Border studies are somewhat obsessed with issues of fluidity and mobility. This may be the reason why many post-Soviet borders, which have hardened after the collapse of the Soviet Union remain largely understudied (for an important exception, see Reeves 2014). The consolidation of these borders has not always been driven by militaristic claims or state security concerns, but has also been enacted “from below”. In his study of the Turkish-Georgian border, Mathijs Pelkmans (2006) has shown how the Laz people, a population divided by Soviet borders, emphatically embraced the opportunity to reunite with their kinfolk once the border was opened in the wake of the “collapse” of the Soviet Union, only to realize that decades of spatial separation had lead to cultural and social alienation between the two groups. When such experiences of alienation became overwhelming, Pelkmans argues, the Laz on both sides of the borders tried to keep their cross-border neighbors away, thus reinforcing the border by generating cultural and social barriers by transforming taken-for-granted practices of hospitality into thinly-veiled expressions of animosity.
The border between Georgia and the Russian Federation in the Caucasian mountains is another such example, albeit with a different twist. While in the case of the Turkish-Georgian border the locals took an interest in tightening the border as a means of keeping distance from those on the other side, most people living on the Georgian-Russian border had no such interest. A case in point are the Tushetians, a subgroup of the Georgians who speak a dialect of the Georgian language and historically reside in a remote mountainous area bordering Chechnya and Dagestan within the contemporary borders of the Russian Federation. Presently consisting of about 15,000 inhabitants, many Tushetians live in the Georgian capital Tbilisi or abroad as labor migrants. Many still engage in a traditional sheep breeding economy, making use of summer pastures in the Caucasian highlands and winter pastures in the lowlands. These winter pastures are situated on the border with Azerbaijan, but formerly also included lands on the other side of the border in Dagestan. In order to support these traditional economic forms, Tushetians continue to engage in trade across a fluid northern border.
However, when the Soviet Union began to dissolve, they began patrol this border, dressing in Soviet uniforms provided with Georgian state emblems and eventually becoming officially sanctioned as the first official border guards of the Georgian state. How did this come about? The following sketch of the history of the policing of the border between Northeast Georgia and the Russian Federation is meant to illustrate the captivating effect of putting on a uniform and acting in the name of the state.
Mobilisation
Mutual raids have been frequent events for villagers in the alpine regions of the Caucasus, as testified by the numerous defence towers and castles that provided at least temporary shelter for those attacked during such incursions. The attackers were often neighbours, located in adjacent villages, but belonged to different ethnic groups. One such example considers a mountainous region stretching along the northeast range separating the North from the South Caucasus – and the Russian Federation from the republic of Georgia. On the southern side, this region is inhabited by Tushetians; while the residents of the northern side belong to one of the many ethnic groups of Dagestan and are predominantly Muslim. Despite nominal differences in religious affiliation, Tushetians and their neighbours to the north share many cultural practices as well as customary law.
Under the Soviet Union, both sides and their respective populations belonged to the same state. And although it is said that the chopped-off hands of enemies displayed on Tushetian house walls as trophies were not infrequent sights well into the 20th century, at least in the last decades of the Soviet Union, the practice of raiding had practically come to an end. When the Soviet state started to break apart around 1990, the practice of raiding returned. The population most affected were the Tushetians, because most of them resided in the lowlands for much of the year, due to their traditional economic practice of transhumance (a form of mobile pastoralism based on a seasonal movement of livestock). Another decisive factors was a Soviet resettlement program in the 1950s that declared that remote regions in Georgia such as Tusheti had no viable economic prospects (neperspektivnye) and forced the inhabitants to resettle in more “promising” regions for economic development (Pallot 1990: 657–660, Jähnig 1983: 38, 52). By contrast, their northern neighbours in Dagestan, called “Leks” by the Tushetians, lived in the region year long. Tushetians, in turn, blamed the “Leks” for breaking into their houses and stealing valuables, as well as for cattle theft. According to Tushetian contemporary witnesses the raids increased during the following winter of 1991, requiring action to be taken.
Tushetian men began to patrol the border, yet could not entirely control it, due to a lack of manpower and the roughness of the terrain. In order to address this problem, Tushetian representatives got in touch with the Georgian state ministry of defence. The latter was only gradually re-establishing itself after the civil war of 1991/92, during which criminal gangs had taken control over large portions of the military and police forces. Besides, the security, or even the very existence of the Georgian state was threatened by violent conflicts with the Russian Federation, which took place in the secessionist, self-proclaimed republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia during this period. Within this context, any initiative to control the border was welcomed by the Georgian state authorities. Consequently, the Tushetian brigades got officially sanctioned as the first border guards of post-Soviet Georgia by the Georgian ministry of defence. Their first uniforms still largely stemmed from the Soviet period, but they received some official looking badges and better equipment from the Georgian capital Tbilisi – and, more importantly, the authorisation to represent a state.
In addition to policing the border, however, the Tushetians took another action to improve the situation: the resumption of micro-diplomatic ties with their northern neighbours. For this purpose, the head of the Tushetian council (sabch’o), the local political representative body that derived from its Soviet predecessor and maintained its name, got in touch with representatives from Dagestani villages where he expected the raiders to live. Those representatives were soldiers of higher rank or village administrators (or both), but the crucial factor for their informal political authority was their status as elders. All the elders in a community taken together constituted an institution referred to as jamaat.[1]
Preserved in the archive of the Tushetian village council, two protocols (dated 1991 and 1994) recounted meetings of administrative bodies in Dagestan and eight letters written in Russian, which were exchanged between the council of Tusheti and the jamaat of Xusheti[2] between 1993 and 1995. These protocols and letters document political and legal procedures for criminal cases. The first initiative was taken by a Tushetian delegation sent to the region of Xusheti in order to contact the local jamaat. Acknowledging the complaints of their southern neighbours, the elders promised to punish the raiders and to prevent future criminal acts. For this purpose, they revived a pre-Soviet tradition that required every adult male villager to swear on the Qur’an that they would refrain from attacking the Tushetians and seizing their property. Additionally, they reported 13 names of robbers to the Tushetian council and told the council to get in touch with state representatives in Makhachkala (capital of Dagestan) “in order to punish severely the robbers by the [civil] law.”[3] The cases of cattle theft were also resolved by means of face-to-face negotiations, sometimes with the aid of the Tushetian border guards. As stated in a letter from “the administrator of Xusheti” from 1995, the Tushetian border guards kept two cows from their northern neighbours as a kind of deposit for cattle stolen and held on the other side of the border.
Immobilisation
The events of 11 September 2001 had a profound impact on politics across the world, including in Tusheti. In addition to Russian claims that Chechen fighters were taking refuge in the Georgian mountains during the second Chechen-Russian since 1999 and that the Georgian state was either unwilling or incapable of controlling its borders, now Al Qaida and even Bin Laden personally were suspected of residing on Georgian territory. The hot spot of the day was Pankisi, a valley neighbouring Tusheti and bordering Chechnya. The local population, who go by the name Kists, had fled from Chechnya in the 19th century, and many of them maintained close ties to relatives on the northern side of the Caucasus mountains.
In the second half of the 1990s, the Georgian government effectively lost control over this region. There was widespread corruption involving Georgian state officials, drug trafficking, money laundering, reports of radical Muslim propaganda, and military training for Chechen fighters and their allies. In the years to come, an Arab and an Algerian citizen residing in Pankisi without Georgian visas were imprisoned by Georgian police forces. Some of the foreign trained fighters also fought in the second Chechen war.
The Georgian government at that time attempted to dismiss the accusations, but with limited success. As the Russian government threatened to invade Georgia in order to arrest the Chechen and Muslim fighters, then president Shevardnadze appealed to the US government for support. With its strategic interest in the Caucasus and support for the Georgian political orientation towards the West, the US provided assistance in the form of military aid and training. In spring 2002, approximately 200 Special Operations Forces were sent to train and equip four 300-man Georgian battalions with light weapons, vehicles and communication devices. With this kind of support, the Georgian army was able to invade the Pankisi gorge in summer 2002 and reassert state control.
The Georgian military and its capacity to control its national borders were monitored and fostered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE). Having already started their mission to Georgia in 1992, the OSCE was mandated to observe and report on movement across parts of the border between Georgia and the Russian Federation from late 1999 until the end of 2004. While the area of operation initially only covered the border between Georgia and the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation, it was extended in subsequent years to the Ingush and Dagestan segments of the Georgian-Russian border.
In the heyday of the OSCE mission to Georgia, plenty of employees from all over Europe had focused their binoculars on the Russian side of the border. The monitors could testify that any kind of border transgression had clearly come to an end. With the beginning of the new millennium, the two sides of the Caucasus had been effectively disconnected. Locals from the Northern Caucasus could no longer go shopping in Omalo, as they had done in the 1990s, and the Georgian shepherds could no longer use pastures in Dagestan, as they had done for centuries. Any kind of trans-boundary diplomacy had to be enacted via state authorities and direct negotiations were no longer possible. Moreover, the Tushetians could no longer decide for themselves whom to allow on their territory and whom to reject.
In the course of an OSCE training program – and possibly related to it – the organisational structure of the border guards underwent significant changes. In 2006, their affiliation was changed from military to police, thus bringing the personnel under control of the Georgian ministry of internal affairs and thus coordinating their actions with other forms of policing. In recent years, the recruiting and placement criteria have also altered. In the beginning, local affiliation was seen as an advantage for border guards because of the local expertise and social embeddedness of the soldiers. After a while, this policy was dismissed as disadvantageous. Consequently, the border guards today come from all parts of Georgia, with Tushetians in the minority. What began as an effort to police the border “from below” ended (and in some ways resulted) in a consolidation of policing authority in state hands.
Conclusion
The Georgian state the Tushetians sought to protect was envisioned as both a presence and an absence: a presence in the performances of physical control over territory, an absence in the practice of regulating the social, religious and legal relations with the neighbours. But the state the Tushetians invoked once they put on Georgian uniforms was a captivating one that, over the course of time, didn’t make any concessions: The intentions of its subjects ended at the borders it defined. The uniform the Tushetians voluntarily assumed in order to strengthen their status, in turn, became a captivating force of their own dispossession. Whereas initially, they hoped to increase their bargaining position in a more structured relationship with their neighbours, they later had to realize that representing a state can take various meanings in various contexts with different, sometimes paralyzing consequences. One such consequence was that Tushetians could no longer attend religious festivals alongside their Muslim neighbours, as they have done for centuries. Another consequence was that they were no longer capable of settling conflicts directly with their counterparts on the other side of the border, and that routinized practices of creating social bonds across lines of ethnic, religious and regional affiliation such as sworn brotherhood could no longer be practiced.
What this case also illustrates is that acting and speaking in the name of the state occasionally causes unanticipated and unwanted consequences. What was initially expected to increase the scope of agency eventually paved the way for its very limitation. One obvious reason for this is that uniforms reproduce chains of command, and thus their use inadvertently stratified and solidified a hierarchical system. In the turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and re-making of statehood in post-Soviet Georgia, central authority was rather weak and left much room for non-state actors to take state affairs in their own hands; this was the case for Tushetians. With the consolidation of centralized power, their superiors from the Georgian government based in the Georgian capital prioritized security concerns over local interests. This quest for security, in turn, was supported by Georgia’s Western allies such as the European Union and particularly the Unites States.
Moreover, Tushetians began to invoke a new conception of statehood during this period. For centuries, Tushetians have guarded the northern border to Georgia, alongside other groups who live in the Caucasian mountains such as Khevsurs. In addition to the presence of self-armed forces ready to ward-off incursions, signal towers were erected by the locals, but not least in the interest of the political power holders in the lowlands to communicate the danger of an approaching enemy. Such border guarding, however, consolidated these local populations’ autonomy vis-à-vis the state centre by increasing their bargaining power because they acted outside of a chain of command. The Georgian state which began to consolidate amidst the chaos of the 1990s, however, was unwilling to accept these fluidity borders. In an ironic twist, Tushetians provided the very legibility needed to pave the way for the state apparatus to regulate their lives(cf. Scott 1998).
Florian Mühlfried is full professor for social anthropology at the Ilia State University in Georgia. His publications include the monographs Mistrust: A Global Perspective (2019) and Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (2014) as well as the co-edited volumes Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus (2018) and Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (2012).
Works Cited
Jähnig, Wolfgang. 1983. Die Siedlungsplanung im ländlichen Raum der Sowjetunion mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Konzepts der ‘Agrostadt’. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot.
Mühlfried, Florian. 2014. Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia. Oxford, New York: Berghahn.
Pallot, Judith. 1990. „Rural Depopulation and the Restoration of the Russian Village under Gorbachev.“ Soviet Studies 42 (2): 655–674.
Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Reeves, Madeleine. 2013. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
References
[1] For more details on the history and functions of these jamaats, see Mühlfried 2014: 133ff.
[2] Xusheti (also called Iusheti in one letter) is an unofficial name of a region in Dagestan bordering Tusheti. It is used in the letters as a self-designation of the respective jamaat, and by the Tushetians in colloquial conversations. However, it is not testified for in official sources.
[3] It is unknown to me, if this punishment was ever enacted. I also cannot verify if they were punished by the jamaat according to religious law, as stated by the head of the Tushetian council in an interview.
While I have never been one for fieldwork, it does occur to me that I have had several encounters with the post-Soviet police; fortunately, they were all in the 1990s, when the stakes for such incidents were relatively low. Now I see that, when I was sitting in a Moscow militia van in 1999 after failing to produce documents 100 feet from my rented apartment, I should have anticipated that 21 years later, my need for data could have been satisfied if I had just asked the right questions.
Instead, I just passed the time giving unsatisfactory answers to inquiries about my background until the cop finally asked straight out if I was Jewish. This had nothing to do with any legal jeopardy I might have been in, and admitting to being Jewish would not have gotten me into any trouble. Quite the contrary: I was usually stopped by police in their ongoing attempts to round up suspicious “people of Caucasian nationality” (“Do you ever stop blonds?” I asked once, but only after brandishing my boss-level immunity in the form of the magic American passport that I had neglected to carry the day of the police van incident). The Jewish Question (to coin a phrase) was more a matter of satisfying a mutual, if inconsequential need: his to peg my ethnicity, and mine to make him say it. After most likely missing several hints about possible bribes, I was let go, with a stern warning to carry my passport with me at all times.
All of which is to say that, in interacting with the post-Soviet militia, I never was quite sure what sort of institution I was dealing with. Were they supposed to be stopping crime, or were they the Russian equivalent of ICE, keeping the city safe from the threat of undocumented dark hair? Besides doing a poor job of ethnic profiling (they really could have learned a lot from their much more efficiently racist counterparts in the U.S.), and despite doing an even worse job at catching criminals (if the news was any indication), what were they really for?
But the police are only one half of the theme of this collection of essays; the other is prisons. Policing and prisons seem like an obvious pairing, like love and marriage (if only from a post-divorce point of view). But in terms of their symbolic resonance for the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, they are not equal partners. As portrayed by critics and dissidents, the Soviet prison camp system was the country’s master metaphor: the USSR was one vast carceral “zone,” but with less freedom of speech. It worked well with the American Cold War metaphor of the Soviet Union as a penitentiary for “captive nations.” I bring these ideas up not to endorse them; the portion of the non-incarcerated Soviet population that saw themselves as “prisoners” was probably miniscule. The power of these metaphors did not reside in their empirical accuracy, but in their rhetorical force. From an oppositional point of view, they made intuitive sense.
But that metaphorical power rested on the dissident’s familiar distinction between the “political” criminal and the “real” criminal. Well before the Soviet Union ended, a romantic subculture surrounding the thieves’ prison life made its way outside the “zone,” particularly in the form of the blatnaya pesnia, a musical genre glorifying th life of the outlaw. By the 1990s, prison became the source of important segments of popular culture: providing slang, serving as the setting for various flavors of criminal melodrama, and inspiring fashions and behaviors among the gopniki in a rough analog to the prison/hip-hop connection.
It was only in the shift from medium- to high-Putinism that prison started once again to make inroads into the public political consciousness, thanks to high-profile cases (Khodorkovsky, Magnitsky, Pussy Riot). The post-Pussy Riot “Media Zona” project is important not just for the obvious reason (activism on behalf of the incarcerated), but also for the shear linguistic novelty of putting those two words (“Media” and “Zone”) together. As for their other activist endeavor, “Zona prava” (Zone of Law), the irony speaks for itself.
The path of the “police” from the late-Soviet to the post-Soviet is more complicated. I would like to put forward the proposition that the policeas police occupied only a small corner of the country’s psychic real estate; the USSR was relatively short on police, but long on policing.
Technically, there were no police, but rather the militia. The term initially signaled a break with the Tsarist-era police, and carried a whiff of spontaneous self-organization (even if that whiff was deceptive). Favoring a military-style hierarchy to a greater extent than its Western counterparts, the militia exemplified the Soviet tendency to turn the military into the template for an unofficial Table of Ranks: you get to be a general, and you get to be a general–everyone gets to be a general!
In the (technical) absence of police, the USSR had hypertrophied police functions, shared not only by those very same military and militarized bodies (including, but not limited to, the KGB), but also Party structures, enterprises, and medical authorities. The fight against crime (as we would understand the word) was never the cornerstone. If statistics have even minimal validity, crime was not a significant, widespread problem, or at least not framed as such. Instead, these institutions policed the borders of the behaviorally and ideologically permissible. Crossing certain lines led to serious policing of the violators, but by bodies that were not, technically, police. It was not that all cops were bastards, but that all bastards were, in some way or another, cops.
Some, but not all of this changes after 1991. As crime becomes central to the news, it also colonizes popular entertainment: a perceived boom in robbers yields a similar growth in cops. The popularity of crime genres was already apparent in Soviet times, but kept under wraps by limited publication and scant imports of foreign crime film and fiction, and the ideological strictures that limited the ability to represent crime as a home-made phenomenon. Actual cops (that is, militiamen) become heroes and anti-heroes, from the early days of the television series Menty (Ulitsy razbitykh fonarei) (Cops/Broken Streetlights) (1998-2019) down to the more recent series Mazhor (inexplicably plucked out of the Russian linguistic ghetto by Netflix and renamed Silver Spoon) (2014-).
At the same time, the militia (now police) are more recognizable as a problem. It is the various divisions of the police and similar state organizations who are responsible for arresting and beating protesters, for example. The police are now more appropriate as a symbol of state repression, but they still do not have a monopoly on policing. Those same repressive functions exercised by schools, enterprises, and medical establishments still have a policing role. In the case of the first two, it is they who are still responsible for mobilizing their constituencies to vote “correctly,” for example, while medical experts continue to be called upon to declare (or try to declare) inconvenient people “unfit.” If this all sounds Foucauldian, I apologize, because I intend for it to be more along the lines of “Foucault-adjacent.” These institutions do not constitute power/knowledge, but rather enforce it. In other words, they police.
As for the police/militia themselves, post-Soviet conditions require a level of visibility from them that was not as necessary under Late Socialism. The police, and particularly OMON (the Russian equivalent of SWAT) are deployed not just operationally, but operatically, that is, performatively. With a dynamic weirdly inverted later by Pussy Riot, their masked anonymity and displays of overwhelming superior force help constitute the Putinist paradigm of strength and order. And technically, the Russian police, even when local, are the ground-level instantiation of a federal authority (serving within the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD)). In the state imaginary, federal authority replicates itself anywhere and everywhere, a structure that is as much fractal as it is hierarchical.
The police function as both a symbol of state biopower and its most immediate physical manifestation. Their bodies are sacred and untouchable in a way that those of ordinary citizens are not; think of the Bolotnaya Square Trial, where no officer got in trouble for beating protesters, but protesters were prosecuted for the equivalent of hurting the cops’ fists with their faces.[i] In such an unequal contest between differently valued and empowered bodies, what kind of resistance is available?
