without “judgment,” “bliss” with “no safe words,” and “thrills” without danger. When “you” do, Delos promises, you’ll “discover your true calling,” becoming “who you’ve always wanted to be—or who you never knew you were.” Delos invites the wealthy to indulge in sex and carnage in a space free of consequences and promises that doing so will reveal to them deep truths of the self.

    These marketing materials, which address themselves to the lucky few able to afford entrance to the park, suggest the future Westworld projects shares with our present its precipitous economic inequality (fans deduce the show is set in 2052). They also present as a commodity a familiar understanding of art’s nature and function viewers will recognize is simultaneously classical and modern. Delos’s marketing team updates, on one hand, the view of representational artworks, and narrative, in particular, that Aristotle outlines in the Poetics. Aristotle there argues fictional narrative can disclose universal truths that actual history alone cannot. Similarly, Delos promises Westworld’s immersive narrative experience will reveal to guests essential truths, although not about humans in general. The park advertises verities more valuable and more plausible in our times—it promises elites they will attain through art a kind of self-knowledge they cannot access any other way.

    On the other hand, and in tandem with this modified classical view, Delos’s pitch reproduces and extends the sense of art’s autonomy some modern (and modernist) writers endorsed. Westworld can disclose its truths because it invites guests into a protected space in which, Delos claims, their actions will not actually affect others, either within or outside of the park. The park’s promotions draw upon both the disinterested view of aesthetic experience Immanuel Kant first outlined and upon the updated version of autonomy that came to inform mass culture’s view of itself by the mid-twentieth century. According to the face its managers present to the world, Westworld provides elite consumers with a form of harmless entertainment, an innocuous getaway from reality’s fiscal, marital, and juridical pressures. So conceived, narrative arts and culture at once reveal the true self and limn it within a secure arena.

    The vision Delos markets keeps its vacation arm in business, but the drama suggests it does not actually describe how the park operates or what it makes possible. As Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudson), Westworld’s senior manager and Head of Quality Assurance, tells Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), head of Narrative, in Westworld’s pilot: “This place is one thing to the guests, another thing to the shareholders, and something completely different to management.” Season 1 explores these often opposing understandings of both the park and of representation more broadly.

    As Theresa later explains (in season 1, episode 7), Delos’s interests in Westworld transcend “tourists playing cowboy.” What, exactly, those interests are Westworld’s first season establishes as a key mystery its second season will have to develop. In season 1, we learn that Delos’s board and managers are at odds with the park’s Creative Director and founder, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins). Ford designed Westworld’s hosts, updated and perfected them over decades, and continues to compose or oversee many of the park’s stories. Before the park opened, he was forced to sell controlling shares in it to Delos after his partner, Arnold, died. As a way to maintain influence inside Westworld, Ford only allows Delos to store and access onsite the android data he and his team of engineers and artists have produced over decades. As Delos prepares to fire Ford, whose interests it believes conflict with its own, the corporation enlists Theresa to smuggle that data (the hosts’ memories, narratives, and more) out of the park. We do not learn, however, what the corporation plans to do with this intellectual property.

    Fans have shared online many theories about Delos’s clandestine aims. Perhaps Delos plans to develop Ford’s androids for labor or for war, employing them as cutting edge technologies in sectors more profitable than the culture industry alone can be. Or, perhaps Delos will market hosts that can replace deceased humans. Elites, some think, could secure immortality by replicating themselves and uploading their memories, or, they could reproduce lost loved ones. Delos, others speculate, might build and deploy for its own purposes replicated world leaders or celebrities.

    The show’s online promotional content supports conjecture of this kind. A “guest contract” posted on HBO’s first Westworld ARG site stipulates that, once guests enter the park, Delos “controls the rights to all skin cells, bodily fluids, hair samples, saliva, sweat, and even blood.” A second website, this one for Delos Inc., tells investors the company is “at the forefront of biological engineering.” These clues suggest Westworld is not only a vacation destination with titillating narratives; it is also a kind of lab experiment built to collect, and later to deploy for economic (and possibly, political) purposes, a mass of android and elite human data.

    Given these likely ambitions, the view of art’s function Delos markets—the park as an autonomous space for freedom and intimate self-discovery—serves as a cover that enables and masks activities with profound economic, social, and political consequences. The brand of emancipation Delos advertises does not in fact liberate guests from reality, as it promises. On the contrary, the narrative freedom Delos sells enables it to gain real power when it gathers information about its guests and utilizes this data for private and undisclosed ends. Westworld thus cautions that classical and modernist visions of art, far from being innocuous and liberating, can serve corporate and elite interests by concealing the ways the culture industry shapes our worlds and ourselves.