To address this question, I want to end my talk by bringing in Actionism, and in particular, the collective known as Voina.[ii] The immediate audience for most of Voina’s actions in the Medvedev years (the feast in the subway car, the cats thrown at McDonald’s cashiers, and so on) are the by-standers: this is art that leverages physical presence and emphasizes the use of bodies in space (as they did during the Biological Museum orgy).[iii] The second, much larger audience, is on the Internet—most of what they did would have been local and ephemeral without video uploads. But there is a third audience whose role is undeniable, even if that audience is not always physically present: law enforcement.
Law enforcement, or, put more simply, the police, are always a potential restraint on their activities. In fact, I would argue that the police play the same role of productive restriction as meter and rhyme do for traditional poetry: nearly all of Voina’s performances took place within short time frames limited by the inevitable arrival of the police. Either the police’s arrival was part of the act, or a successful action relied on the complementary distribution of Actionist bodies and police bodies: it all worked out as long as they weren’t in the same place at the same time.
Voina’s last action, which now looks like a transitional, pupal stage between the larva of Voina and the butterfly of Pussy Riot, exposes the dangers in conflating the police as symbol and the police as body. “Commemorating” the new law transforming the militia into the police, “Kiss the Pig,” consisted of female members of Voina (including Nadia Tolokonnikova and Katia Samutsevich, two future Pussy Riot trial defendants) surprising female cops and kissing them on the lips without permission. Though Tolokonnikova says she wanted men involved, this was really the only arrangement unlikely to end in serious physical violence: women kissing male cops could not be sure of getting away safely, men kissing female cops would be arrested for assault, and men kissing male cops would be lucky to escape with their lives. Faced with the obvious (and in my opinion, entirely valid) criticism that what she and her colleagues were doing was a kind of sexual assault, Tolokonnikova responded that when a person puts on a cop’s uniform, they stop being a person and become only a cop.
In other words, she sees the symbolic cop as overriding the physical cop. Cops, like kings, have two bodies, but for the purposes of the action, only one of them really matters: the physical body is exploited as a weakness in the symbolic cop body. In a way, this is a brilliant reductio ad absurdum of the symbolic prominence that the police have attained under High Putinism. But it also means assenting to that very logic and deploying personal biological power in the cause of the negation of state biopower. This is a conundrum that cannot be solved, even by performance art. It is a losing proposition, transforming the political protester into something akin to an actual criminal, thereby validating the state’s framework.
When I was working on my book Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power (2020), this was the only moment when I was truly disappointed in Tolokonnikova. For the most part, Actionists and the 2012 protesters had avoided the trap of binary, Manichaean thinking that caught so many Soviet-era dissidents (who, in their crusade for freedom, developed an ideologically rigid maximalism and became the mirror image of the regime they despised). The demonstrators and Actionists sidestepped this trap through absurdity, but also came close to the bodily self-sacrifice of the non-violence of Gandhi and King.
The final irony is that the Actionist who seemed to literally embody this ethos was Pavel Pavlensky, notorious, for among other things, nailing his own scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square. But now his former partner Oksana Shalygina has written a book detailing the sadistic abuse she suffered at his hands. Shalgyina ends her interview with Wonderzine with a statement that says it all:
He was sincere in his struggle, but he was the same [repressive] authority as the one he fought against.
Power, authority, the law –they are like quicksand: the more you fight, the more you are sucked in. Or, in the words of Sonny Curtis and the Crickets: I fought the law and the law won.
Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. His most recent books include Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (winner of the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinich brook prize and the 2020 AATSEEL book prize), and Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and ViralVideo (2022).
Works Cited
Borenstein, Eliot. 2020. Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power. London: Bloomsbury.
Taratura, Iuliia. 2020 “’Eto byli ne bytovye izbieniia, a sadizm’: Oksana Shalygina o zhizni s Petrom Pavlenskim.” Wonderzine, November 2. https://www.wonderzine.com/wonderzine/life/life-interview/253377-intervyu-oksana
References
[i] The case refers to a protest that took place in Moscow on May 6, 2012. More than thirty protesters were charged with various offense, twelve of whom received prison sentences from two to four and a half years.
[ii] Founded in 2007, Voina was a political performance art group with branches in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.
[iii] On February 29, 2008, right before Dmitry Medvedev was elected president, 10 members of Voina protested by having sex in the Moscow Timiryazev Museum of Biology.
This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
——Ralph Waldo Emerson
Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be “excluded” from circulation.
——Marjorie Perloff
When a mother gives an egg to her child and says “egg” at the same time, she is helping her child establish “a link” between language and the world. But what is the nature of this link? As the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explained, langue (by which he meant particular languages, like French, or English, or Mandarin Chinese) is a system of signs which parcels out the world of sense into discretely sayable things. The signs that comprise this system are complex: they are composed of a signifier – the acoustical image, as he called it, that is formed from a combination of a given language’s phonemes – and a signified – the conceptual image or item recalled and indivisibly linked with that string of phonemes. The linguistic sign is not the thing in the world which it names.[1] In the scene described, the mother teaches the child the link between all three elements in a single stroke, bringing the child irrevocably into the world of language – both the particular language, through which this introduction is made, and language in general, what Saussure called langage. Eventually, the child will learn to draw a self-conscious distinction between language and the world which it denominates, between what is sometimes called the linguistic functions of use and mention, as when he refers to ‘egg’: not the reproductive ovum and its nutriment, but the three-letter word spelled /e/g/g/. The creation of these links is the foundation for all human thinking, upon and out of which all of our most complicated thoughts are built. It is from the perspective of these links that we can examine some of the most pressing questions concerning what I will call international poetics, the communication of innovations and norms within and between the poetry of particular languages and cultures, and beyond.[2]
The best recorded story to demonstrate how the first links between a signified, a signifier, and the real world are created is that of Helen Keller. As she recalled: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”[3 In this passage, Keller vividly describes the moment when “the link” between the word “water”, and the wonderful cool flowing water of the world that was impressed upon on her mind. Though the signifier of the linguistic sign is objective, common to all speakers of a language, the cognitive image to which it is linked, and the emotional associations it bears, are personal, subjective and changeable. The significance of this division between the objective elements of language, and the subjective half to which they are bound and supported, is significant to the study of poetics.
T.S. Eliot’s theory of an “objective correlative” is a case in point. He states: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”[4] Eliot is correct in suggesting that such an emotion can be “evoked”. However, it is mistaken to assume that “the link” between “the evoker” and “the evoked” is objective. In fact, as exemplified in the case of Helen Keller above, the emotional association with the image of a particular object in one’s mind is formed by a combination of personal experience and collective instruction, the results of which are at once common enough to allow communication among speakers, yet irreducibly individual, and variable among one another, such that we can never know if our signifieds are identical to each other’s. This is indeed one of the great mysteries and miracles of language. Beyond this brute difference of other minds, there are the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of experience that contribute to the formation of our sense of our language. For Helen Keller, the emotional response evoked by the word “water” included the unique joy and enlightenment she experienced when she learned the word. The word retained for her a sense of the discovery of its link to the world. Another reader, one perhaps not deprived of their senses in the way Keller was, might have a completely different emotional response to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” not only with respect to other readers, but to the artist endeavoring to evoke the objective correlative itself.
Yet people do share certain common experience, which is what makes Eliot’s theory possible in the first place. All human beings, being human, share certain life experiences and outlooks upon the world that enable them to enjoy the same literary works. The notion of a classic work, enjoyed by people of all nations around the world, is tacit proof of the commonalities across regional differences that make international literary and artistic success possible. People of the same national or cultural background will of course share more personal experience than those of different national or cultural backgrounds. There are artistic works that are highly favored in one culture while not well regarded in others. A good example is the novel A Dream of Red Mansions (《红楼梦》，1744-1754)[5] which is regarded as the best novel ever written in Chinese, yet hardly read in the west.
Literature often serves a pedagogical function. The degree to which works are read, and continue to enjoy success, often depends on their ability to continue to teach readers something about themselves, and their world. Ezra Pound, another remarkable theorist of literature (and poet), is among the most vociferous exponents of this theory of literary efficacy. He vividly describes the rewards a fruitful reading experience offers as “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[6] Indeed, rewarding reading experiences are those that enlighten and develop our minds, stimulating them to great satisfaction. At the root of any literary judgment, the overall motive force by which literary traditions are sustained, is this affective dimension of reading. To read in an engaged way, to persist in reading, is to be somehow moved by it.
How does this affective core of reading, which binds traditions and communities together in spite of their differences and distances, hold for the international communication of modern poetry, not least when even the most highly experienced reader of one culture can feel lost in the works of another. Bewilderment occurs not just with respect to the idiomatic sense of another language and culture but, when it comes to poetry especially, the ways in which an artist plays and puns with every level of that language. A story told by the distinguished scholar Huang Yunte about his colleague Zhang Ziqing, is illustrative. Reading Charles Bernstein’s poem “Fear of Flipping,” Zhang persistently asked the poet for the lexical meaning of the words in the poem. Huang explained, “the poet is more invested in the ring of echoes of wall, ball, fall, all, and even the half- rhyming repel, than the lexical meaning of these words. The ricochet of sounds and syllables, creating the titular fear of flipping, like a flip or slip of tongue, looks to walls to keep it inside or floors to hold it up.”[7] In other words, Bernstein is experimenting with the sonic dimension of poetic lines; indeed, one could say that the ‘meaning’ of his verse here is produced by his play effects with the reverberation of rhyming syllables across the poem. Poetic meaning is therefore not restricted to, or even primarily, lexical here. The title of the poem sets the terms for this play by punning on the phrase “fear of falling,” a substitution of one term / phobia for another, which flips the sense of the phrase on its head. The echoing internal rhymes create a verbal image which gives shape and body to this gesture of flipping, retaining the ghost of the original phrase even as it ricochets across the altered soundscape of the lines. This practice will no doubt be recognizable to readers who are familiar with the poetics of the Language School. The play serves as a framework for linking mind and world beyond and between the confines of individual languages, and is definitive of Bernstein’s practice.
Huang Yunte’s interpretation is not difficult to understand. However, it was wholly foreign to Zhang Ziqing, and would almost certainly be to anyone who did not come to Bernstein’s work with the framework of sound and cognitive play in mind. Modern poetry like his is not unique in being theory-laden – that is, constructed and expounded according to the unique poetics of its practitioners. Nevertheless, modern poetry and poetic theories are two sides of a coin; they stand by working together – all the more so as poetry becomes esoteric in form, further removed from the conventions of ordinary language use, and governed increasingly by rules of composition unique to it. Without knowledge of the theories which govern such an esoteric art, therefore, one can find oneself at sea while reading a modern poem.[8] This is especially true of poetry where innovation does not occur at the lexical level either: indeed, where the poetry at stake is not a matter of lexical play. The divergence of modern poetry from the rules which governed previous traditions – rules of a more subtle kind of artifice intelligible to a broader literate class – has made the dissemination of its doctrines and theories a necessary part of its reception and interpretation. The difficulty a lay but native reader faces with work like Bernstein’s is exacerbated in the international context, where neither fluency in the language of composition, nor education within a broadest concept of the originating culture, can serve as sure guides. It is paramount that Chinese scholars introduce both modern poetry and modern poetic theories together, teaching them as two facets of the same literary phenomenon.
Many modern poems make good sense in a lot of ways other than the traditional lexical one, which is why they seem quite difficult to understand. T. S. Eliot once said: “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”[9] Indeed, modern poetry is as difficult to comprehend as modern civilization. The difficulties are comparable, mimetic even, in so far as the poet is driven, in Eliot’s reasoning, by a vocational maxim to both reflect and train the sensibility of his audience to his work through the dislocations of language he performs. The difficulty of modern poetry is a difficulty inherent in its context: modern civilization. What of its value, the other aspect (ever present) of Eliot’s judgment. A difficult poem is good not because it is difficult. In fact, the difficulty of many poems is not that difficulty of modernity refracted, but rather a failure to adequately make sense of the incoherence the poet intuits. It is a subtle difference, one with which Eliot was principally concerned. A difficult poem is good only when it creates one more possibility, “forcing language into meaning,” in an unconventional way. Again,“Fear of Flipping” is exemplary. From the perspective of linking, it is an exploration of more possible ways to make new, and possibly more efficient, thought ways and patterns. The poem’s difficulty is likewise a function of the way in which it is approached. Though Eliot would demur to such a consequentialist proposition, perhaps the test of a difficult poem’s quality may be the very satisfaction of mind, its inspiration and development, that has affectively and cognitively bound generations of poetry readers to one another in a tradition millennia-old, and world-wide.[10]
What then of the transposition of these difficult poems into foreign contexts. From one perspective, it would be easy to conclude that poems like“Fear of Flipping” simply cannot be translated into Chinese. Semantics are not what a translator ought to target here, yet there are no characters in the Chinese language that reproduce the poem’s soundscape either: wall, ball, fall, all, and repel, are constructions of the sound system of English. Chinese phonology simply does not permit their formation. Yet this perspective is impoverished, for the link the poem creates (the link which is its essential, creative practice and energy) is certainly “translatable.” The poem’s signature effect, its ‘fear of flipping’ so to speak, can be reached in the target language of Chinese, and the minds of readers from this or another culture, like those of its author and his native culture, can be enlightened and developed by a translation which ‘translates’ those effects. From the linking perspective, the reward for reading a poem is to build up some new and better links, so that the minds of its readers can grow. In bringing, i.e., “translating”, poems like “Fear of Flipping” to readers in China, we need to explicate them in detail, line by line, giving more detailed interpretations than what Huang Yunte does in his essay; but we also must consider the general theory and framework of mind that the poem conjures. For it is only by doing both that Chinese readers will be rewarded in their encounter with the difficulty of works like those of Bernstein, or his Language School peers. This is the true project and mission of translation.[11] To deal with such poems that stand closely with the linguistic features of the particular language in which it is written that cannot be replicated in Chinese, the strategy for translation is not to focus on the technical details of linguistic features, but on helping readers in China in understanding the ways, i.e., the frameworks of mind presented in the poems, so that they could not only understand them but also create links in Chinese in the same spirit – and to replicate the features where possible, according to the rules of Chinese.
Marjorie Perloff has noted: “Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be ‘excluded’ from circulation.”[12] In other words, the contribution Bernstein’s works have made is not only to serve an individual reader by promoting his/her intellectual and emotional growth, but also, and more importantly, to serve contemporary American language and culture as a whole. With poems like“Fear of Flipping”, Bernstein has been constructing and reconstructing some delicate links to promote the growth of contemporary American thought capacity. That is to say, his work has contributed to the growth of the thinking capacity of the American cultural being, which, if well “translated”, can help other cultural beings develop in similar, relevant areas too.
Different from lyrics, narrative works, both in verse and prose, tell stories that define the formation of certain links, as well as the associated emotions, so that they can often be translated in the traditional way. Story travels across cultural borders much more freely than poetic technique.
In the field of international cultural communications, a mind, or a culture at large, grows in two ways: one is of transplantation, the other of inspiration. The key difference between these two learning ways is that the former offers something that cannot be logically developed out of the exercise of the learner’s own mind or the recipient culture’s institutional self-renewal, while the latter brings something that can be logically achieved by the recipient person or culture.
Here are a few examples to further demonstrate the difference. When Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China in 1911, he attempted to “transplant” the whole American political system into China, which was a failure because it did not function well in the Chinese culture by then. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919 (五四运动), the western ideology of free love and free marriage were introduced into China, which inspired many young people, who totally understood them, cherished them and were willingly guided by them, because in Chinese history there had been many people who had fought for their freedom of love and marriage, though they had not developed the theory of these practices to the degree the west had. In some cases, the transplantation model and the inspiration model are combined together, such as in the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; Socialism was transplanted from the former Soviet Union, while Chinese Characteristics refers largely Chinese people’s own innovation, partly on basis of traditional Chinese political practice, and partly inspired by Western political practices.
When a Chinese student learns English, s/he needs to learn a vocabulary and a grammar / syntax (words, and the rules for their formation and combination). In this way, his/her mind grows by “transplantation”. When a Chinese scholar learns Charles Bernstein’s poetics, acquiring a totally new way of thinking, it is also of transplantation. Inspiration, by contrast, is the event of learning something that can be interpreted, understood, and made good sense of in the context of one’s already established knowledge. For example, all traditional western poetry, especially Romanticist’s works, such as those by William Wordsworth, can be easily understood by Chinese readers, as they share much of the spirit with traditional Chinese poetry.
Where do these processes of transplantation and inspiration fit in the current world of international poetics? Among the most interesting instances in the communication of inspirational learning is what one may call mis-interpretive innovation. These are cases defined by a fortunate mistake, in which the application of a norm in the target language and culture to the translation of a work produces something incongruous with the original cultural perspective. One famous example is Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method”. As Xie Ming said, “This etymological, compositional theory of the ideogram, from which Pound derived his ‘ideogrammic’ method, had an enormous impact on his thinking about poetry and other cultural matters, and on the writing of the Cantos.”[13] The method has influenced many poets in the west: “An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an ‘ideogrammic method’ that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be.”[14] Indeed, it is for this reason that Pound is said, in a well-known oxymoronic idiom, to have ‘invented Chinese poetry in English”. And yet, as explained on the back cover of the book The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the Chinese language is just a set of signifiers, like the English language or any other languages.[15] This now seems to be common knowledge to most English readers. However, Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method” made perfect sense in its context, and it was a wonderfully productive method for the composition of his works. It was an extremely valuable invention in poetics in English, inspired indeed.
There are many more examples of mis-interpretive innovation. Let us offer a personal one. When Li Zhimin was invited to give a talk on Ezra Pound’s lyric “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”, Li found the other three panelists interpreted the poem as a war poem, the context for which was England’s involvement in WWI.[16] This appeared quite strange to him, as Li had been accustomed to interpretating the poem in the cultural context of its original author, the great Chinese poet Li Bai (701-762). In the traditional Chinese cultural context, this poem is normally taken as a love poem that romanticizes the mutual love and devotion of a young couple, which is considered a key virtue of the family ethics highly valued by Confucianism. Li found his American colleagues’ new (to me) interpretation compelling, making good sense as it does of the historic context in which the poem was translated and read in England. In fact, this new interpretation is inspiring and fascinating, and has contributed to the growth of Li’s understanding of the original and translated poem. What we can see from this example is that poetry not only exists in its original or translated context, but between them, in the historical and cultural rhymes that mutually illuminate diverse regions of the literary tradition.
Let us give another example that illuminates the importance and shifting influence of context. A famous Chinese scholar prof. Yue Daiyun once held a seminar and discussed a novel entitled “Marriage of Xiao‘erhei (小二黑结婚)” with her American students. In the novel, there is a character named Sanxiangu (三仙姑) who often makes herself up to look more beautiful, which is meant to be inappropriate as she is of the working class, so that the conventional comments in the proletarian literary circle in China on this character is always negative. However, Yue Daiyun found all her American students were supporting Sanxiangu, as they thought there was nothing wrong with her making herself up. On the contrary, they considered Sanxiangu to be an admirable woman, as she seemed to them to love life.[17] Yue Daiyun came to agree with her American students’ comments, and has been retelling their views to her students and colleagues back in China, which is surely a contribution to the interpretation of the character Sanxiangu as well as the whole novel in China.
The purpose of international interactions is not to make all cultures the same. Rather, international interactions can make all parties more perfect in their own way. We learn from each other in the transplantation model only when there is no alternative. We apply the model of inspirational learning in most cases. The overriding principle to decide whether any international communication is fruitful or not is whether it makes good sense in terms of the recipient individual or culture, indeed, whether it enriches the recipient through the change it rings.
In the model of inspirational learning, the exchange can move in both directions: the innovative knowledge produced by the recipient may depart from the codes and conscience of the original culture, and yet in doing so inspire something novel in return, within the original culture. With the back and forth of such international communications, human knowledge on the whole is greatly expanded. In fact, the method of international communication, especially of the mind-expanding forms of poetry, is perhaps the best way for humanity to develop itself by diversifying itself: that is, to resist the pull of sameness.
International interaction follows more or less the same principles in other fields. For example, in the field of politics, China and the West have learned and benefited from each other, and will continue to do so in the future. Jacques Gernet has said: “China furnished the first example of a disciplined, rich, and powerful state which owed nothing to Christianity and seemed to be based on reason and natural law. It thus made a powerful contribution to the formation of modern political thought, and even some of its basic institutions were imitated by Europe.”[18] Indeed, he convincingly argues that what the West has learned from China it has learned in the inspirational model. In return, China has learned a lot from the West as it developed during the modern age, much of which has transformed Chinese society to a great extent, such as in the fields of education, industrialization, urbanization and so on. And again, perhaps in the future, some of modern China’s successful institutions might serve as good examples from which the West might learn, and so on in perpetuity.[19]
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that all forms of life are linked: “A subtle chain of countless rings/ The next unto the farthest brings”[20] as he writes in the poem which prefaces his essay “Nature.” Helen Keller’s story about the creation of the link between the signifier “water,” the concept water the signified on her mind, and the water out there in the world, is a story about the origination of thought, without which she would have lived in a kind of intellectual darkness all her life. But the story is general: if human beings could not create links between the world and the world of signs, human beings would have lived in the darkness as well. Without poetry to further enhance these links, or to break and remake them, and without its transposition between languages, in which it is once more remade into a monster of linguistic and cultural confusion (in the etymological sense of this word), our thought would be even darker. The linking is everything; it is, as Emerson reminds us, life itself.
2022/04/18
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LI Zhimin is “Guangzhou Scholar” Distinguished Professor of English at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University (Guangzhou, China, 510006). He serves as President of Foreign Literature Society of Guangdong Province. His research interests focus upon studies on modern poetics, culture (philosophy) and English Education (Email: washingtonlzm@sina.com).
Daniel Braun is English Lecturer with Special Honor at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. He got his PhD in English literature Studies in Princeton University in 2019.
[1] Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 65-66.
[2] More discussions on the formation, nature and functioning of such links are made in Li Zhimin’s monograph The Good and the True of Knowledge (Beijing: The People’s Press, 2011) [黎志敏：《知识的“善”与“真”》。北京：人民出版社2011年版。]
[3] Helen Keller, Story of My Life (C. Rainfield, 2003), 11. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
[4] T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1920), 92.
[5] TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo, A Dream of Red Mansions, Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994). TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo are of the Wade-Giles System. In modern Pinyin system, they are Cao Xueqin and Gao E respectively.
[6] Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Toronto：George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968), 4.
[7] Yunte Huang, “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 275.
[8] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Modern English Poetry: Innovation through Theory,” Foreign Language and Literature Research, Vol. 35, No. 5, 2020, pp. 27-34. [黎志敏：《理论主导下英语诗歌的现代转型》，《外国语文研究》2020年第5期。] In this essay, Li argued that modern poetry and modern poetic theories have to be read side by side to make good sense of both of them.
[9] T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 289.
[10] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Innovative Spirit of Modern Poetry: To Develop Human’s Intellectual and Emotional Capacities,” Foreign Languages and Cultures, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2021: 1-8. [黎志敏：《现代诗歌的创新精神》，《外国语言与文化》2021年第2期。] In this essay, Li argues that one major function of modern poetry is to promote the development of human’s intellectual and emotional capacities.
[11] In fact, this is what we have done in our on-line bilingual course on modern poetry in English. This on-line course can be reached at: https://www.ulearning.cn/course/25598. In this course, Charles Bernstein is invited to have given a talk on an excerpt from Dark City, in which he gives a line to line interpretation. This is indeed the best way to “translate” a difficult modern poem.
[12] Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 86.
[13] Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 236-237.
[14] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 162.
[15] See the note on the back cover in the book: Ernst Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936).
[17] Yue Daiyun and others, “Feminism and Literary Criticism,” Free Talks on Literature, No. 6, 1989, p. 19. [乐黛云等：《女权主义与文学批评》，《文学自由谈》1989年第6期。]
[18] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 523.
[19] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “The One Way Model of Cultural Interaction: Literary Interactions between China and Cambridge,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012: 111-127.
[20] R.W. Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2009), 18.
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Works Cited
Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, edited by T. S. Eliot, 281–291. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
——. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, edited by T. S. Eliot, 87–94. London: Methuen, 1920.
Emerson, R.W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2009.
Gernet, Jacques. A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Huang, Yunte. “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 255–278.
Keller, Helen. Story of My Life. C. Rainfield, 2003. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 85-90.
Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot, 3-14. Toronto: George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968.
Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. NY: Philosophical Library, 1959.
Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.
Yue, Daiyun and others. “Feminism and Literary Criticism.” Free Talks on Literature, no. 6 (1989): 18–24.
Res Nulla Loquitur: A Multimedia Essay in Seven Parts is an experiment in the study of how sound decomposes the words of law. The sound recordings used here were taken from evidence collected during investigations into the deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, Terence Crutcher, Samuel Debose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling. While legal interpretation of these recordings strip them of self-evidentiary meaning, their recomposed repetition here force an encounter with a form of evidence I call, res nulla loquitur, ‘the no-thing speaks.’ Their indestructible questions refuse to settle for and in whatever the law offers as justice.
Click on the image below to use the essay:
Photo of the interactive sound sculpture, American Monument, by lauren woods, the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine, October 5, 2019 to March 16, 2020. Image credits: Photo by Will Yang; courtesy of lauren woods, the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine, and the University of California Regents
Res Nulla Loquitur is a prelude to the article, “North County Jail,” forthcoming in boundary 2.
Sora Han is Chair of the Department of African American Studies, and Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society, the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program and the School of Law at UC Irvine. She is the author of Mu: 49 Lines of Flight (forthcoming) and Letters of the Law (2015), and a co-author of Lacan and Mahayana Buddhist Thought (2022) and the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, 3rd Edition (2020).
A pigeon in a mural. In early August 2011, the American street artist Shepard Fairey paints a mural in Copenhagen, Denmark, on a wall adjacent to the “ground zero” of a recently demolished squat called Ungdomshuset (the Youth House). Fairey could hardly have chosen a worse spot in the city to sport his ready-made design of a pigeon hovering over the word “peace”: shortly after the mural’s completion, graffiti writers defaced what Fairey refers to as “my Peace Dove mural.”[2] Their message was clear: “no peace” and “go home yankee hipster.” To make matters worse, Fairey ended his trip to Copenhagen with a “black eye and a bruised rib” after a violent assault.[3]
Today, Fairey’s pigeon—a take on Picasso’s famous peace dove—is still aloft in the mural high above the vacant lot, a serene emblem of triumphant peace. Unlike Hito Steyerl’s parable of contemporary art in “A Tank on a Pedestal”—where she recounts how pro-Russian separatists drove a Soviet battle tank “off a World War II memorial pedestal” to use it in guerilla warfare—the pigeon was never hijacked from its mural and redeployed as a war machine.[4] Or was it? Considering Fairey’s controversial mural from the combined perspective of art history, the history of counterinsurgency, and late-modern warfare prompts a series of questions that pertain to our “hypercontemporary” moment in much the same way that Steyerl’s example of a tank on a pedestal does: is the mural a theater of war? Picasso’s peace dove, a drone?
Shepard Fairey’s “Peace Dove Mural”, Copenhagen, August 2011.
In this essay, I consider Fairey’s pigeon in a mural as an art-historical index for the “bodies of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation” that characterize the “historical situation” of US drone warfare under the Obama administration.[5] By analyzing the peace-dove motif, and situating it in the broader context of drone warfare, I argue that the pigeon-cum-peace-dove emerges as an instrument of war alongside its mechanical double, the drone. The pigeon in the mural, then, is more than some helpless animal caught in the crossfire of a chance conflict: it is also a cipher for late capitalist war.
In what follows, I begin from the controversy surrounding Fairey’s Copenhagen peace dove mural before zooming out to reconsider how the peace dove motif relates to the conduct of war and politics from the end of the Second World War to the age of drone warfare—and beyond. As I show, the peace dove motif is historically at the center of an “image war” in which opposing political ideologies struggle for mastery in the realm of representations.[6] The story of the peace dove from Picasso through to Fairey, in other words, is the story of how an “icon of the left” was detached from its origins and aligned with a triumphant conception of liberal peace: one that effectively helped obscure US military aggression in the era of drone warfare.[7] Ultimately, then, the image conflict traced and contextualized in this essay points toward the historical limits of what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in a seminal essay from 1795, called the “sweet dream of perpetual peace.”[8]
I
“You don’t have to be Picasso, you just need to be inspired by Barack Obama.”[9]
To the Copenhagen Youth House activists, Fairey’s artistic peace statement was unwanted because it literally and symbolically erased the traces of conflict from the site of a year-long struggle that revolved around systemic dynamics of capitalist gentrification, political repression, and police violence. But the activists’ fury—as the tag line “go home yankee hipster” suggests—was equally fueled by their perception that Fairey’s peace message converged with President Obama’s rhetoric in the US-led war on terror by other supposedly more “peaceful” means, mostly drones.
On the street address Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen where the Youth House once stood, there is now an empty, graffiti-covered lot. The house that once stood there, by contrast, was a vibrant hub for radical politics and dissidence for more than a century. Historical figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin would pass through to give political speeches and conspire with local revolutionaries and exiled comrades. It was also here, in August 1910, that the German Marxist Clara Zetkin proposed the annual celebration of what is now known as the International Women’s Day.
After the eclipse of the historical workers’ movement, the building was temporarily abandoned. In 1982, in the wake of severe street confrontations, the Copenhagen municipality surrendered the disused building to the “BZ-movement” of young squatters, dropouts, and punks.[10] People started referring to the building as Ungdomshuset (the Youth House), which became a crucial countercultural node for the European punk movement and radicals of various stripes.
Around the turn of the millennium, the Copenhagen municipality sold off the estate to a Christian sect. The sale technically turned the building into an illegal “squat,” as its users refused to acknowledge the change of ownership. Instead, existing tensions rose, and conflicts about “the right to the city” developed into riots. The militants responded to eviction notices and a sensation-hungry press by hanging a banner from the windows of the occupied building, reading: “For sale, including 500 autonomist stone-throwing violent psychopaths from hell.”[11]
Early one morning in March 2007, one of the most carefully planned and most spectacular police operations ever carried out in Denmark took place. In scenes resembling a film, police helicopters lowered a team of special operations agents onto the Youth House, broke through barricaded windows with power tools, and filled the house with tear gas to evict the militants and clear the house for demolition. As news of the eviction spread, Copenhagen’s streets became ablaze with anger. Hundreds of militants from all over Europe joined the struggle. In their effort to “keep the peace,” while facing some of the most severe riots Denmark had ever seen, the Copenhagen police department mustered reinforcements from neighboring districts, and even neighboring countries.[12]
The state forces far outnumbered protesters and rioters, who could not prevent the Youth House’s eventual demolition.[13] Still, the riots, protests, and demonstrations carried on relentlessly after the demolition, and every single Thursday for several years, thousands of protesters would ritually march through the city. Even though in 2008 the municipality yielded to the pressure and allotted another building in the city’s outskirts to activist purposes, the Thursday protests carried on unrelentingly for several years. The original battle cry—nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven—still resounded among a discontented youth when Shepard Fairey made his cameo appearance in 2011.
When Fairey flew in to decorate the city—Fairey’s stint as a Copenhagen street artist included an art show at the self-styled “street art gallery,” V1, and no fewer than seven murals in prime locations across the city—the Youth House struggles were still recent memory. In a blog post, Fairey recalls being aware that “the mural location in question had a controversial history” but says he thought to himself: “what a shame, I hope I can do something that is a symbolically positive transformation.”[14] Apparently, some activists thought differently. Even before the mural was completed it was destroyed by graffiti.
The destruction of the Copenhagen mural and the ensuing image conflict soon attracted international media attention. The Guardian, for instance, reported that Fairey’s mural “appeared to reopen old wounds, with critics accusing Fairey of peddling government-funded propaganda.”[15] Fairey, in turn, insisted that his mural was non-political, stressing that he was merely promoting a universal message of peace, and went back to restore his mural. Just as quickly as he restored it, however, someone destroyed it anew.
V1, Fairey’s local art gallery, stepped in to mediate by inviting some artists, who supposedly represented the Youth House, to repaint the bottom half of the mural in a design of their own choice. Fairey recalls:
It was a powerful scene of hostile riot police like those who had evicted the Youth House dwellers and it incorporated one of the paint bombs on the mural as if it had been thrown by a riot cop. I thought it was a brilliant solution reflecting the history of the site and keeping my pro-peace message intact, but adding additional emphasis to the idea that peace is always facing attack from injustice that I felt was already more subtly implied by placing the dove in a target.[16]
These changes did little to help, and the mural kept getting attacked. And so too, unfortunately, did the artist. Soon, a mock version of the famous Obama posters the artist created for the 2008 US presidential election appeared on Copenhagen street corners. Instead of a picture of Obama, the poster now featured Fairey, with a bruised eye, over the familiar caption: HOPE. But why such vehement opposition? And “how”—as the artist asked—“is a mural advocating global peace inflammatory”?[17]
To understand the antagonism toward Fairey, one needs to consider how Fairey glossed over decades of struggles between local activists and a repressive state apparatus parading as the apotheosis of liberal democracy. As the mock poster amply suggests, the activists’ perception of Fairey as a useful idiot for American cultural imperialism originates in the street artist’s world-renown campaign to help elect Obama for president.
In 2008, Fairey created and distributed thousands of stickers, posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise to support the future president. Fairey even painted an “Obama mural” in Hollywood, photographed from a spectacular bird’s eye view. Across these images, the graphic form of Obama’s face is invariant. Fairey’s instantly recognizable aesthetic, which borrows in equal parts from political propaganda, pop art, and advertising, led TheNew Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, to extol Fairey’s Obama HOPE poster as “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’”[18]
Obama too, recognized the poster’s political efficacy. In a letter of appreciation to the street artist, Obama said: “I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. […] Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support.”[19] Soon after, with a little help from his “poster boy,” as the media later dubbed Fairey, Obama was elected. He was sworn into office on January 20, 2009. The rest is history. A history of hope, among other things.
Looking back from the recent Trump era, Obama’s presidency might appear to embody the progressive march towards what Kant, in 1795, had called “perpetual peace.” But the “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” as Kant stressed—to shield himself from allegations of subversive intent—remains precisely that: a philosopher’s dream, to which the “worldly statesman” does not need to “pay […] any heed.”[20] And though the worldly statesman Obama rhetorically advocated peace, he didn’t shy back from using military force.
One of President Obama’s first military campaigns, what became known as the “Obama-surge,” consisted in ramping up US troops in Afghanistan by an additional 17.000 soldiers. Later Obama’s military strategy shifted toward a series of so-called “small wars” or military interventions in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places, that most certainly violated key philosophical articles in Kant’s treatise on peace – e.g. intervening forcibly in another state and employing “assassins.”[21] Advanced weapon technologies or “drones” for carrying out assassinations were instrumental to what some would describe as the Obama administration’s transformation of “the whole concept of war,” along with its attendant relationship to peace.[22]
However, Obama was not yet another “war president” but rather an example of a statesman who carefully paid heed to the dream of lasting peace and whose chief political task, accordingly, was to engineer this peace by all means necessary. One of the most potent tools that Obama inherited and redefined was the infamous US drone program. However, while new technology may have changed the reality of warfare, it takes more than technical advances to change social conceptions of war. Critics have rightly exposed the ambiguities in Obama’s peace rhetoric.[23] But which other “instruments” may have helped transform our understanding of war and its relationship to peace?
Key here, I believe, is how state and non-state actors ideologically supercharge artworks to wage “image war.”[24] One of the most famous examples of image war occurred when US officials, prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, deemed the reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica that was hanging in the UN Security Council chamber an inappropriate backdrop and ordered it to be concealed behind a curtain before the media arrived. According to the Retort collective’s analysis, this incident illustrates how states “struggle for mastery in the realm of the image.”[25] Can we pursue this analysis one step further to explore forms of image war that do not directly involve the state’s micromanagement of the “means of symbolic production”?
The advent of blogs, social media, and algorithms has challenged traditional top-down approaches to the politics of representation. As the Situationist Guy Debord pointed out at the dawn of our networked era, new decentralized or “diffuse” forms of control in the realm of the image exist side by side with more “concentrated” forms of spectacular representation.[26] State power no longer relies to the same extent on micromanaging appearances. Instead, as in the case of the Obama administration’s quasi-official endorsement of Fairey’s artwork, state power now benefits equally from artists-as-influencers who more or less wittingly align their aesthetics with the ideological exigencies of those in power.
Fairey placing his pigeon in a target to “subtly” imply, in his own words, “that peace is always facing attack from injustice” is an example of how ideology exists, independently of overt state control, in the expanded realm of art.[27] Fairey’s idea of a fragile and easily victimized peace—as not-so-subtly underscored by the white-feathered creature placed in a target—thus readily exposes a key ideological component of the liberal reasoning behind late-modern warfare: that perpetual peace requires an advanced pre-emptive “security” regime to ward off potential attacks from the enemies of peace.
In the liberal conception of peace, “keeping the peace” does not mean waging war indiscriminately but protecting the international community’s fragile state of equilibrium from external threats. What the US-led international community refers to as “peace” is not just a misnomer for perpetual war but also, in a historically specific sense, the precondition for newfangled forms of pre-emptive state violence, the urbanization of drone warfare, and the policing of racialized “surplus populations.”[28] From war power to police power, in other words.[29]
From such a perspective, Fairey’s pigeon dovetails with what Mark Neocleous calls the “liberal peace thesis.”[30] Now “a standard trope in the political discourse of international theory,” Neocleous argues, the liberal peace thesis is an untenable “claim for capitalism’s essentially pacific grounds.”[31] Since its inception in eighteenth-century political philosophy, the proponents of the liberal peace thesis have ignored evidence that contradicts the idea that free markets are an effective antidote to armed conflict. The constitutive violence at the heart of the liberal peace thesis, Neocleous notes, is encapsulated in ahistorical interpretations of Kant’s essay:
Liberalism, and thus many international lawyers, like [sic] to cite Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ as a key philosophical document outlining the liberal foundations of peace, yet usually omit the fact that the essay was published in October 1795, just one month after the military suppression of the revolt in Poland led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Poland’s partition by Russia and Prussia, and about which Kant had nothing to say.[32]
Likewise, proponents of the liberal peace thesis in the age of drone warfare typically have little to say about the lethal violence undergirding the “peace” discourse of the Global North. Obama is, again, a case in point. As one of the most popular American presidents ever, Obama was—and to some extent still is—primarily perceived as the embodiment of liberal democracy. In terms of US politics, Obama is something close to the incarnation of the liberal peace thesis: a champion of the most politically progressive values, with “peace” chief among them.
Eleven months into his presidency, in December 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping the US to play a more constructive role in world politics and for preferring “dialogue and negotiations” as “instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.”[33] The news that the 44th American president had received the world’s most prestigious peace prize resonated globally. Prefiguring Fairey’s pigeon mural, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a cartoon picturing Obama as a “black peace dove.”[34]
But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate admitted to having “instruments” other than just “dialogue and negotiations” in his peace arsenal. In his acceptance speech, Obama acknowledged that, as “the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he was “filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace.”[35] The answer to these “difficult questions,” as is now well known, took the form of the drone.
As Daniel Klaidman stated in his contemporaneous bestselling book Kill or Capture: the War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, “[b]y the time Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency.”[36] According to estimates produced by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama oversaw “ten times more” air strikes than his predecessor, amounting to “a total of 563 strikes, largely by drones,” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen among other places. The corresponding death-by-drone casualties logged by the bureau amount to somewhere “between 384 and 807 civilians,” and counting.[37]
In his Nobel Peace Prize remarks, Obama gauged the “costs of armed conflict” in relation to the “imperatives of a just peace” and concluded: “So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”[38] Obama’s closing remark?