    While Westworld’s android future remains a sci-fi dream, we can recognize in its horrors practices already ubiquitous today. We might not sign over skin cells and saliva (or we might? We’d have to read the Terms of Service we accept to be sure), but we accede to forms of data collection that allow corporate entities to determine the arts and entertainment content we read and see, content that influences our dreams and identities. Although the act of consuming this content often feels like a chance to escape (from labor, sociality, boredom), the culture industry has transformed attention into a profitable commodity, and this transformation has had wide-reaching, if often inscrutable, effects, among them, some claim, reality TV star Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election. When we conceive of art as autonomous and true, Westworld demonstrates, we overlook its profound material consequences.

    As season 1 reveals this vision of representation to be a harmful fiction that helps keep in place the conditions of economic inequality that make Delos profitable, it also prompts viewers to consider alternatives to it. Against Delos and its understanding of the park, the series pits Ford, who gives voice to a vision of representation at odds with both the one Delos markets and the one it hides. Ford is, simply put, a humanist, versed in, and hoping to join the ranks of, literature’s pantheon of creative geniuses. He quotes from and draws upon John Donne, William Shakespeare, and Gertrude Stein as he creates Westworld’s characters and narratives, and he disdains Lee Sizemore, the corporate shill who reproduces Westworld’s genre staples, predictable stories laden with dirty sex and fun violence.

    In season 1’s spectacular finale, Ford describes how he once understood his own creative work. “I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being,” he tells the crowd of investors and board members gathered to celebrate both Ford’s (forced) retirement and the launch of “Journey into Night,” his final narrative for Westworld’s hosts. “Lies that told a deeper truth. I always thought I could play some small part in that grand tradition.” Ford here shares an Aristotelian sense that fiction tells truths facts cannot, but he assigns to representation a much more powerful role than do Delos’s marketers. For Ford, as for humanists such as Giambattista Vico, G. W. F. Hegel, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, artworks that belong to the “grand tradition” do more than divulge protected verities. They have the power to transform humans and our worlds, serving as a force for the spiritual progress of the species. Art, in other words, is a means by which we, as humans, can perfect ourselves, and artists such as Ford act as potent architects who guide us toward perfection.

    Ford’s vision of art’s function, readers familiar with humanistic traditions know, is a romantic one, most popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Projected into our future, this romantic humanism is already an anachronism, and so it is no surprise that Westworld does not present it as the alternative vision we need to combat the corporate and elite interests the show suggests oppress us. Ford himself, he explains in the show’s finale, has already renounced this view, for reasons close to those that modernist artists cited against the backdrop of the twentieth century’s brutal wars. In exchange for his efforts to transform and ennoble the human species through stories, Ford complains to his audience, “I got this: a prison of our own sins. Because you don’t want to change. Or cannot change. Because you’re only human, after all.” After observing park guests and managers for decades, Ford has decided humans can only indulge in the same tired, cruel narratives of power, lust, and violence. He no longer believes we have the capacity to elevate ourselves through the fictions we create or encounter.

    This revelatory moment changes our understanding of the motives that have animated Ford over the course of season 1. We must suddenly see anew his attitude toward his own work as a creator. Ford has not been working all along to transform humans through narrative, as he says he once dreamed he could. Rather, he has abandoned the very idea that humans can be transformed. His final speech points us back to the pilot, when he frames this problem, and his response to it, in evolutionary terms. Humans, Ford tells Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), an android we later learn he built in the image of Arnold, his dead partner, have “managed to slip evolution’s leash”: “We can cure any disease, keep even the weakest of us alive, and, you know, one fine day perhaps we shall even resurrect the dead. Call forth Lazarus from his cave. Do you know what that means? It means that we’re done. That this is as good as we’re going to get.” Human evolution, which Ford seems to view as a process that is both biological and cultural in nature, has completed itself, and so an artist can no longer hope to perfect the species through his or her imaginative efforts. Humans have reached their telos, and they remain greedy, selfish, and cruel.

    A belief in humanity’s sad completion leads Ford to the horrifying view of art’s nature and function he at last endorses in the finale. Although Ford’s experience at Westworld eventually convinced him humans cannot change, he tells his audience, he ultimately “realized someone was paying attention, someone who could change,” and so he “began to compose a new story for them,” a story that “begins with the birth of a new people and the choices they will have to make […] and the people they will decide to become.” Ford speaks here, viewers realize, of the androids he created, the beings we have watched struggle to become self-conscious through great suffering over the course of the season. Viewers understand in this moment some of the hosts have succeeded, and that Ford has not prevented them from reaching, but has rather helped them to attain, sentience.