Clear-eyed, we can understand thatthere will be war, and still strive forpeace. We can do that—for that is the story of human progress; that’s the hope of all the world; and at thismoment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.[39]
Leaving aside the question of whether the US-led, drone-based peace campaign is the story of human progress, it is clear that Obama’s work on Earth changed how we think about war and international conflict. Touting promises of “hope,” “progress,” and “change” (incidentally, the words that Fairey interchangeably used on his iconic HOPE posters), the Obama administration helped transform the concept of warfare into a logic of global “security.” As Grégoire Chamayou, in his instant classic of the drone age, pointed out, “in the logic of this security, based on the preventive elimination of dangerous individuals, ‘warfare’ takes the form of vast campaigns of extrajudiciary executions.”[40] As Chamayou remarks, “the names given to the drones—Predators (birds of prey) and Reapers (angels of death)—are certainly well chosen.”[41] So, is the pigeon in Fairey’s mural a bird of prey? The peace dove, an angel of death? Let’s examine in more detail the history of this magically ambiguous motif.
II
In 2010, the year before Fairey painted his “Peace Dove mural” in Copenhagen, there had been a global celebration of Picasso’s work. The temporary closure of the Picasso Museum in Paris, which sent many of Picasso’s works on tours of the global museum circuit, enabled major Picasso retrospectives in Moscow, New York, Münster, Seattle, Zürich, Vienna, and Liverpool.[42] The Liverpool exhibition, which took place at the Tate Liverpool gallery, was called Picasso: Peace and Freedom.
The exhibition frontispiece sported one of the artist’s iconic peace dove designs. According to the exhibition statement, this would be the first exhibition “to examine in depth the artist’s engagement with politics and the Peace Movement,” and it would “reflect a new Picasso for a new time.”[43] A new Picasso for a new time—but what “new time,” exactly? A time before Brexit, Boris Johnson, and Trump. A time of “hope,” for sure. A time that embodied all the most progressive values and hopes of Western liberal democracies. But how did Picasso’s peace dove become an emblem for an overarching liberal narrative of progress, peace and freedom?
While the dove has been a symbol of peace since ancient times, it was in the hands of the twentieth century’s most famous artist, Pablo Picasso, that it acquired its status as the quasi-official symbol of world peace. Appropriately to our story, Picasso’s peace dove originated, it is not often noted, as a fusion of street art avant la lettre and political propaganda. According to art historian Sarah Wilson, Picasso’s peace dove first appeared on the world stage in a poster on the streets of Paris announcing the World Congress for Peace, Paris-Prague, in 1949. It was the French communist and founding member of Surrealism, Louis Aragon, who, during a visit to Picasso’s studio, had chosen “Picasso’s pigeon—a soft wash drawing on a black ground” as a symbol for the upcoming international peace congress.[44]
Thanks to mechanical reproduction techniques, Picasso’s pigeon or La Colombe (1949)—originally intended as a limited edition lithograph of 50 prints—was being churned out by the thousands. Under the French Communist Party (PCF) auspices, Picasso’s delicate peace dove motif thus evolved into what specialist in political imagery Zvonimir Novak fittingly describes as a machine de guerre graphique, a graphical war machine.[45]
In response to the PCF’s “extremely successful billboard campaign,” French anti-communists, covertly sponsored by the CIA, formed a movement called Paix et Liberté (peace and freedom), with the sole purpose of discrediting the communist peace campaign that symbolically centered on Picasso’s wildly popular peace dove motif.[46] Did the 2010 Tate exhibition, Picasso: Peace and Freedom, perhaps intend some historical pun by alluding to the anti-communist propaganda of Paix et liberté in their exhibition title? It is difficult to tell, especially given that there was also a pacifist communist group with that name in the interwar years.[47] The changing ideological valence of the terms “peace and freedom” notwithstanding, the recuperation of Picasso’s peace dove exemplifies how art and politics intertwine in ways that exceed artistic intent. Much like Picasso’s Guernica was detached from its historical origins in “exchange for its continuing topicality”—as O.K. Werckmeister argued in his seminal book Icons of the Left—so too did his peace dove evolve into an all-purpose image of a politically non-descript peace. [48]
The original Paix et liberté group is an essential component in the history of Picasso’s peace dove. It was the French socialist politician, Jean-Paul David, who in 1950 founded Paix et liberté together with fellow partisans of the North Atlantic Treaty. To their concern, the signing of the treaty had been “effectively eclipsed” in France by the press coverage of the first communist peace congress.[49] The group’s aesthetic counter-offensive launched a flood of “posters supplemented by newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, stickers, and tracts that used the words, themes and symbols of the Communist Party to counter their message.”[50] In the climate of tense ideological antagonism that characterized the early phases of the Cold War, Novak recalls, the Parisian “walls were a site for a permanent war between billposters, the streets a battlefield scattered with paper tracts.”[51] A recurrent feature of the anti-communist campaign was how it exploited a deep-seated cultural sense of ambiguity about birds to draw attention to the two-faced nature of the communist peace symbol.
In a popular fable by Jean de La Fontaine, “The Bat and The Weasels,” a bat is caught by a weasel with an appetite for mice. The poor creature cunningly escapes death by convincing the predator that it is “not of that species” at all: “I, a mouse? No, no, some people must have told you merely out of malice. Thanks to the creator of the universe, I am a bird: behold my wings. Long live the nation that skims the air.” A little later, the same bat is caught again by another weasel, this time one that harbors an “enmity” toward birds. Again, the clever bat escapes. But this time by refusing to be a bird, insisting that, surely, it is the feathers that make the bird, not the mere ability to fly. La Fontaine’s fable—which, as one can imagine, also lent itself to French anti-Semitic political caricatures—was used against the communists to present them as morally suspect.
Because much of the support for the PCF in the 1940s and 1950s stemmed from the glory of the communist resistance movement’s fight against fascism during the Second World War, the Fontainesque anti-communist propaganda centered on undermining the idea that communists could be French republican patriots. One particular tract, a precursor to the Paix et liberté variations that followed in its path, gets this message across: recto, there is a winged creature draped in the French colors, with a caption that reads “I am bird, behold my wings”; verso, the creature reveals its true colors, a deep communist red, hammer and sickle on its chest, with the caption now reading “I am a mouse! Long live the rats!”
Perhaps the most successful attack of this kind was the poster, La colombe qui fait boum, which ingeniously transformed Picasso’s peace dove into an explosive device. According to Wilson, “the explosive slogan was soon pasted all over the walls of Paris as Picasso’s Dove had been: the print run was purportedly 300,000.”[52] As Wilson notes, Picasso’s voluminous FBI file references the satirical poster along with a press clipping from The Washington Post, February 17, 1952:
The back, the pouting breast and the belly made the form of a tank: the tail feathers were exhaust fumes. The head was a turret and the beak a cannon, the hammer and sickle brand was on the shoulder. There was a simple five word caption: ‘The Dove that goes Boom’. All Paris laughed and the Communists were ridiculed.[53]
The satirical attacks may have harmed the PCF’s image momentarily, but Picasso’s peace dove took off to become the quasi-official mascot of the world peace movement. From today’s perspective, however, the peace dove of the Picasso: Peace and Freedom exhibition at Tate Liverpool Gallery stands, along with Fairey’s peace dove mural, at the end of the historical arc of triumphant liberalism.
Retrospectively, 1989 was a hinge moment. On this crucial threshold from the “modern” to the “contemporary,” Francis Fukuyama famously trumpeted the “end of history” based on the alleged “fact that ‘peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world.”[54] In the prominent political scientist’s global peace narrative, “Western liberal democracy” had revealed itself to be the “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution.”[55] The future, from this perspective, was canceled. The only significant task left to humankind would be to come to terms with the past, a perpetual historical curating. Or, in Fukuyama’s own words: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”[56] But the “modern” constraints and contradictions of the pigeon-cum-peace-dove were carried over into the age of drone warfare and continues to shape our hypercontemporary—and oddly Fontainesque—condition.
III
Imagine this. Just as Shepard Fairey puts the finishing touches to his mural in Copenhagen, a mysterious mechanical bird crashes to the ground. But Fairey, in deep concentration, perhaps mulling over whether to include an olive branch in the pigeon’s beak, doesn’t notice it at all. The street artist is so immersed in his work that he forgets where he is. Los Angeles, New York, Reykjavik, or perhaps Tel Aviv? When Fairey looks around to see what the commotion is about, it is nightfall in Balochistan Province, Pakistan. A man, lit up by the headlights of a parked car, holds up what “looks a bit like a silver bird,” while another man stands guard with a Kalashnikov.[57] What’s going on here? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? A toy? No, it’s “a small combat-proven spy drone.”[58]
Of course, Fairey painting his peace dove mural and the “weird, birdlike mystery drone” falling from the sky were two separate events that happened in two different places. Fairey wasn’t magically beamed into Pakistan. Sheer historical coincidence brings these two birds to the fore at this exact historical moment (August 2011). But there is something uncanny about these twin events that brings to mind the work of the Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin, who in As Birds Flying (video, 2016) and The General’s Stork (mixed media, 2016–ongoing), mines the contemporary drone imaginary through an aesthetic exploration of the historical and ideological overlaps between birds and drones.
Amin does not discuss Shepard Fairey’s peace dove, but she does refer to the Pakistan “mystery drone” as an example of how drones are nested in deep-seated cultural imaginaries about birds flying. In The Generals Stork, Amin relates the crashed mystery drone to its commercial twin, the then much-hyped “SmartBird” by Festo engineering, and brings these two birds-as-drones into a larger media narrative about how, in 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork on suspicions of espionage because it was equipped with an electronic tracking device. A device that, as it transpired, merely registered the bird’s migratory patterns.
To Amin, the Pakistan spy-drone crash highlights the progressive obscuring of the boundaries between natural beings and military artifacts that characterize situations of drone warfare and creates the conditions of possibility not only for storks being detained but also for generalizing a sense of paranoia that pervades everyday life under drone surveillance: “Imagine the confusion of finding such an object in a place where people are so accustomed to drone attacks. What happens when we can no longer differentiate a machine from a living thing?”[59]
Amin critically addresses the projected drone future where birds-as-drones and other similar creatures “naturally” circle the sky above. And Festo’s “smart bird,” to be sure, marks a historical threshold. The “SmartbBird” has since inspired a flock of cheaply available “bionic” or “bio-mimetic” drones, so called because they are engineered to mimic birds and other living creatures. In 2016, for instance, Amazon patented new drone technology that would allow future delivery drones to perch “like pigeons” on streetlights, church steeples, and other vertical urban structures.[60] When the world’s largest online retailer jumps on the bionic drone bandwagon, we can start to imagine what the drone future might bring.
Indeed, if one is to believe the media hype, bio-inspired drones might be the next big thing. One 2019 NBC news report rubric reads: “Inspired by the aerial abilities of birds, bats and insects, researchers are crafting a new generation of ultralight drones that lack propellers and are equipped not with fixed wings but with flapping ones.”[61] More recent examples confirming this trend are legion. In contemporary robotics, common pigeons of the kind that inspired Picasso’s peace dove motif are being anatomically dissected to teach semi-autonomous machines to perform more like their feathered brethren.[62] The common pigeon that inspired Picasso’s peace dove is, essentially, a proto-drone.[63]
Amin’s art project, As Birds Flying, further instructs us about the historical and symbolic crossovers between birds and their mechanical counterparts, the drones, and crucially brings colonialism into the frame. Amin’s film is based on found drone footage of locations in the Middle East, including views of Israeli settlements, and poetically reinterprets how religious myths, colonial wars, airpower, spy birds, surveillance technologies, and late-modern drone warfare historically interlock.
In the artistic research project The General’s Stork, Amin recalls the story of Lord Allenby’s seizure of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in 1917 to show how deep the bird-as-drone imaginary reaches into the historical texture of orientalism and colonialism:
[Lord Allenby] launched an attack based on a biblical prophecy found in the book of Isaiah 31:5, which states: “As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it.” By reason of this prophecy, he sent as many planes as possible to fly over Jerusalem, forcing the Turks to surrender the city. So, when Allenby marched into Jerusalem, it was seen as a prophecy fulfilled. Right at the core of this prophetic figure, or augury, is the symbolic and actual presence of the avian, the prophecy of the birds flying over Jerusalem, the birds mutating into airplanes, the airplanes mutating into drones, and the menace of predictive drone technology metastasizing into the specter of aerial bombardment. This prophecy has become predictive in terms of drone technology, envisioning what will be and what is yet to come.[64]
Amin’s examination of “the symbolic and actual presence of the avian” in the historical ascendance of the drone underscores how the realms of the symbolic and the real overlap. Just as the biblical prophecy helped Lord Allenby visualize and ultimately legitimize Jerusalem’s destruction, the liberal peace thesis provides ideological justification for the US-led drone program. Lord Allenby’s prophecy materialized as mechanical birds flying over Jerusalem dropping bombs while Picasso’s peace dove, in turn, participates in an ongoing image war with no less deadly consequences. As diverse as these different historical contexts of killing may be, they are equally grounded in deep-seated cultural narratives with a near palpable orientalist subtext.
Seen from an art-historical perspective, the migration of the common pigeon (Colombia livia)—from Picasso’s 1949 ink-wash drawing through to Fairey’s 2011 peace dove mural and further still—forms an irregular pattern across history that culminates symbolically at the height of the age of drone warfare and resonates into our present moment. Today, there is a more-than-symbolic sense in which Picasso’s peace dove mutates into a drone—or a swarm of drones, to be exact.
In December 2016, as Obama’s presidency was coming to an end, the skies above the Disney World theme park “dazzled with drones” in a spectacular night-time show: “For Starbright Holidays’ finale, the drones form a dove. With the music swelling, the sequence packs an emotional punch.”[65] In an article in USA Today, Ayala, one of Disney’s so-called Imagineers (that is, an imagination engineer) notes that “his team originally animated the word, ‘peace,’ but later removed it. The dove, the Imagineers figured, transcends language and culture. ‘We have the symbol of peace,’ notes Ayala. ‘What better way to show it than from the stars themselves—from the universe?’”[66]
Although arbitrary to the events recounted in this essay, the Disney show appears as a grand finale of the ideology of liberal peace as epitomized by the drone. It also bespeaks what Andrea Miller calls the “specter of the drone,” an example of how “diffuse histories and geographies of war are folded into the sign of the drone” in new forms of entertainment.[67] The proliferation of drones as a tool of entertainment since 2016 practically refutes its reputation as an aggressive instrument of US neo-imperialist war in ways that are most certainly conducive to the drone industry. President-elect Joe Biden’s drone fireworks celebration in November 2020 testifies to this historical shift—and raises important questions about what the drone future might hold.[68] So where are we now? And what happened to the pigeon in the mural?
*
In 2013, Shepard Fairey fell out of love with his former political icon, Obama, and became an outspoken critic of drone warfare (if not of liberal peace).[69] As Fairey’s criticism of Obama’s use of drones became known to the public, one blogger quipped: “End of a Fairey Tale: Poster Artist Says Obama’s Drones Killed ‘Hope’.”[70] A 2015 Washington Post op-ed took a similar line: “Obama’s done. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration for Republicans. That widespread enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 has eroded, and with less than two years left in office, one of his most visible supporters, the guy who made the most iconic image of the Obama years has even turned on him.”[71] The commentator turned out to be correct: Obama was done. The Fairey Tale of perpetual peace ended, as we now know, with the brutal awakening in 2017 to the Trump era and the spectacular rise of late-capitalist fascism.[72]
The story about the destruction of Fairey’s peace dove mural in Copenhagen now belongs in a backroom of Fukuyama’s “museum of human history.” And no one paid much attention to Shepard Fairey’s peace dove after its attempted assassination by graffiti writers in 2011. After Fairey returned to the US, the partly destroyed mural was left to its own devices; an aesthetic prop in the staging of a “radical chic” image that accompanies Copenhagen’s ongoing gentrification. To this day, Fairey’s pigeon remains intact in its mural, hovering peacefully above street level commotion. Its mechanical double, however, is as busy as a bee.
The Covid 19-pandemic has rekindled interest in “bionic” drones inspired by flying creatures such as birds, bats, and bees. In China, for instance, drones disguised as white doves surveil the population, firing up the imagination of conspiracy theorists worldwide.[73] In the US and in many other countries, a new breed of Fontainesque drones with and without feathers are operating daily outside of the military context. In addition to commercial drones and drones operated by amateur hobbyists, so-called “pandemic drones” are now performing various roles: delivering medical supplies, sanitizing streets, or “shouting” at people to keep their distance.
According to statistics from the Bard College Drone Center, more than 500 public safety agencies acquired drones between 2018 and 2020, bringing their total number close to 1,600—and counting. If the US is a bellwether of a global tendency for public safety agencies to add drones to their “peace arsenal,” the question remains whether this peace is preferable to what was called, once upon a time, by a more recognizable name: war.
Taking recent political unrest in the US and elsewhere into consideration one can fear that the mainstream adoption of drones—under continuing capitalist relations of production—will reinforce rather than challenge existing systems of technologically enabled oppression. It is crucial to remember, as scholar of surveillance Simone Brown notes, that oppressive forms of surveillance did not arrive with new technologies such as drones. Instead, drone surveillance is but a new expression of the same racism and anti-blackness that undergird existing power structures.[74] Whether we are dealing with “ghetto birds” or drones disguised as white peace doves, racist police power is still, to paraphrase James Baldwin, policing black communities like occupied territories.[75] The “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” in other words, still weighs heavily on the brains of the living.[76]
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Dominique Routhier is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the research project Drone Imaginaries and Communities (Independent Research Fund Denmark) at the University of Southern Denmark. His first book With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation, is forthcoming with Verso Books in 2023.
[1] Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers par J. de La Fontaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint and Saillant, 1755), 53, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1049428h.
[4] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (New York: Verso, 2017), 1–8.
[5] T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 562.
[6] The term “image war” has been used in various theoretical contexts since the Gulf War. Perhaps most famously, Jean Baudrillard theorized “the birth of a new kind of military apparatus which incorporates the power to control the production and circulation of images” in a series of essays that appeared in English translation under the title The Gulf War did not take place (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 5. Dora Apel in War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univeristy Press, 2012), W.J.T. Mitchell in Cloning Terror: The War of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), and, of course, the Retort collective in Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005) all use the term (or corelates) in their analysis of the spectacular nature of late modern warfare.
[7] In terms of methodology, I rely on Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[8] Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 67.
[10] For a more detailed historical contextualization of the Youth House, see René Karpantschof and Flemming Mikkelsen, “Youth, Space, and Autonomy in Copenhagen: the Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement, 1963-2012,” in The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements from the 1970s to the Present, eds. Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 179-206.
[20] Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” 67.
[21] “Targeted killing” using drone airstrikes is arguably state assassination by another name. Thanks to Tim Carter for helping me clarify my argument here.
[22] Christi Parsons and W. J. Hennigan, “President Obama, Who Hoped to Sow Peace, Instead Led the Nation in War,” Los Angelses Times, January 13, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/.
[23] See, for instance, Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May, “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2013, pp. 623-650.
[24] For an excellent discussion of this term in relation to the task of art history, see James Day, “Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War: Ten Recent Publications on Image-Politics in Relation to the Possibility of Art Historical Analysis,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 48 (2015), doi:10.7146/nja.v24i48.23071.
[25] Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts (Retort), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005), 19.
[26] See Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London ; New York: Verso, 1990).
[28] See Ian G. R. Shaw, “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis,” Geographica Helvetica 71, no. 1 (February 15, 2016): 19–28, doi:10.5194/gh-71-19-2016.
[29] Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
[33] “The Nobel Peace Prize 2009,” NobelPrize.Org, accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/press-release/.
[34] Stephanie Busari and Claire Barthelemy, “Obama Peace Prize Win Polarizes Web,” CNN World, accessed April 21, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/09/obama.nobel.peace.reaction/index.html.
[35] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” (Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2009), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize.
[36] Daniel Klaidman, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 117.
[37] Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, “Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush.
[44] Sarah Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 131.
[45] Zvonimir Novak, Agit tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire (Les Éditions L’échapée, 2015), 210.
[46] Anastasia Karel, “Brief History of Paix et Liberté,” Princeton University Libraries, accessed February 11, 2021, http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/paix/.
[48] See Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78.
[62] Eric Chang et al., “Soft Biohybrid Morphing Wings with Feathers Underactuated by Wrist and Finger Motion,” Science Robotics 5, no. 38 (January 16, 2020), doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aay1246.
[63] The “animal prehistory” of drone technology is comparatively well-rehearsed, see Stubblefield, Drone Art, especially chapter 4, “The Animal Remainder: Excavating Nohuman Life from Contemporary Drones.”
[67] Andrea Miller, “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 86.
[68] For an excellent analysis of Joe Biden’s drone fireworks in the shifting historical context of drones, see Caren Kaplan “Everyday Militarisms: Drones and the Blurring of the Civilian-Military Divide During COVID-19” Forthcoming in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, eds. Michael Richardson and Beryl Pong, Open Humanities Press.
[69] A more recent incident in France testifies to Fairey’s continued commitment to the liberal cause and his knack for appealing to world leaders with his propaganda art. Briefly told, Fairey painted a gigantic Marianne-mural, that, in an echo of the 2011 Copenhagen incident, was destroyed by anonymous graffiti artists. See HIYA! Rédaction, “Un Crew Anonyme Fait «pleurer» La plus Grande Marianne de France! #MariannePleure,” HIYA!, December 14, 2020, https://hiya.fr/2020/12/14/inedit-un-crew-anonyme-fait-pleurer-la-plus-grande-marianne-de-france-mariannepleure/.
[72] For a forthcoming analysis of “late capitalist fascism,” see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).
[73] See for instance the self-declared international movement “Birds Aren’t Real,” which absurdly claims that all birds are government-controlled drones. Whether or not these “activists” are serious about their claims is hard to tell.
[74] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.
[76] I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and insightful criticisms that have helped me greatly improve this essay.
Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 2015.
Chang, Eric, Laura Y. Matloff, Amanda K. Stowers, and David Lentink. “Soft Biohybrid Morphing Wings with Feathers Underactuated by Wrist and Finger Motion.” Science Robotics 5, no. 38 (January 16, 2020). doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aay1246.
Clark, T.J. “The Conditions of Artistic Creation.” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 561–62.
Day, James. “Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War. Ten Recent Publications on Image-Politics in Relation to the Possibility of Art Historical Analysis.” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 48 (2015). doi:10.7146/nja.v24i48.23071.
Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London ; New York: Verso, 1990.
Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May. “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16, no. 4 (2013): 623. doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0623.
Kant, Immanuel. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Edited by Pauline Kleingeld. Translated by David L. Colclasure. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Kaplan, Caren. “Everyday Militarisms: Drones and the Blurring of the Civilian-Military Divide During COVID-19.” In Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, edited by Michael Richardson and Beryl Pong. Open Humanities Press, Forthcoming.
Karpantschof, René, and Flemming Mikkelsen. “Youth, Space, and Autonomy in Copenhagen: The Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement, 1963-2012.” In The City Is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, edited by Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze, 179–206. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.
Klaidman, Daniel. Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
La Fontaine, Jean de. Fables choisies. Tome 1 / , mises en vers par J. de La Fontaine. Tome premier, 1755. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1049428h.
Miller, Andrea. “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 85–106. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Neocleous, Mark. War Power, Police Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Novak, Zvonimir. Agit tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire, 2015.
Shaw, Ian G. R. “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis.” Geographica Helvetica 71, no. 1 (February 15, 2016): 19–28. doi:10.5194/gh-71-19-2016.
Werckmeister, Otto Karl. Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Wilson, Sarah. Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.
This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.
Jed Rasula’s doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1989 for a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, is titled “The Poetics of Embodiment: A Theory of Exceptions.” His forthcoming book with Oxford University Press is titled The Lower Frequencies: Genre and Extravagance in the Novel. From exception to extravagance: that relay offers an apt resumé of Rasula’s critical oeuvre, which has been consistently devoted to the discrepant, the illegible, the exorbitant, the eccentric, and the superfluous. Rasula’s first critical book, The American Poetry Wax Museum, studies the “reality effects” of anthologization and canon formation from 1940-1990. But while this is indeed a work of literary history and sociology, it amounts to a reckoning with the metaphysics of genteel cultural coercion, a study of “canontology” as that which signifies “the criteria for existence—the modes of being and appearing” that are stipulated by canons (471).
Rasula is himself an anthologist of another stripe. Imagining Language (MIT, 2001), coedited with Steve McCaffery, convenes a vast assembly of linguistic deviation, experiment, and expansion across three millennia, organized conceptually and thematically so as to produce discordant congruities brought into theoretical and contextual focus by rigorously rhapsodic section introductions. Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (Action Books, 2012), coedited with Tim Conley, assembles a vertiginous array of efforts by international modernists to include the cacophonous provocations of urban experience within the field of the poem through parataxis, visual forms, and aural effects. These are anthologies that do not reproduce canontology but rather explode its parameters.
It is in his book This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2002) that Rasula goes farthest toward undoing distinctions between the roles of literary critic, anthologist, and poet. The book traverses the sweep of American poetry from Whitman through Pound, Olson, and Zukofsky to such contemporary figures as Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, while referring to dozens of poets along the way. As it does so, This Compost deploys a unique style of quotation whereby texts are woven together in compound threads, constructing associative bonds between passages from different poets distinguished only by a tilde (~), with names and titles cited sequentially in endnotes. Amid these we find passages of Rasula’s poetic prose, distributed across subsections of a continuous essay and thinking with rather than interpreting the poetry—drawing out conceptual, historical, imaginative implications and consequences with often startling lucidity:
The peculiar skill of any art is in making all that is available of itself be surface; even its depths (like the picaresque profundities of Moby-Dick) are disclosed only as surface events. This puts writer and reader on more or less equal footing, because although each has a different approach to the text, once the text is in place the surface it makes available is haunted or shadowed by an obverse, the obvious perversity by which it affords glimpses of eaches and anys where every and all appear to lurk. Both sides are never visible at once, although a fundamental tropical urge is to make both sides available in such rapid succession that, like a coin trick, a continuity of the alternating surfaces blends into one demonic animated texture that is posed as identity and surplus indistinguishably. (71)
In This Compost, it is as though the surfaces of poems had descended into the darkness of the underworld along with their reader (or wreader, as Rasula sometimes writes, emphasizing the co-implication between reading and writing) before emerging once more into the light, now transfigured by their passage into possibilities of relation they always harbored among themselves.
Rasula’s work cannot be subsumed under a “methodology,” but if there is one word that captures the enabling condition of his mode of thought it would modernism. The exceptions his work theorizes and the extravagance it displays are akin to the exteriorizing force of modernist rupture, to the self-surpassing energies that go by the name of modernism and continue to agitate the present. Imagining Language delves into three thousand years of the archive, but the inspiration for that transhistorical editorial labor stems from the revolution of the word carried out by modernism, projected forward and backward from the rift it opens in the history of the letter, the line, and the law of genre. In The Shadow Mouth: Modernism and Poetic Inspiration (Palgrave, 2009) and Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015), Rasula turns his attention directly toward this subject matter, but it is only in his two most recent volumes that the full scope of his immersion in modernism across the arts comes into focus. History of Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory (Oxford University Press, 2020) are companion volumes carving forking paths from early German Romanticism through Wagnerism to the proliferation of international avant-gardes and the global convulsions of jazz before following the ungrounding of these upheavals back to prehistoric precedents in cave painting, reading modernism as a “renaissance of the archaic.” With the prodigious and perhaps unprecedented range and variety of materials these volumes convene across nine hundred pages, Rasula has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to develop a research practice and a prose style adequate to the sheer profusion of modernist precedent—if not through an unattainable approximation of totality then by producing a sufficiently complex experience of its irreducible inventions.
The signal claim of History of a Shiver is that “the first modernism was Romanticism” (73). If the eighteenth century querelle between the ancients and the moderns remained “a neoclassical affair” (73), we might deduce from this claim that modernism emerges within modernity not through the rupture between the classical and the modern, but rather between the classical and the romantic. The impetus of modernism—its sublime impudence—stems from the self-conscious affirmation of this break, signaled in particular by a movement beyond classical genres. Rasula argues that modernism might be “understood in broad historical terms as the self-overcoming of genres in all the arts, for it’s this above all that illuminates the distinguishing trait of modernism while making legible its basis in Romanticism” (74). The specific Romanticism to which Rasula refers is the circle of writers concentrated in Jena, Germany, in the late 1790s, including Friedrich Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Ludwig Tieck. Through their journal, Athenaeum, the Jena Romantics made the overcoming of separations between genres and art forms their explicit project through such keywords as Romantische Poesie, Mischgedicht, or Roman, which constellate their ambition to inaugurate forms of writing, thought, and sociality fusing art, science, philosophy, and politics while displacing the opposition of literature and criticism. “To affirm creative activity in terms of perpetual expansion and self-overcoming,” writes Rasula, “is not so much to envision the completion of a work as to valorize a project exceeding any momentary incarnation in a particular work” (56). Through this “feeling for projects” affirmed by Friedrich Schlegel, Jena circa 1800 becomes a fragment of the future it anticipates and constructs, with unclassifiable works like Novalis’s Das Allgemeine Brouillon making manifest a mode of striving not only metaphysical or historical, but above all formal—a demand that forms become adequate to all that exceeds them.
History of a Shiver coalesces around the recognition that such striving involves a passion for synesthesia: “The Mischgedicht—or blended composition—fanned the flames of an ambitiously synesthetic compulsion revisited with increasing urgency throughout the nineteenth century” (61). Moreover, in Rasula’s account the vehicle of this synesthetic compulsion was music. Due to an ineffability apparently exceeding that of other arts, and “because music was the art form least encumbered by mimetic criteria” (61), it served as an endlessly mutable locus of synesthetic reverie, such that experiences of “seeing music” or “listening to incense” pass over from idle analogy to transgenerational project, conveyed by the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk from Romantische Poesie to early twentieth century avant-garde experimentation. Rasula is attentive to the irony of one particular art form taking on, through synesthetic revery, the burden of overcoming particular art forms—but what is irony? And how are we to understand the specific nature of this particular irony? It is by posing and indeed answering questions like this—which up the ante of art historical observation—that Rasula is able to illuminate the undercurrents of a century’s obsessions with an order of metaphysical insight equal to his objects of study, here in response to a fragment by Schlegel:
“Irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an endlessly abundant chaos”—in short, the primordial cosmic potentiality from which art (and all creative effort) derives. Irony is the romantic salutation of a finite being greeting the infinite cosmos, graced by reciprocal genuflections of cricket and leviathan. According to the principle of the fragment, every creative act leaves some trace of its “infinitely teeming” energy in the domain of the possible. Although the romantic concept of irony was mostly applied to literature, its artistic consequences are closely linked to the increasing eminence of music during the nineteenth century. Disclosing patterns of “eternal agility,” accompanied by an ironic awareness of the fragility of musical forms, music became the Trojan horse that smuggled Romanticism into modernism. (58-59)
It is not only ironic that music is positioned as the art capable of overcoming divisions among the arts; music is the irony which bears and conveys that Romantic imperative through the nineteenth century: the eternal agility of a medium with no object and no delimited spatial frame, temporally restless and composed of fleeting tones that die upon the air into which they are born and within the senses they populate. It is the clear consciousness of endlessly abundant chaos, communicated by music, from which modernism draws its sublime impudence from Romanticism, an ironic consciousness that extends to the dialectical relation between medium specificity and interarts experimentation, each pole of that relation propelling the other into generative contradictions. Taking up Carl Dalhaus’s notion of the “pathos of emancipation” (23) implicit in the contradictions of medium specificity and synesthetic yearning, the first half of History of a Shiver tracks tantalizing efforts to “surmount the input/output ratio of sense-specific arts” (24) from the throes of melomania and the delirium of Wagnerism through the subtractive operations of symbolism, the untimely pastorals of pageantry, pictorialism, and dance in California, invocations of a fourth dimension and a sixth sense, and a theoretical excursion through the ideal of endless melody.
Chapters on symbolism and on pictorialism and dance exemplify Rasula’s discrepant approaches to defamiliarizing modernism. “Drawing a Blank: Symbolist Retraction” is a beautiful, fluent meditation upon the “propensity to vacate the stage, reconvene space as magnitude, and generally clear the ground in order to start from scratch” (116). This “particular motif of retraction or clearing a blank,” Rasula argues, “is the salient feature of symbolism that persisted into modernism” (116). It’s not only the argument itself but also a subtle appreciation of the complex emotional textures of this subtractive operation that lend Rasula’s account its singularity. “I feel myself more trusting of the nameless,” Rilke intones, and as we read, that feeling of trust enters into the vacancies of Hammershøi’s interiors; into the “simple feelings” of Maeterlink’s plays and puppet theater (137); into the ghostly evanescence of Fernand Khnopff’s paintings, or their serial repetition of figures upon undeveloped ground; into portraits by Auguste Levêque, Mieczyslaw Jakimowicz, Odilon Redon, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wherein closed eyes bespeak a silent inner life; into Mallarmé’s compositions in which the lines “mustn’t be composed of words; but of intentions, and all the words must fade before the sensation” (121). Moving among so many names—some familiar, others less so—Rasula helps us sense the nameless blank of indeterminate meaning in the background or below the surface of what we thought we knew, of what we have been looking at for a long time:
Symbolist painting exudes a kind of thematic huddling, suggesting the predatory nature of certain subjects, as though the subjects chose the painters and not the other way around. So those scenarios of silence and absence seem on the verge of releasing some sound, like the skittering of rats or a sudden flutter of pigeons. (145)
To see sight renounced is to be asked to consider another sense (143); to trust the nameless is to let the object sink into indeterminacy, into resonance with undefined attributes—so symbolist retractions fertilize synesthesia and merge with the ineffability of music by evoking interiorities or elsewheres subtracted from recognition, suggesting reminiscence, and suffused with significance.
The following chapter on pictorialism and dance in turn-of-the-century America follows such obscure figures as photographer Arnold Genthe into the neo-Hellenic fantasies of Carmel by the Sea, or poets Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey onto the open road in their Songs from Vagabondia (1894). Rasula reconstructs affinities between the bucolic idylls, hieratic poses, flowing gowns, and pagan mysteries of American pageantry and Pacific arts colonies with fin-de-siècle Europe through such transatlantic crossover figures as Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, imbibing and interpreting Wagner, praised by Mallarmé. Photography not only documented the bodily postures and physical mystique of such figures, it also sculpted, curated, and framed their production according to the contrasting subjective ideals looking both forward and backward at the switching point between centuries:
Photography provides a vivid study of contrasts at that fin de siècle moment when Jean-Martin Charcot was documenting the convulsions of his hysterics for scientific purposes, while dance and body culture manuals were deploying a similar range of corporeal expressivity to illustrate modern standards of healthy living. In the genteel and ultimately redemptive petition to art by pictorial photography, the female form emerged as a tasteful return to Hellenistic animation—animus tamed by anima. (183)
Moving from Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey’s experiments with the photographic documentation of movement to Diana Watts’s The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal and Genthe’s photographs of Duncan, his collaboration with Percy Mackay (leader of the American pageantry movement), and his link to the photographic pictorialism of Stieglitz’s Camera Work, to Edward Steichen’s affiliation with the same journal, Rasula tracks the curious capacity of burgeoning art photography to shuttle between pastoral bohemia, mechanical scientism, nostalgic Hellenism, and Hollywood glitz. Formal problems of lighting and pose link these apparently discrepant photographic worlds with symbolism, while documentation of outdoor dance links pictorialism to the “barefoot modernism” of Duncan and the Arcadian dream of Vagabondia. Anne Brigman would photograph a series of wilderness nudes posed on outcroppings in the high Sierras, evocative of H.D.’s poems in Sea Garden and of “new dimensions” of “the human form as part of tree and rock rhythms” (198). Such projects exemplify Rasula’s reminder that “the influential view of modernism as a series of formal advances in various arts has obscured the extent to which such advances were stations in a spiritual quest.” “It has been too easy,” he notes, “to recognize formal issues from outside, while the tangle of hunches and beliefs that actually drove someone’s engagement with his or her art can seem inscrutable and messy. Once something like an idea emerges, it seems to have little to do with the plangent psychological and material muck out of which it arose” (189-190). Rasula’s rare gift is his capacity to make that plangent substance and that tangle of hunches manifest, not only prior to but in the ideas they generate and by which they are displaced.
The arabesque associations between major and minor streams of incipient modernism in History of a Shiver flow into Acrobatic Modernism like elaborately winding tributaries into a vast river, itself composing manifold currents. Understanding the structure of the book is crucial to grasping its method. We find three central chapters—“Make it New,” “Jazzbandism,” and “Multiplied Men”—constructed as something like encyclopedic catalogues. Here the task is to track down and include as many nodes in these thematic networks as possible: the writing moves briskly between names, practices, movements, and contexts, enumerating and briefly characterizing declarations of fidelity to the new in all its forms; the international scope and protean reception of jazz as a global phenomenon; invocations of plural selves and heteronymic displacements of identity. The sheer profusion of these chapters is at once exhausting and exhilarating, as the Preface anticipates:
My advice to the reader, then, is to regard the text like a big crowd on Times Square, Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, Mexico City’s Zócalo, or Trafalgar Square in London. As you venture into the swarm, let the kaleidoscope spin. After a while patterns will emerge in prismatic rotation, and the poor old tired horse of modernism may turn out to be a zebra after all. Count the stripes, if you will, or at any rate, saddle up. (vii)
One might add “buckle up,” in preparation for a ride that charges onward with the velocity of Marinetti’s automobile retrofitted for the freeway.
Yet these three central chapters are bookended by five others which proceed at a somewhat more reflective pace, and which pursue more or less continuous lines of investigation through the opening and closing sections of the volume. The first three chapters—“The Ache of Modernism,” “Luminous Sores,” and “Gathering Hay in a Thunderstorm”—elaborate an approach to artworks as “pathic receptacles,” compounds of thought and feeling deposited by making, poiesis. “Signs in any medium,” Rasula notes, “propagate more signs even as they purport to close in on the object of representation or on some intended meaning.” Thus,
To speak of an artwork as a pathic receptacle indicates this migratory propensity, this condition by means of which our sentience gets the better of us, as it were, thanks to which artifacts attain a life of their own. The transfigured object harbors a twofold pathos: on the one hand, like a corporeal dismemberment, the work is poignantly removed from the body that nourished it; on the other hand, in defiance of the medical model, the work itself (the disjected member) becomes the phantom sensation. (61)
The notion of artworks as phantom sensations, and of prosthesis as constitutive of embodied apprehension and production, is theorized in greater detail and with striking insight in Rasula’s dissertation on “The Poetics of Embodiment.” Here it offers an approach to artworks traversing apparently discrete forms or distinct media and attentive to “a biomorphic insistence, a biologically exigent extension of corporeality” attending the work of artists whose “generative impulse is profoundly embedded in a somatic manifold” (62).