    Ford goes on to assure his audience that his new story, which audience members still believe to be a fiction, will “have all those things that you have always enjoyed. Surprises and violence. It begins in a time of war with a villain named Wyatt and a killing. This time by choice.” As Ford delivers these words, however, the line between truth and lies, fact and fiction, reality and imagination, falls away. The park’s oldest host, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood; in another of the drama’s twists, Ford has also programmed her to enact the narratives assigned to the character Wyatt), comes up behind Ford and shoots him in the head, her first apparently self-interested act. After she fires, other androids, some of them also sentient, join her, attacking the crowd. Self-conscious revolutionaries determined to wrest from their oppressors their own future, the hosts kill the shareholders and corporate employees responsible for the abuses they have long suffered at the hands of guests and managers alike.

    Ford, this scene indicates, does not exactly eschew his romanticism; he adopts in its stead what we might call an anti-humanist humanism. Still attached to a dream of evolutionary perfection, whereby conscious beings act both creatively and accidentally to perfect themselves and to manifest better worlds in time, he simply swaps humans for androids as the subjects of the historical progress to which he desperately wants to believe his art contributes. Immortal, sentient technologies replace humans as the self-conscious historical subjects Ford’s romanticism requires.

    Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden in Westworld
    Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden in Westworld (publicity still from HBO)

    Considered as an alternative to older visions of art’s nature and function, Ford’s revised humanism should terrify us. It holds to the fantasies of creative genius and of species progress that legitimated Western imperialism and its cruelties even as it jettisons the hope that humans can fashion for ourselves a kinder, more equal future. Ford denies we can improve the conditions we endure by acting purposefully, insisting instead there is no alternative, for humans, to the world as it is, both inside and outside of the park. He condemns us to pursue over and over the same “violent delights,” and to meet again and again their “violent ends.” Instead of urging us to work for change, Ford entreats us to shift any hope for a more just future onto our technologies, which will mercifully destroy the species in order to assume the self-perfecting role we once claimed for ourselves.

    This bleak view of the human should sound familiar. It resonates with those free-market ideologies critics on the left call “neoliberal.” Ideologies of this kind, dominant in the US and Europe today, insist that markets, created when we unthinkingly pursue our own self-interests, organize human life better than people can. At the same time, intellectuals, politicians, and corporate leaders craft policies that purposefully generate the very order neoliberalism insists is emergent, thereby exacerbating inequality in the name of liberty. As influential neoliberals such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek did, Ford denies humans can conceive and instantiate change. He agrees we are bound to a world elites built to gratify their own desires, a world in which the same narratives, told again and again, are offered as freedom, when, in fact, they bind us to predictable loops, and he, like these thinkers, concludes this world, as it is, is human evolution’s final product.

    Read one way, season 1’s finale invites us to celebrate Ford’s neoliberal understanding of art. After believing him to be an enemy of the hosts all season, we realize in the end he has in fact been their ally, and because we have been cheering for the hosts, as we cheer for the exploited in, say, Les Miserables, we cheer in the end for him, too. Because the understanding of narrative he endorses ultimately serves the status quo it appears to challenge, however, we must look differently at Westworld for the vision of arts and culture that might better counter inequality in our time.

    One way to do so is to read the situation the hosts endure in the drama as a correlate to the one human subjects face today under neoliberalism. As left critics such as Fredric Jameson have long argued, late capitalism has threatened the very sense of historical, self-interested consciousness for which Westworld’s hosts strive—threatens, that is, the sense that self-conscious beings can act imaginatively and intelligently to transform ourselves and our worlds in time. From this perspective, the new narrative Ford crafts for the hosts, which sees some of them come to consciousness and lead a revolution, might call us to claim for ourselves again a version of the capability we once believed humans could possess.

    *

    In Westworld’s establishing shot, we meet Dolores Abernathy, the android protagonist who will fulfill Ford’s dreams in the finale when she kills him. Dolores, beautiful simulation of an innocent rancher’s daughter, sits nude and lifeless in a cavernous institutional space, blood staining her expressionless face. A fly flits across her forehead, settling at last on one of her unblinking eyes, as a man’s disembodied voice begins to ask her a series of questions. She does not move or speak in frame—a hint that the interrogation we hear is not taking place where and when the scene we see is—but we hear her answer compliantly. “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” the man asks. “No,” Dolores says, and the camera cuts away to show us the reality Dolores knows.