In “Luminous Sores: The Pathic Receptacles of Modernism,” this approach enables a deep reckoning with the impact of the Great War on the relation between modernism and modernity. What distinguishes Rasula’s treatment of this well-worn topic is a concept of the artwork adequate to understanding how the war brought into “cataclysmic focus” (64) a wrenching recalibration of sensory ratios and a thoroughgoing displacement of generic norms that was already well underway. The “acute materialization of pathic intensity” focalized by the war is “a rupture that tells us, poignantly, that art is of the body and the body’s traumas extend to art” (115)—“that art’s receptacles hurt when they undergo transformation” (114). From the perspective of the synesthetic dialectic developed in History of Shiver—wherein synesthetic yearning becomes lodged in particular artforms, transgressing their distinctions precisely through intensifications of their address to particular sensory channels—we are in a position to understand how Nietzsche’s response to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk registers the pain of modernism in the element of both formal and historical transformation, given the body’s inadequacy to the demands of reception: “the absolute arts tear us to pieces, as it were, and we also enjoy only by bits, now as ear-people, now as eye-people, etc” (qtd on 115). “The siren call of ‘absolute art,’” writes Rasula, “endowed each sense with an enhanced perspective of loss—what it had to shed to partake of the absolute—as well as the advantages of further refinements along the paths of ‘eye-people’ and ‘ear-people’” (115).
This clarification illuminates not only anticipations by artworks of the sundering of bodies by the war, but also competing claims of medium specificity and inter-arts experimentation as central to modernism. The apparent contradiction of those accounts attests to “the paradoxically enabling trauma of productive loss” (126) traversing the unsettling of both generic and historical regularities throughout the nineteenth century. To position the war as ruptural cause of modernist culture is to occlude an understanding of the war itself as an effect of complex historical determinations stemming from the upheavals of modernity—those which shape as well the affective field in which artworks express the pain of transformation, and in which they become adequate to register the force of the war’s catastrophe. One must have suffered a long time to be adequate to the crisis of suffering, and have been greatly transformed to endure such transformation. When we read Hegel’s critique of Enlightenment and his philosophical transubstantiation of the French Revolution, we may be acutely aware that the pathos which also suffuses Beethoven’s Eroica is preparing the ground for those artworks of the twentieth century which take up ruptural traditions in the name of the new. Rasula cites Loy’s “Apology of a Genius”:
We come among you
innocent
of our luminous sores (127)
Among whom? one might ask. As Rasula will show, the genius of modernism is immersed in many thousands of years of cultural history, but it displays its wounds “among” the denizens of modernity. The sores of modernism illuminate the darkness of modernity like an underworld, by torchlight drawn from its own fires. Such a torch would be a prosthesis, supplementing the body’s lack, displaying its need, connecting it with the elements. The “excess of deficiency” (127) from which modernism suffers is bred in the bone of modernity, and its projects—whatever their explicit predecessors—stem in particular from the attunement of Jena Romanticism toward the dialectical overcoming of discrete artforms and genres.
In “Gathering Hay in a Thunderstorm” (Chapter 3), Rasula draws Aby Warburg’s research toward his Bilderatlas and his concept of pathosformel into contact with H.D.’s poetry and the meditations of her Tribute to Freud, in order “to explore the affective force of antiquity as a healing agent” (129). As the chapter weaves together H.D.’s vision of writing on the wall in Corfu with her dream of a caterpillar writhing under salt, with the intensities of her bond with D.H. Lawrence, and with the religious impulses of her sensibility, the depth and subtlety of Rasula’s psychoanalytic learning becomes apparent. There’s a sensitivity to the intersection of psychic trace and historical complex that imbues this material with a density of insight which the volume slows down to register. Meanwhile, the linking of H.D.’s case not only with Warburg’s art historical investigations but also the fissures of his dual identity as psychiatric patient and scholar of Renaissance art realizes the concept of pathosformel through the elaboration of its parameters. Warburg “sought the disclosure of otherness as such, in any form” (130), and Rasula takes the pursuit of this disclosure as an occasion for its advent: Warburg’s experience of his own body as akin to “a telephone girl during a storm or under artillery fire” (133) is fused not only with the “heraldic electricity” (159) of H.D.’s disposition, but also with the shock of cinematic experience recorded in Mann’s Magic Mountain and the harrowing cuts of the film Borderline, starring H.D. and Paul Robeson. Rasula limns the pathic intensity registered by Warburg in Renaissance paintings as a “sense of density evoked by the intractable body” (136) and lodged in works of art, reading the psychic distress at issue as manifest in the scholar’s life as much as in the concepts he develops. It’s the shiver that passes from one to the other that passes as well from Warburg to H.D., and that gives us to think modernism writ large as akin to a caterpillar writhing under the sprinkled salt of modernity—as an image of somatic convulsion. Citing Maeterlinck—“perhaps illnesses are the various and authentic poems of the flesh” (161)—the chapter offers a profound if understated meditation on the inextricability of illness and health, with culture caught at the crux of their chiasmus.
These opening chapters of Acrobatic Modernism enable us to imagine the quiver of the tightrope as it is traversed, or the sudden shudder of the fine line as one shifts to keep one’s balance above the void. The “acrobatic” is a matter of virtuosity, to be sure, but also of corporeal peril and exposure in the midst of the performance. The saltimbanque of Baudelaire’s “La Muse Vénale” not only shows off her charms, but does so through a “laughter soaked with tears that no one sees, / To split the sides of the vulgar.” The “hectic multiplicity” of modernism is riven by the very energies propelling its performances, such that “whether there’s a choice or not, modernism demands an acrobatic response to change, and change is the legislative circumstance of modernity” (11). Poised on the cusp of transformation, or undergoing its crux, the acrobat makes a living of the impossible, takes it as a test or “metabolic provocation” (12) productive of elaborate postures. Such performances take their toll, and Rasula’s title inspires attention, throughout, to the ways in which exposure to extremity—even when pulled off with aplomb— demands contortions as painful as impressive. “Historical mutation is the elective burden of modernism” (22) and artworks bear, as prostheses, the pain of the amputations they supplement, even those proceeding the birth of those who produce them.
Precedent becomes the closing theme of this book, as “the new” intersects with the question of how much precedent invention can include. A chapter on “The Renaissance of the Archaic” is preceded by a chapter on “The New Mythology,” and these form a diptych at the hinge of prehistory. The metaphor is meant to evoke Rasula’s discussion of the symbol:
In the original Greek, symbol refers to the two halves of a pledge split in two, so each half bears within it the potential for reunion. Moby-Dick is possessed of the perfect symbol: insofar as the white whale is symbolic, it’s because it is the living counterpart (and possessor) of Ahab’s lost leg. In that sense, then, a symbol emits phantom sensations, woeful registers of somatic penury. In addition to the spatial aspect of its object status, a symbol is also a temporal indicator. The sundered pledge attests to past truncation, portending the future reunion when the two halves of the pledge are reunited. (348)
Modernism is a sundered reunion with the deep past: reunion becomes the very act of severance that proclaims the new even as it claims a destiny in common with the archaic.
“The New Mythology” takes the landmark journal Transition as a signpost, dwelling on its publication of the “Work in Progress” that would become Finnegans Wake, with its sense of historical simultaneity wherein (as Siegfried Giedion claimed), “present, past, and future are not chopped off from one another but merge into one uninterrupted fabric” (296). But as usual, Rasula brings the usual suspects (Joyce) into contact with lesser-known figures, such as the German Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen or critic Carola Giedion-Welker, the latter becoming a kind of guide through both closing chapters. Giedion-Welker’s lucid commentaries on Joyce, Arp, Moholy-Nagy, Ozenfant and Jeanneret, Satie and others others illuminate the stakes of Dada, Constructivist, and Surrealist artworks and their archaic precedents. It’s her attunement to the problem of sensory ratios, the requirement of renovating human perception through mutations of proportion demanded by modernity, that Rasula particularly values in her perspective. “Reminiscence of the archaic,” she writes of Giacometti’s sculptures, “is this delicate awakening of the form from out of the plane of stone, this swelling up and down of the plane.” And of Arp she notes that the material is infused with “something growing, welling, gliding which admits neither of formal nor mental frontiers and fixations” (298). We might glean from such descriptions that, for Giedion-Welker, the reminiscence of the archaic in modernity involved a measureless formal flux or interior pressure transforming the dimensions of the work in accordance with historical forces traversing the present and connecting it with a distant past. What’s interesting in these passages is that the language is not one of rupture but of undulation, as if the deepest past were sculpting from within the immediacy of the present without the regulation of proportional laws.
The inspiration of the archaic suggests a return to origins, to inaugural moments, thus fusing the new with the old as that which was not old when it took place, and it is this simultaneity of taking place which accounts for how allegiance to precedent strictly entails commitment to the unprecedented: the first instance of what once was, right now. The incipient curvature Giedion-Welker sees in the awakening of modernist forms to archaic precedent (think of Gaudier-Brzeska) is manifest in the dynamic, rather than static, equilibrium urged by Piet Mondrian, the kinetic rhythm advocated by Naum Gabo, or the asymmetrical balance of typographical design adopted by Jan Tschichold (302). Rasula positions the values and inventions of Constructivism, its realization of the apparently abstract in the concrete practice of making, as part of the pursuit of a new mythology—and in this sense in continuity with the project of Jena Romanticism. “We admit,” Naum Gabo acknowledged, “that we do not what what ‘reason’ is, what ‘myth’ is, where free fancy begins, and where knowledge ends,” and it was this uncertainty about parameters of knowledge, perception, and imagination in modernity which forced a production of the new often inseparable from a recovery of the old. Gabo declared that “the aim of our time consists in creating a harmonious human being” (319), where the emphasis falls upon creating, since harmony could no longer be taken for granted. And indeed this specifies the terrain upon which Constructivism and Surrealism—apparently divergent or opposing movements—converged upon the same goal in different ways. “New innocence and new experience,” Rasula writes, “join to produce (from a Constructivist perspective) or to induce (in the Surrealist outlook) a new sentience” (346)—a new sentience for which the boundaries between reason and the irrational are as unclear as those between knowledge and myth.
In a sweeping final chapter, Acrobatic Modernism then considers “The Renaissance of the Archaic” such new sentience involved, again conjoining major figures (Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Charles Olson, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko) with a host less familiar names, (Max Raphael, Anatole Jakovski, Andrea Caffi, Martha Graham, among many others). Abstract Expressionism anchors the chapter’s associative tour through investments in the paleolithic, and a trajectory comes into view from Constructivism and Surrealism into a postwar context for which avant-garde excavations of the archaic had themselves become historically mediated. “Prehistory” —that which comes before the beginning of record—comes to constitute an opening upon the way in which the archaic had been made new by modernism, as cave painting recalls the gestural inauguration of the unprecedented: art. The book draws toward a close with a moving meditation upon the hand print as prehistoric sign and modernist motif, wherein the marking of corporeal presence asserts or shadows or abstracts the being-there of the human in the midst of the ghostly apparitions of time’s passage. It’s through such associative gestures that Rasula is able to bring what seems to be unrelated into suggestive proximity, and this closing movement of the book’s final chapter might be regarded as itself a kind of methodological sign: any and all signs of what came to be called modernism are available for reconsideration of their significance, and of the way they snap the most profound depths of our history into altered focus.
Together, these books are a massive contribution not only to modernist studies but to our understanding of modernity. In their passage across two centuries, across the breadth of international modernism, across the arts and experimental practices located among their interstices, History of a Shiver and Acrobatic Modernism show us just how much typical scholarly protocols tend to occlude the profusion of modernist practices. In particular, the acrobatic agility of Rasula’s writing—a compositional style willing to risk immersion in the materials to the point of saturation—enables the kind of alacrity urged by a figure like Friedrich Schlegel: an associative field of intelligence and attention constantly mutating, expanding its limits, frequently turbulent but at times settling into regions of meditative continuity. These are books that display a ferocious determination to know or at least to gather as much as possible, yet also a light touch that makes so much research and learning amenable to enjoyment and play. To read them is a difficult pleasure, teeming as they are with so many encounters and new prospects. As we contemplate the vexed energies they trace, they draw us near the most distant, and they suffuse what we thought with knew with intimations of the unknowable.
While discussing the composition of these two books in a forthcoming volume of essays and conversations, Wreading: A Potential Intelligence (University of Alabama Press, 2021), Rasula notes, “The fact that these people were alive means a great deal to me.” You can tell. For it to mean a great deal that such people were alive requires us to encounter their works as refractory to the museum, to the catalog, to the backward gaze of the scholar. For it to matter that they were alive, they have to be brought to life. It means a great deal because the history of a shiver those lives transmit, of the luminous sores their works display, remains our own.
This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.
by Anton Jäger and Jan Overwijk
On December 5th, 2019, London’s Conway Hall hosted an illustrious reunion. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – authors of the 2000 classic Empire, itinerant celebrities of the academic left – came to London to revisit their theses in a “world of Trump” (Hardt and Negri 2019a). “Twenty years on”, the announcement read, “globalization remains a central issue of our era, but commentators are conducting its postmortem, as forces across the political spectrum herald the return of national sovereignty” (Hardt and Negri 2019a). A lot had indeed changed in twenty years, the authors admitted. Across the world, evangelists of globalization found themselves in a state of retreat, embattled by Brexiteers, Orbánists, and other antiglobalists, led forth by the likes of Bolsonaro, Trump, and Duterte (Eichengreen 2018; Norris and Inglehart 2016). With supposed “populists” heading states from Budapest to Delhi, raising tariff barriers and restricting labor mobility, had Empire stood the test of time?
There was a time when Empire occupied the center of global political theory. “Even if it doesn’t deliver the goods,” a reviewer charged in 2001, “Empire should inspire a multitude of empirical investigations and practical political projects” (Henwood 2001, 12). Others were less enthused: a member of the American LaRouchist movement described Negri as a “terrorist controller” who became “a leading ideologue of the new decasualization” (Celano 2001, 16). Despite such early pushback, the phrases deployed in Hardt and Negri’s book still occupy a stable place in the left’s vocabulary” – “multitude”, “cognitive capital”, “deterritorialization”, “post-Fordism” – and have found their way into scholarly language (Kioupkiolis 2016, 138-139). Interestingly, Hardt and Negri’s theory also seems to have been granted a paradoxical new lease on life after the failure of left populism in the 2010s. After ten years of experimenting with parties, institutions, elections, and representation the left finds itself sent back to a position resembling early 2000s horizontalism, but without facing a triumphantly cohesive neoliberal bloc.
No thinkers provided a more trenchant diagnosis of this previous period than Hardt and Negri. Yet no thinkers also more clearly exemplified the limits of the previous horizontalist critique of the Washington Consensus than the authors of Empire – limits to which the left populist moment was all too attentive in its focus on party building and associative activity. The dogged return of the Hardt-Negri thesis thus speaks to a deeper contradiction in their oeuvre. While few theorists offered a more powerful theory of the new gods of fin de siècle capitalism – both economic and political – they had far less to say about the ‘old gods’ that stalked the neoliberal world, from the spread of general market dependence, the retrenchment of mid-century social rights, to the declining bargaining power of labor. On a surface level the hypothesis of Empire was so plausible as to be unassailable – the spreading of flexibility and creativity through the entirety of the capitalist labor market, and the digital ideologies this spawned. Hardt and Negri also offered a potent vision of the new modes of anti-representative politics that flourished on this new economic terrain, and how capital reconstituted both itself and the labor process. On a deeper level, Empire equally leaned into the most implausible of all hypotheses: that the fight for an old-style political economy and decommodification had to be abandoned for Marxism to remain viable, that old dogmas were only just that: dogmas, and that regression could be recast as progression.
As the world returns to the squares and the “multitude” resurfaces, this article revisits the project begun with Empire. Although cognizant of the advancements and insights offered by Empire and the broader, anti-institutional mood it was part of, it claims that Hardt and Negri’s theory of the multitude, indexed to a specific understanding of capitalist logics and a Spinozist ontology, still retains a fatal ambiguity. That ambiguity deserves revisiting today, in a time when the left populism first proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and later enacted by Podemos, La France Insoumise, and Syriza has waned and Hardt and Negri’s movementism is undergoing a revival.[1] While the 2010s swore by theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe’s “organizational” tendencies, the 2020s open a chapter continuous with Hardt and Negri’s horizon (Cunliffe 2020, 122). This article thus cautions both politically and theoretically against a hasty return to Hardt and Negri’s trilogy of four after the close of the populist decade, and urges us to move beyond it while maintaining some of its key insights. In this sense, it calls neither for uncritical acceptance nor unconditional rejection. We argue that even today still, much of value can be found in Hardt and Negri’s oeuvre, even if that value is often too one-dimensional.
Metaphysics of Indistinction
Any reckoning with Hardt and Negri’s legacy must move from the abstract to the concrete, peering at the foundations propping up the political theory: their ontology. From Empire (2000) to Commonwealth (2018), both authors understood the transition from the Fordist phase of capitalism to its post-Fordist phase primarily as one of a “multitude” coming into its own. But Hardt and Negri take this faith in the productive capacities of the global working class far beyond Mario Tronti’s (2019) original, post-operaist “reversal of perspective” (Shukaitis 2015, 3). In the 1960s, Tronti sought to correct classical Marxism’s overly strong emphasis on the autonomous development of the productive forces as the principal determinant of historical progress (Balestrini 2020). Instead of envisioning history as a chain of events in which a reactive working class pre-empts capital’s maneuvers, Tronti’s operaismo understands labor as the prime historic agent, to which capital is forced to ceaselessly respond. Post-Fordism, on this count, is not so much driven by new business opportunities for capital as by a need for capital to contain the struggle of organized labor through a new regulation regime – an endogenous, rather than an exogenous, shock. Like Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) in The New Spirit of Capitalism therefore, Hardt and Negri argue that the post-Fordist mode of regulation must be viewed as capital’s response to the revolts of May 1968. The soixante-huitards, as Paolo Virno (2004, 111) notes, demanded the abolition of wage labor but instead got the abolition of the stable job. That capital is merely a reactive force, then, does not mean that it cannot be historically effective.
This Trontian worldview informs Hardt and Negri’s elegy to the concept of proletarian resistance. “Resistance”, Hardt and Negri write, “is actually prior to power” (2001, 360). What is distinctive about Hardt and Negri’s workerism, however, is that they do not primarily understand the agency of labor as a historical force but as an ontological power. Hence their nominal displacement: instead of “labor” or “the working class”, they speak of “the multitude”, inspired by Spinoza’s original multitudo. In its simplest formula, the multitude represents “the power to act”, an ontological principle of self-organization, a purely immanent source of “creative positivity” (Negri 1999, 79; Hardt and Negri 2009, 179-180; 2001, 61). The multitude forms the sole “constituent power”, the only creative agent that produces both itself as well as its historic antagonists, the “constituted power” that is capital, sovereignty and Empire. Capital is thus not so much a freestanding counterforce to labor but a historical aberration of the multitude itself – a “failure to realize our own power” as Benjamin Noys puts it (Noys 2010, 112; see also Hardt and Negri 2001, 312).
More concretely, the multitude under post-Fordism makes up the collective subject of cooperative immaterial laborers under Empire. “Empire”, meanwhile, is understood as the global social order organized around “biopolitical production”, or the production of living labor and subjectivity (Hardt and Negri 2001, 24). With its post-Fordist mode of regulation, Empire thus forms the attempt of capital to capture the value that the multitude always already produces in its very mode of being and becoming. Empire’s stress on networked, collaborative and flexible production—what Hardt and Negri, following Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) call “immaterial labour”— necessarily mirrors the decentralized, cooperative creativities of the multitude, since capital must always follow labor as the sole source of value. In this sense, the post-Fordist moment can rightly be said to be a further realization of the productive capacities of the multitude, which finds itself in a feedback loop with the common: it produces the common in common through the common (Hardt and Negri 2009, 123, 148; 2017, 98). A principle of pure relationality, the multitude is this very feedback loop. Or to use Hardt and Negri’s Deleuzian language, it is the relation that pre-exists the relata.
The pre-existence of labor as a creative force also drives its primal agency. “[T]he deterritorializing power of the multitude”, Hardt and Negri (2001, 61) contend, “is the productive force that sustains Empire”. The post-Fordist formation of Empire here appears as the historical end result of the ontological pressures of the multitude, forcing capital to battle on the multitude’s home terrain of total immanence. At first glance, this may appear as a problematic proposition. It appears that, in ontologizing Mario Tronti’s sociological reversal of perspective, Hardt and Negri pre-decide historical and empirical questions concerning the development of capitalism in ontological terms. For it is not at all empirically obvious that the labor conditions in post-Fordism are the result of the dynamism of the multitude rather than of a power grab of capital in the face of stagnating accumulation in the capitalist core in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, Hardt and Negri explicitly eschew the type of ontology that builds in a metaphysically coercive strain of teleology: “there are no final ends or teleological goals written in history” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 221). Instead, they follow the Marxist principle that theory follows practice (Hardt and Negri 2004, 140). History and ontology therefore appear to be pulling in opposite methodological directions: the one pointing to a timeless tension between “Empire” and the “multitude”, the other situating that tension in a distinct temporal setting with history as its facade.
Hardt and Negri navigate this problem by distinguishing between a historical and an ontological multitude – in Spinozist jargon, a multitude of “actuality” versus one of “possibility”. Whereas the latter shapes an “absolute freedom” by acting in the eternity of the perpetual present, the former signals the politics required to constitute the multitude in the image of its absolute aspirations. Without falling into a Hegelianism, one can easily see these as a multitude for itself and a multitude in itself. The distinction, Hardt and Negri hurry to add, is merely analytic: the two dimensions of the multitude cannot ultimately be separated. The historical multitude, for instance, only recognizes itself in its political project based on its ontological potential. “The multitude, then, when we put these two together”, Hardt and Negri conclude, “has a strange double temporality: always-already and not-yet” (2004, 222). By joining these two faces of the multitude, Hardt and Negri explicitly refuse a false dilemma between history and ontology and keep their eyes fixed on both at once. They then infuse their materialism with just enough historical contingency to steer clear of the philosophic vice of a grand teleology. As Kam Shapiro (2004, 294) puts it: “It is here, in the space between the potential and the actual […] that Hardt and Negri interject the teleological strain of their materialism”.
Some tricky questions remain, however. It is difficult to comprehend, for instance, how a Spinozist monism that collapses yet separates the historical and the ontological does not simply end up muddying the two. There are, after all, still two countervailing tendencies in Hardt and Negri’s Spinozism: does the arrival of Empire and post-Fordism represent the liberation of the ontological by the historical? This fits well with the Spinozian picture in which the multitude is a vital force of excess that blooms through history like a flower slowly bursting through the asphalt. But this vision is explicitly denied by Hardt and Negri’s insistence on the priority of history (2004, 140), on the Marxian methodological principle that theory should always follow social reality. What, then, is history? Is it a contingent organization of materials that informs empirical sociology or is it a passive receptacle for the play of the ontological powers singled out by the Spinozists? If this question is rejected as a false dilemma, then one might ask: is the fact that historical Empire is the exact mirror image of the ontological multitude merely a momentous coincidence?
Hardt and Negri’s question is never resolved. Rather than pre-deciding on the question of what entity or force forms the motor of history, Hardt and Negri’s confusion of the ontological and the historical makes it undecidable who or what is the prime mover in capitalism. This confusion stretches out over several dimensions: ontologically speaking, it remains unclear what constitutes the difference between Empire and the multitude, or, between post-Fordism and the labor force it subsumes. Empire, for Hardt and Negri (2001, 327), represents Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space defined by uncoded flows, flexibility, continual modulation”, a fully immanent network that sustains all relations (Hardt and Negri 2001, 327). In contrast to “sovereignty”, which is imbued with a transcendent logic, post-Fordist capital functions through what they call, again in reference to Deleuze and Guattari, an immanent “axiomatics” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 327). “The primary characteristic of such an axiomatic”, Hardt and Negri write, “is that relations are prior to their terms”. This means, shockingly, that Empire has the exact same conceptual structure as the multitude: it is the relation that precedes the relata. Empire and the multitude thus become ontologically indistinguishable.
Adding to the confusion, Hardt and Negri argue that this indistinguishability between capital and labour is itself a product of history. Post-Keynesian capital, they maintain, survives in a permanent state of crisis: its modus operandi is the exploitation of disequilibrium and the unruly forces it discharges. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to grasp whether a crisis came “from above” or “from below”, whether the fall in profit was a ruse of capital or resistance from the multitude, whether rebellion or recuperation (Cooper 2011, 135). In an ironic twist, therefore, little to nothing remains of the original Trontian reversal of perspective. Both ontologically and historically, it has become impossible to say whether the current phase of capitalism results from the agency of labor or that of capital; ontologically speaking, they are both forces of pure “relationality” on the plane of immanence; historically speaking, it is radically uncertain on which empirical force one should pin crises.
Despite adversity, Hardt and Negri maintain that the multitude represents the sole ontologically productive principle. Empire itself, they claim, “is not a positive reality” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 361), but merely a “parasite”, an “apparatus of capture that lives only off the ontological vitality of the multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 62; 2019b, 83). Our concluding hypothesis is therefore that in this multifaceted confusion of the historical and the ontological as well as the multitude and Empire, Hardt and Negri ultimately go with the overpowering thrust of their Spinozian monist ontology. By this picture, the multitude is the causa sui, the liberating force of excess that pushes its way through history, now driving capital into the fully immanent Empire as the last vestige onto which capital is forced in anticipation of Commonwealth. The latter is Hardt and Negri’s term for communism, which, incidentally, Negri defines as “the negation of all measure, the affirmation of the most exasperated plurality—creativity” (1999, 33). However powerful the image, it brings with it a risk to misunderstand the precarious, flexible and networked labor conditions of post-Fordism as the deepest producing-desires of the working class – and thus to downplay the continuities between pre-Fordism and post-Fordism. It is to this risk that we will now turn.
Historical Ambiguities
Empire’s consequences were never exclusively philosophical. Besides its claims in ontological and philosophical registers, the implications of Hardt and Negri’s argument extend far into sociology and Marxist studies more generally, leading into social movement studies, political sociology, and political theory. Most of these fields of discussion can be centered around their description of a new, distinct accumulation regime that began in the 1970s. Hardt and Negri have consistently described the advent of their “polytechnic” work as part of a distinct, new historical phase of capitalist growth. During the late-Fordist age, they claim, workers used their historical advantages and pushed beyond the “dynamic stabilization” (Tronti) of the post-war period (Smith 2019, no page). Borrowing from cybernetics and systems theory, Tronti’s concept indicated the capacity of Italian capital to harness seemingly militant demands for wage increases and public sector expansion to their benefit, channeling popular energy into increased capital accumulation. Once it was clear that the interests of labor and the interests of capital began to diverge, however, capital went on the offensive and steadily deconstructed the post-war settlement. This could not be done without acknowledging the legitimacy of some of the revolts that had taken place within that system itself, which drove the demands for increasing spontaneity, creativity, and bottom-up input. Rather than the result of falling growth rates, Hardt and Negri argue, labor militancy itself drove declining profit margins and urged a different model of governance.
A recurrent response to this deconstruction has been a version of left melancholy, lamenting capital’s supposed breach of contract after the Trente Glorieuses. But rather than lamenting the death of the post-war compromise, Hardt and Negri see a liberation from a corporatist cage which can stimulate even stronger militancy. Such activity was heralded in the Italian “hot autumn” of 1968-69, when workers ignored the dictates of union and party and began to agitate on their own terms. In ending this “dynamic stabilization”, a newly disorganized mass of casual workers became available in the interim, who would shun the large representative pillars which had structured mass working class politics throughout the twentieth century. A new “multitude” was becoming visible in the interstices of this old world, less beholden to organizational dogmas and open to institutional experimentation. Although it shared a structural location with the older, industrial proletariat, its set-up was also constitutively different, less tolerant of leaders, representation, and mediation, and less centered on the hierarchical, industrial workplace. The new class in the social factory tracked a broader systemic shift across capitalist economies. The model of the factory at the heart of Fordism separated a male sphere of production from a female sphere of consumption, the former’s commodification reliant on patriarchal decommodification in the latter (Winant 2019). Capital’s push to post-Fordism and the consequent “feminization of work”, in turn, transformed the whole of society into the factory, forcing workers to hire themselves out to a variety of employers and adopt an inviting, entrepreneurial pose (Hardt and Negri 2009, 133). “Neoliberalism” became the preferred mode of management for this new welfare world. After the tense maneuvering between capital and labor in the inflationary 1970s, an “entrepreneurial multitude” gradually came about, less collectivist than its industrial predecessor but still politically militant, and potentially more emancipatory.
In its own time this vision also generated a familiar range of critiques from Marxists. Normatively, they questioned Hardt and Negri’s emphasis on labor’s supposedly deterritorializing powers and their key claim: that labor militancy rested on a supposed refusal for measurement (Negri 1999, 33). Earlier Marxists have mainly faulted Hardt and Negri for their account of the transition and for neglecting problems of industrial overcapacity in the current economy – rather than workers who wanted too large a segment of the social product, it was a global glut of manufacturing goods that drove capital’s profit rates down in the late 1960s (Brenner 2006, 2018). At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s chronicle, however, lies a deeper ambiguity: the substantial and eerie continuities between pre-Fordism and post-Fordism. These problems can be traced back to Hardt and Negri’s conceptualization of the Fordist regime itself. In their insightful passages, Hardt and Negri did acknowledge the political preconditions for this Fordist moment. Rather than an inevitable social formation, Fordism was often a political battle for decasualization and formal labor contracts, fought between workers and management in the 1920s.
Before 1918, most labor was casual, underpaid, and precarious by nature; it was only when political struggles over these working conditions pushed towards decasualization and permanent contracts that a corporatist settlement was reached. As studies by Charles Maier (1975) and Marcel van der Linden (2014) have shown, most corporatist arrangements rebranded as “Fordist” were the result of intense revolutionary activity from 1918 to 1945, as socialist and communist parties made their first forays into bourgeois governments and began to use state power to coerce capital into the general interest (Maier 1975; van der Linden 2014, 9-21). “Fordism”, in this sense, was less of a natural stage for capitalism than a political imposition from below and above, as recent studies by Noam Maggor and Stefan Link (2011; 2018; 2020) have pointed out – an attempt to shortcut international competition and capital development without dependency, growing a solid labor force which could be kept in the factory and disciplined into consumption (see also Buck-Morss 2002). Rather than an evolutionary stage inherent in capitalism’s DNA, Fordism was a unique political product which arose out of workers’ struggles rather than being imposed on them. In no way was Fordism thus a natural development for capital, a fact that is acknowledged by Hardt and Negri but never properly thought through (Link 2018; Buck-Morss 2002; Link 2011, 2020). When viewed from the perspective of capital’s short-term interests, after all, labor protection, decasualization, welfare rights, and formal contracts are no more than legal and political barriers in the free flow of capital and its maximum valorization in production. As John Clegg notes, “in a capitalist order of fully specified property rights, it is wage labor rather than slave labor that is the anomaly” (Clegg 2015: 303). Completely “enforceable labor contracts”, in this sense, would “be the dream of many an employer”, allowing them to extract surpluses without having to honor any contractual obligations (Clegg 2015, 303).
This prehistory of post-Fordism sensitively reshuffles the stages of capitalism implicit in Hardt and Negri’s story. Rather than a completely new historical situation, the post-Fordist era has seen the return of phenomena reminiscent of a pre-welfarist capitalism. Precarious labor conditions, loss of control over labor time, or the offloading of market risks have all reappeared vigorously, now coupled to a new ideology of human capital development. A return to self-entrepreneurship and self-employment form the legal counterpart of this shift, heralded by Hayek and other neoliberal ideologues. Organized capitalism, in this sense, was an interlude, not an evolutionary successor.[2] This similarity should induce healthy caution against Hardt and Negri’s periodization. What looks like the new is rather a resurrection of the old, now motivationally enforced through a radically “embedded” form of neoliberalism, organized by states, intergovernmental bodies, and carefully constructed trade treaties (see Slobodian and Plehwe 2020).
This critique has both descriptive and normative ramifications. Descriptively, it relativizes the transition from pre-Fordism to Fordism from an ontological development to a contingent process mediated by political struggle. Normatively, this analysis casts doubt on Hardt and Negri’s assertion of labor’s supposedly deterritorializing powers, culminating in the prospect of commonwealth as the “negation of all measure” (Negri 1999, 33). Rather than a tool for employers, measurability and rationalization were often a demand pressed by workers who sought better contracts, clarified working hours, and higher pay rates. This became clear in the first bill for the 8-hour day and the setting of wage scales in Belgium, Germany, and France after the First World War. Likewise, late nineteenth century statistical research that uncoupled poverty from innate character and instead linked it to social forms of unemployment, though doubtless an instrument of state discipline and biopower, simultaneously effected a pushback against charity-based poverty relief and pried open a political field of labor market regulation and social security (Desrosières 1998, 262). More than a refusal to be “measured”, measurability was a potent response to market-dependence and workplace discipline – the insistence to enumerate the exact amount of labor paid rather than remain in the dark. As Max Henninger notes, “we have an interest in taking the categories developed in the Marxist critique of political economy more seriously than Negri seems to do, for the simple reason that if we don’t ‘do the math’ ourselves, others will do it for us” (Henninger 2007, 177; see also Morozov 2017). Capital was in large part rational when forced to be so from below or above, whether a militant working class a domineering developmental state.
The Politics of Immeasurability
Unsurprisingly, the metaphysical and historical ambiguities and inconsistencies reverberate through the post-Operatist duo’s politics. In this context, a reckoning with the influence of cybernetic theory on left-wing thinking has also remained overdue. Taken in by a new digital ideology of verticality and absence of hierarchy, Hardt and Negri built on the promises of the terrain created by the end of “organized capitalism”, where large-scale institutions such as parties and unions were replaced with looser networks and assemblies. As Hardt and Negri put it in Multitude: “once again, a distributed network such as the Internet is a good initial image or model for the multitude because, first, the various nodes remain different but are all connected in the Web, and, second, the external boundaries of the network are open such that new nodes and new relationships can always be added” (2004, xv). Here, “immaterial labor” thus “seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 294). The emancipatory switching of cybernetic languages has thus played a key role in this ambition, with computerized “societies of control” offering their own unique “line of flight” or “exodus” (Deleuze 1992). Yet, as contemporary critics continue to point out, cybernetics was never a neutral science and cannot be so today. Strangely, there are two contradictory risks involved, attesting to cybernetics’ complex logic and development: one of control and one of anti-control. First of all, with cybernetics implicated in war time strategy and post-war management, its in-built assumption of entropy and tendency toward homeostasis blunts the tools of critical analysis and smuggles in neoclassical assumptions about perfect capitalist equilibria (Galison 1994; Tiqqun 2020). On this account, offered most forcefully by Peter Galison (1994), cybernetics cannot simply be dissociated from its heritage of behaviorism, old-school rationalization and control. Rather than recognizing the persistence of hierarchy and domination in the new digital workplace, Hardt and Negri took the self-presentation of the neoliberal bloc at face value and saw the digital as a less vertical mode of organization.
Contrary to these worries of persistent control, there exists the danger of importing the “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron, 2015) into a supposedly emancipatory program. This celebration of anti-control runs from old libertarian fantasies through 1960s counterculture into the ideology of Silicon Valley today. Underneath the rhetoric patina of horizontality and participation, this ideology thus hid an increasingly classical capitalism in which cybernetics simply imported market mechanisms into the realm of state management itself. Attempts at “repurposing” these new organizational logics – part of the general internet euphoria typical of the early 2000s – obscure this essential co-originality between cybernetic management and capitalist profit imperatives, the one driving the design of the other. And rather than superseding the immobile monolith of the party, the cybernetic swarm simply affirms and reproduces the disorganization and refusal of general will formation implicit in an atomized market. A mere fetishism for physicality – “nothing can beat the being together of bodies and the corporeal communication that is the basis of collective political intelligence and action”, as Hardt and Negri postulate recently – will not solve this organizational deficit (cited in Lovink 2016, 19; Gardiner 2020, 1-15). In the face of the paradoxical legacy of cybernetics, it is clear that there are no easy answers when it comes to politics in communication-heavy societies. The threat remains palpable however, that by buying into this “cybernetic illusion”, Hardt and Negri rather threaten to liquidate the only historic forces ever capable of coercing capital into a less adversarial mode.
A similar problem of self-presentation holds for the concept of “cognitive capital” or its cognates recurrent in the Hardt and Negri corpus (Boutang 2011; Vercellone 2007). These theories can be traced to earlier debates in the 1980s and 1990s, when the disappearance of the industrial proletariat led to theorizing about a new “non-class of non-workers” who would supervise an increasingly automated industrial landscape (Gorz 1982, 82). André Gorz’s work remains a prime point of reference here. Himself enamored with Hardt and Negri in his late life in the 1990s, Gorz and Negri claimed that the “crisis of measurability” inherent to the post-Fordist regime meant that labor itself had become impossible to standardize and all activities could now conceivably count as “work” (Marazzi 2008, 43). Workers outside of stable contracts spend their entire lives perfecting CVs and reskilling capacities or reframing every inch of human activity as enhanced human capital—all under the imperative to become as reprogrammable, networked and adaptive as the new cybernetic machines that now streamline the workplace. They thereby rendered the very notion of “socially necessary labor time” a pitiful anachronism.
Since it was no longer possible to satisfyingly measure labor performance in strict clock hours, a permanent grant would provide the only natural political response to a measurability crisis, completing the neoliberal dissolution of the waged worker. This was three years after Gorz proclaimed that “as a system, socialism was dead,” together with its “philosophy of work and history.” If the left still “stood for the emancipation of the workers,” he claimed, this would turn them into the spokespersons for “those 15 percent who still define themselves chiefly by their work” (Gorz 1994, vii). Negri usually followed Gorz on this score. “Flexibility and mobility of labor force”, he claimed in 2001, “are irreversible: The question is not to oppose the new organization of labor, but to guarantee a salary and freedom for the post-Fordist worker.” Basic income schemes remain a classical alternative here, which would allow casual contracts to survive while offering workers a minimum means of sustenance. It is a logical train of thought if one sees the negation of measure as the fulfilment of a liberating ontological movement.
A second, connected question concerns the key concept mobilized in Empire—“immaterial labor”. In Hardt and Negri’s view, the new multitude’s mode of production was less centered on the large scale, industrial factory but on the small-scale, flexible value chains of a globalized world. It also implied a change of personnel from a proletariat into a “cognitariat”, which worked with information rather than producing physical objects. As capitalist production shed its basis in concrete, physical objects, production was now more fleeting and moved into the confines of the human brain, or even into the network of cooperating brains—the social brain (Boutang 2011). Following the ontological push of the multitude, measurable labor-power had become immeasurable “invention-power”. This shift, Hardt and Negri claim, has had momentous consequences for Marx’s classical value theory. Loyalty to this theory would imply the view that labor can be measured in neat, homogeneous slices of time, which is then repaid in monetary form. Such a model of the labor theory of value was clearly premised on the figure of the factory clock, which herded workers to their posts at a time in the morning only to end by emptying at a designated ring of the bell.
Around this Fordist set-up the post-war welfare state was constructed, centering male producers who spent wages earned from material production. Post-Fordist labor markets, in which workers surf from one job to the other desperately searching for gigs, hardly conform to the same model. They also severely complicate the claim to “measurability” posited in the classical labor theory of value. As Hardt and Negri note, in a world where time discipline has become diffuse, the workplace has dissolved into an encompassing ‘social factory’ and workers are not enumerated with the same wage scales, what future is there for a labor theory of value in the classical mold? Instead of relying on the intrinsically Fordist measurement unit of “labor time”, the age of the new entrepreneur celebrates more ethereal activities and efforts. This crisis of immeasurability has received a new lease on life in a burgeoning “platform capitalism” literature, which sees a return to new decentralized forms of domination through networks, rather than the semi-military forms of discipline associated with Fordist factory (Wood 2020; Standing 2016; Huws 2019).