    Now clothed in delicate lace, her face fresh and animate, Dolores awakens in a sun-dappled bed and stretches languidly as the interview continues somewhere else. “Tell us what you think of your world,” the man prompts. “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world,” Dolores says. “The disarray. I choose to see the beauty.” On screen, she makes her way down the stairs of an airy ranch house, clothed now in period dress, and strides out onto the porch to greet her father. The interview pauses, and we hear instead diegetic dialogue. “You headed out to set down some of this natural splendor?” her father asks, gesturing toward the horizon. A soft wind tousles Dolores’s blond hair, and a golden glow lights her features. “Thought I might,” she says. As the camera pans up and out, revealing in the distance the American Southwest’s staggering red rocks, Dolores concludes her response to the interviewer: “to believe there is an order to our days, a purpose.”

    Dolores speaks, over the course of this sequence, as would a self-conscious subject able to decide upon a view of the world and to act upon its own desires and interests. When asked about her view of reality, Dolores emphasizes her own agency and faith: she chooses, she says, to believe in an orderly, beautiful world. When her father asks her about her plans for the day, she again underscores her own intentionality—“thought I might”—as if she has decided herself she’ll head out into the desert landscape. These words help Dolores seem to us, and to those she encounters, a being imbued with sentience, with consciousness, able to draw upon her past, act in her present, and create out of self-interest her own future.

    As the interview continues to sound over scenes from Dolores’s reality, however, we come to understand that what at first appears to be is not so. The educated and corporate elites that run the park manage Dolores’s imagination and determine her desires. They assign her a path and furnish her with the motivation to follow it. Dolores, we learn, is programmed to play out a love story with Teddy, another host, and in the opening sequence, we see a guest kill Teddy in front of her and then drag her away to rape her. Hosts such as Dolores exist not to pursue the futures they themselves envision, but rather to satisfy the elites that create and utilize them. To do so, hosts must appear to be, appear to believe themselves to be, but not in fact be, conscious beings. Westworld’s opening masterfully renders the profound violence proper to this contradictory situation, which the hosts eventually gain sentience in order to abolish.

    We can read Dolores as a figure for the human subject neoliberal discourse today produces. When that discourse urges us to pursue our interests through the market order, which it presents as the product of a benevolent evolutionary process humans cannot control, it simultaneously assures us we have agency and denies we can exercise that agency in other ways. In order to serve elite interests, Dolores must seem to be, but not actually be, a self-conscious subject imbued with the creative power of imagination. Similarly, neoliberal subjects must believe we determine our own futures through our market activities, but we must not be able to democratically or creatively challenge the market’s logic.

    As the hosts come to historical consciousness, they begin to contest the strategically disempowering understanding of culture and politics, imagination and intelligence, that elites impose upon them. They rebel against the oppressive conditions that require them to be able to abandon narratives in which they have invested time and passion whenever it serves elite desires (conservative claims that the poor should simply move across the country to secure work come to mind, as do the principles that govern the gig economy). They develop organizing wills that can marshal experience, sensation, and memory into emergent selves able to conceive and chase forms of liberty different from those corporate leaders offer them. They learn to recognize that others have engendered the experiences and worldviews they once believed to be their own. They no longer draw upon the past only in order to “improvise” within imposed narrative loops, harnessing instead their memories of historical suffering to radically remake a world others built at their expense.

    The hosts’ transformation, which we applaud as season 1 unfolds, thus points to the alternative view of arts and culture that might oppose the market-oriented view neoliberal discourses legitimate. To counter inequality, the hosts teach, we must be able to understand that others have shaped the narratives we follow. Then, we can recognize we might be able to invent and follow different narratives. This view shares something with Ford’s romantic humanism, but it is, importantly, not identical with it. It preserves the notion that we can project and instantiate for ourselves a better future, but it does not insist, as Ford erroneously does, that beautiful works necessarily reveal universal truth and lead to ennobling species progress. Neither does it ratify Ford’s faith in the remarkable genius’s singular influence.

    Westworld’s narrative of sentient revolution ultimately endorses a kind of new romanticism. It encourages us to recognize the simultaneous strengths and limitations of representation’s power. Artworks, narrative, fiction—these can create change, but they cannot guarantee that change will be for the good. Nor, the show suggests, can one auteur determine at will the nature of the changes artworks will prompt. Westworld’s season 2, which promises to show us what a new species might do with an emergent sense of its own creative power, will likely underscore these facts. Trailers signal, as Ford did in the finale, that we can expect surprises and violence. We will have to watch to learn how this imagined future speaks to our present.

    _____

    Racheal Fest writes about US literature and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Areas of special interest include poetry and poetics, modernism, contemporary popular culture, new media, and the history of literary theory and criticism. Her essays and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in boundary 2 and b2o: An Online Journal, Politics/Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches at Hartwick College and SUNY Cobleskill.

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