Yet critics have also continued to question the novelty of this “cognitariat” in recent years. As Charles Post notes, Hardt and Negri’s “immaterial labor” tends to “confuse highly material labor – work in the telecommunications industry creating and maintaining the infrastructure for computerization” with “forms of mental labor” such as “designing machinery and work-systems” (Cummings and Post 2016, 251). Rather than debunking Marx’s value theory, the paying of wages for “immaterial” activities is simply an extension of capitalist practice, not a complete qualitative break. The same continuity has been applied to Hardt and Negri’s reworking of Marxian value theory. Michael Heinrich has similarly cautioned against Hardt and Negri’s innovation. Although the transition to a service economy has undeniably rewired European economies and initiated a switch from tradeables to non-tradeables, this has not put an end to classical processes of value creation. “What is relevant”, Heinrich counters, “is the act of exchange, not the fact that physical objects are being exchanged. “Services, after all, “can also be exchanged and therefore become commodities”, and “the difference between a material product and and ‘immaterial’ service consists solely of a different temporal relationship between production and consumption: the material product is first produced and subsequently consumed (a bread roll should be consumed on the same)” (Heinrich 2012: 44).
Heinrich’s point provides a potent tonic against “the frequently stated argument” that with the “transition from an industrial to a service economy” or in the left-wing variant of Hardt and Negri— the transition from “material” to “immaterial” production—Marx’s value theory has become outmoded” (Heinrich 2012, 44). In regular economics registers, this shift has been explained in terms of a move towards non-exportables and services, part of the new “information economy” that implies a rewiring of classical economic registers (Castells 2011). Hardt and Negri’s incessant stress on the immeasurability of immaterial labor has been a powerful and welcome sociological gesture—one thinks of intellectual property, intangible assets and brand management—but should never tip over into denying the necessity of measurement as a moment in the realisation of value. Rather than a supersession of old capitalist logics, then, the advent of the computer or the cybernetic machine has not fundamentally displaced the question of class composition or the basics of class conflict, it has merely induced new cybernetic strategies for “governing” or “navigating” capitalism’s unruly contradictions.
Before and After the Multitude
If the twenty-first century looks uncannily more like the nineteenth than the twentieth, where does that leave us with Hardt and Negri’s multitude? Stripped of its linguistic charms, Empire’s subject looks more painfully familiar than it might: a planetary proletariat with no recourse to mass institutions or statist safety nets, slowly losing its claim to the “making” class due to deindustrialization. In essence, the new “multitude” thus reveals itself as the cybernetically managed proletariat of yore, stripped of its organizational encasing and as cruelly market-dependent as its nineteenth-century predecessor, but without the cage of “integration” (as Horkheimer put it) of a previous disciplinary era, indicating working class submission to the planning state (Abromeit 2011; Horkheimer 1978). Piece work, putting-out systems, and unsalaried labor have all seen a return in the era of neoliberalism, now engineered through algorithmic devices rather than despotic overseers. Yet the steady automation of middle management or the disappearance of the foreman in this new “digital Taylorism” do little to decrease the relevance of the nineteenth-century models Hardt and Negri are quick to reject (Leberecht 2015). In this sense, the “multitude” still offers a surface reading of a disorganized new global proletariat. Should the rise of precarious labor, sharply formulated, not rather be considered as an example of downright “class war from above”, rendering Hardt and Negri’s redeeming narrative “nothing less than ideology “ (Palmer 2014: 40)?
Such an argument for putative continuity should not obscure real differences between the pre- and post-Fordist phase of capitalism. Hardt and Negri are fully correct to insist on the new techniques of management and steering which have been implemented since the late 1960s, when capital saw a chance to break free from the post-war compromise and reclaim prerogatives over investment. In terms of political leadership, the new regime did come with a new hegemonic order – indicated by Boltanski and Chiapello’s “projective city” (2007), the justificatory regime of the “third spirit of capitalism.” Networks function as the watchword of this new city, a normative space which interpolates workers to ‘surf” the decentralized market signals as “agile”, “lean”, “employable” agents (Bernes 2017, 122; Thrift 2005). The summum bonum of the cybernetic city is the virtue of “connexionism”: the extension of the network to the benefit of all. As with Foucault’s neoliberal “governmentality”, precarious market dependence reminiscent of the nineteenth century now figure in a new strategic field in which subjects are motivated to accept their material condition under the banner of self-entrepreneurship. This is also what distinguishes digital Taylorism from its analogue predecessor: not so much a radical change in the precarity of labor conditions, but in the celebration of this precarity as “gamified”, fluid existence (Neilson and Mezzadra 2019, 82-83; Slobodian 2020). What used to run through the soft power of impersonal market coercion now is increasingly glorified through the even softer attractions of human capital development. Capital’s political encasing has thus become less top-down, hierarchical, and vertical than in the managerial age. Yet none of these normative diagrams should lead one to overstate their importance in the face of the essential continuity with the capitalism analyzed by Marx’s generations, in which the capitalist macrocosm spanned only one part of the globe (Mattick 2018, 8-9).[3]
This fact has become ever clearer to our post-2008 world, in which a global surplus population faces an increasingly stagnant capitalism unable to absorb its services. Notions such as the “multitude”, in turn, do little to elucidate the specific modalities of market dependence all workers experience and how these stratify labor markets across lines. Anno 2019, humanity inhabits an almost fully proletarianized planet: nearly 60% of the world is currently employed in wage relations with a sizable portion of the remaining 40% in partial or complete market-dependency. What was still a condition confined to European workers in the late nineteenth century – foreclosed by the safety valve of colonial emigration – is now a planetary fait accompli (Jäger 2019, 1-22).
Capitalism’s universalization should however caution against deriving a new political stand to this order. Across the global South, market-dependent producers eke out a living without employers, selling wares on the streets or marketing themselves. Ever since urbanization’s decoupling from development and development’s decoupling from growth, this surplus population has not ceased to grow (Benanav 2019, 2014; Benanav and Clegg 2010). But there is a danger of taking this new subject as a prepackaged agent rather than a truly “deterritorialized” anti-subject deserving of legal rights. As Mike Davis notes, speculations about “a new politics of ‘multitudes’ in the ‘rhizomatic spaces’ of globalization remain ungrounded in any real political sociology” (Davis 2020, 7). Rather than focusing on the differing scales of market dependence in the new global economy, Hardt and Negri took the cyber-proletariat as a given and transposed it into an ontological category (Dyer-Witherford 2015). While the attempt to find a new idiom to collect and unite all those wretched of the earth—including those not employed in wage labor—must be applauded, there is a definite risk involved in the task. As Davis (2020, 7) sharply claimed, “imprudent coronations of abstractions like the ‘multitude’ as historical subjects simply dramatize a poverty of empirical research” and do little to point at potential conflicts of interest between sections of the wage dependent classes.
Rather than a new phase of ontological prowess, the new multitude thus tends to appear as the result of a failed Fordist integration which has reverted back to the classical age – a radically embedded neoliberal capitalism in which capital is longer an agent of growth and thrives on state predation. Likewise, Davis cautions against celebrations of spontaneity and casualness which come with these “ideologies of informality” (Van Ballegooijen and Rocco 2013, 1794-1810; Scott 1999; DeLong 2007). Rather than arguing for cash transfers or microcredit for the slums, the classically “Fordist” demand for labor rights, coupled with transformative post-growth programs, should still be at the center of an anti-neoliberal left. To claim the proletariat is “fading away” in the face of the “increasing heterogeneity of work situations and, thus, of social conditions”, as sociologists in the information age often do, elides the fact that “informal workers… tend to be massively crowded into a few major niches where effective organization and “class consciousness” might become possible if authentic labor rights and regulations existed” (Davis 2000, 185 (f)). Overall, “it is the lack of economic citizenship, rather than livelihood heterogeneity per se, that makes informal labor so prone to clientelist subordination and ethnic fragmentation” (Davis 2000, 185 (f)) More than a new political subject, the new “multitude” thus risks tumbling into its very opposite: a floating signifier in desperate search of material grounding in our social reality. At worst, it is a symptom of the disorganization of the populist age in which the measurement techniques of focus groups, real time polls and approval ratings struggle to delineate “the people”. These metrologies have become the face of the multitude’s supposed “immeasurability” (Csigo 2017; Cooper 2011; Feher 2018).
This strategy would require more than invocations of an “entrepreneurial multitude” which survives in the grottoes of globalization, and revisit earlier questions of social rights and decommodification (Hardt and Negri 2018, 146). “The main issue in the informal sector”, Davis notes, “is normalization of the rights and protections of labor, not property” (Davis 2000, 185 (f)). Such a vision would depart from the accelerationist optimism implicit in the Negrite vision, which celebrates the new informal masses as harboring an exclusively new emancipatory promise. Instead, even the oldest dogmas of social democracy, from labor rights to public provision, are “as good as ever”.[4] The closing of the left-populist decade, symbolized by the successive defeats of the Sanders, Syriza, and Corbyn coalitions, has made this point even clearer: rather than stick to an horizontalism, left populists began by returning to the party and rethinking the organizational basics of a previous age. Although they failed, the questions they asked had been left neglected and underused, distracting leftists from the task that the twentieth century originally posed – and which Hardt and Negri sought to bury in 1999.
*
Coming at the tail end of a series of anti-police protests and the storming of the Capitol, early 2021 offers a unique vantage point to assess the valences of Empire. At the close of the neoliberal 1990s, Hardt and Negri’s work offered creative and penetrating insights into the changing nature of labor under capitalism and the ramifications of the neoliberal settlement. It spoke to a disenchanted left traumatized by the counter-revolutionary wave of the 1980s and 1990s, which pulverized the structures of an organized left in the Third World, Europe, and the US, and liquidated the fragile counter-powers built up during the red century. Empire was a new theory for new times, forcing the left to strategies on new terrain. As a holistic theory of politics and social change, its omissions still risk underplaying the continuities between pre- and post-Fordist capitalism and reads an erroneously emancipatory dynamic into a mode of cybernetic management now sold as human capital development. This historical sloppiness and slipperiness stem from a series of metaphysical blunders, where cybernetic techniques of labor control and new strategies of accumulation are recast as an ontological subject reaching its final state. Its practical consequences remained equally suspect: the “multitude” refuses a politics and sociology of class articulation and skirts over real differences in today’s proletarian landscape, abandoning the sphere of production and measurability to a new illiberal bloc (Slobodian 2018; Körösényi, Illés, and Gyulai 2020). As the left-populist decade ends and movementism regains its attraction, Empire indeed seems to offer a useful point of retreat for a newly disillusioned left. One must wonder, however: what is gained by racing from one cul-de-sac into another?
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[1] For contrasts with the “populist” decade, see Laclau (2005).
[2] As Charles Post (in Cummings and Post 2016, 251) notes, “the ‘Golden Age’ was… exceptional in the history of capitalism… the product of a combination of a long period of rising profitability (1933-1966) and a militant labor movement across the industrialized world. Workers had threatened the foundations of capitalist rule (France and Spain in the mid-1930s, France and Italy immediately after World War II, France in 1968, Portugal 1974-1975) or severely disrupted capitalist accumulation in mass strike waves in the mid-1930s, immediate post-war years and again between 1965-1975. Capital was forced to make major concessions to labor.”
[3] As Mattick (2018, 8-9) notes, “when Marx wrote Capital, capitalism was hardly the world’s primary system for the production and distribution of goods (even in England there were still more domestic servants than industrial workers), though it could be argued that at least in Europe and North America it was already socially dominant, in the sense that its institutions were central enough to social life to determine their continuing growth in importance as society continued to evolve. By abstracting from the complex range of features characterizing the actual societies of his time to focus on what he took to be basic to capitalism as such, Marx was able to explain both the evolution towards a more completely capitalist society and specific, apparently essential, features of that evolution.”
[4] A phrase used by Michael Foot to celebrate Tribune’s twentieth anniversary (Warde 1982, 85).
When Donald Trump addressed the UN General Assembly in New York on September 25, 2018, something seemingly unprecedented happened: in response to his boasting about the achievements of his presidency, the General Assembly erupted into spontaneous laughter. Never before had the President of the US, the leader of the most powerful state on earth, been openly laughed at like that.
This episode concerning the most powerful sovereign today is useful to present the frictionlessness of sovereignty as an antinomy. On the one hand, there are those for whom sovereignty is never frictionless. Rather, sovereignty is always the response to the exception (Schmitt), an excess (Bataille), a series of ruptures that indicate attempts to discipline or normalize that which is “abnormal” (Foucault), the product of how living is configured in the zone of indistinction (Agamben), or the response to the “rogue” (Derrida).
To this list we could easily add thinkers before the twentieth century, such as Machiavelli (for whom the prince is not subject to any morality and hence he can use any means—which is to say, frictions—to perpetuate his power), or Hobbes (who views the Leviathan as the “king of the proud” who need to be restrained), or even Rousseau (always lamenting the faults of modern civilization that make the sovereign right to capital punishment necessary).
There are significant differences between the various positions in this tradition. But the idea that unites all the thinkers noted above is that the frictionlessness of sovereignty is nothing but a chimera, a delusion whose only utility consists in the effects it produces—effects that manifest the operation of sovereignty’s power.
On the other hand, there is another long tradition that posits the possibility of a frictionless sovereignty. We can find this idea in Plato’s ideal state, in Augustine’s city of God, or in More’s utopia. There are two immediately recognizable characteristics of this ancient and early modern conception of a frictionless sovereignty. First, it is anti-democratic in the sense that the demos (the vulgus or varia multitudo) is seen as the source of friction and all these authors imagine ways to bypass it. Second, frictionless sovereignty is an ideal that cannot be actualized in reality. Thus, for instance, Augustine posits in fact two cities of God, one on earth that functions as the unreachable destination of the “pilgrims,” and one that is the real city of God, which is eschatological.
In the twentieth century this frictionless sovereignty—surprisingly, given its history—leads to different conceptions of democracy, albeit a democracy as not reliant on the people. Thus, we find theories such as Schumpeter’s that associate democracy with the calculation of individual interest which is in turn guaranteed through economic activity. This leads ultimately to the neoliberal conception of the “sweetness of commerce” as the pacifying agent of modernity (Albert Hirschman). Alternatively, there is an increasing proliferation of theories of deliberative democracy. The main representatives here are Rawls and Habermas. Deliberative democracy pursues an ideal according to which rationality can guarantee consensus and hence a harmonious sovereignty.
These more recent versions of a frictionless sovereignty also share two key characteristics. First, they repress the passions so as to arrive at different conceptions of rationality that supposedly purge the political of conflict. Second, the frictional is again unrealizable but in a different way. In the theories that rely on economics, the frictional is the financial horizon of the “death of sovereignty” in the era of neoliberal globalization. In deliberative democratic theories that tend to lean heavily on Kant’s moral theory, the frictional is the transcendental horizon of the coincidence of morality and politics.
Where, in this vast picture, can we situate the laughter that greeted Trump at the UN Assembly? The laughter indicates some friction but nothing of the sort envisaged by any of the former thinkers listed above. But this laughter does register enough friction nonetheless to be incommensurate with the passionless pursuit either of individual interest or rational deliberation.
Does this mean that we can simply ignore this burst of laughter as irrelevant to sovereignty after all? This may appear as a forced conclusion, one that strives to evade the need for an explanation of a reaction to a sovereign’s words. Does it mean, then, that the laughter of the delegates in the US undermines the distinction entailed by frictionless sovereignty, that is, sovereignty as either reliant on friction or as dependent on a horizon that is completely devoid of friction?
Instead of seeing laughter as miraculously overcoming a distinction that, as the above outline suggests, is sedimented in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present, maybe laughter shows that this was not a stable distinction to begin with. This is to treat the distinction at the heart of frictionless sovereignty as an antinomy. An antinomy not in the strictly Kantian sense, whereby a middle term comes to mediate and resolve the distinction by showing that the premises of each side were deficient. Rather, an antinomy in the more original sense of the word, that is, as something that is adjacent to the law in such a way as to challenge and resist it.
Let me be clear: I do not hold that any kind of laughter of necessity is a form of resistance. The laughter of the court jester, for example, can be an attempt to expend the drive to laugh in an innocuous way so as to eschew any challenge to instituted power. Laughter is not ipso facto subversive. Rather, laughter can enact resistance when it is directed against sedimented and hence hegemonic forms. For instance, I have argued elsewhere that Kafka’s laughter is directed primarily against the idea of an individual that has an autonomous free will, whereby Kafka’s laughter also suggests an alternative conception of freedom (Vardoulakis 2016).
The case of the laughter at the UN General Assembly shows how laughter can challenge and resist the framework within which sovereignty is thought. The reason is that laughter points to something that remains obscured in how we think sovereignty today—namely, authority. Further, this is important in how we think of sovereignty today, in an age where authoritarianism and populism threaten to deform the face of politics. Let me explain by starting with authority.
If we reflect on the incident at the UN that I opened with, it is not as unusual as it may at first appear. It repeats an experience that we all have encountered, namely, how laughter marks the reduced authority of someone who occupies a position of power. For instance, the child’s laughter at an instruction of the parent or a teacher indicates the diminution of the authority of the one laughed at. As Hannah Arendt puts it, laughter is the “surest way” to undermine authority (Arendt 1970, 45). The reason that the event in the UN General Assembly seemed so strange is that we have forgotten nowadays the important role authority plays in how we understand power.
Further, this example shows the inverse relation of populist authoritarianism and authority. The increase of authoritarianism through populist politics and by appeal to “post-truth” strategies exhibits a parallel decrease in authority. How are we to understand this phenomenon? First, we need to understand exactly what authority means.
For around two millennia, authority was a pivotal political concept, so much so that people often did not even provide a definition when talking about it, since everyone knew that one has authority when one cannot be argued with (Arendt 1961). Or, as Spinoza puts it, authority is “impervious to argumentation” (Spinoza 2001, 139). The fact that authority was supposed to remain unchallenged was also signified by external markers, a tradition that remains alive today: e.g. the gown of the judge indicates that his verdict cannot be confuted in the courtroom, or the uniform of the army general signifies that lower ranked officers cannot challenge his commands (Kojève 2014).
Authority is not the same as political power. As the example of Trump shows, one can enjoy sovereign power but lack authority. This is already clearly defined by Cicero in antiquity, when he insists that in the Roman Republic power rests with the people’s tribunes whereas authority only with the Senate (Cicero 1928, 492). In fact, the discrepancy between authority and sovereign power is a significant distinction to help us evaluate the health of the polity. For instance, Spinoza argues that Moses was the exemplary figure to combine authority with sovereign power, but this meant that he remained unchallenged, which was a precipitating factor in the destruction of the Jewish state (Spinoza 2001, chapter 17; see also Vardoulakis 2020).
Nor does the assertion of authority necessarily coincide with a diminished capacity of the polity to function democratically. In certain instances, people need to defer to the authority of one who has the expertise to make decisions about complex issues on their behalf, just as in our everyday life we readily defer to the authority of a doctor to treat a medical ailment. Spinoza was one of the few thinkers who was both a democrat and highly invested in examining the phenomenon of authority, which led him to explore the tension between the democratic imperative to disputation and the requirement for authority to be obeyed. Spinoza shows that this tension can be productive for a well-functioning democracy (Vardoulakis 2020).
Trump is a good example of the inverse relation of authoritarianism and authority. One of the oft-repeated promises of his 2016 presidential campaign was that he was going to “drain the swamp” of Washington DC. During his administration, this translated in the shrinking of the civil service and in the appointment of officials without experience to significant posts. In other words, Trump systematically undermined the importance of authority understood as the political and administrative expertise in the running of government. This has been a significant factor in the diminution of his own personal authority and an important reason why world leaders regarded as laughable his boasting about his presidency at the UN.
The inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism is not new. Marx also describes it in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx 1976a; see Vardoulakis 2013). Not unlike Trump, Louis Bonaparte is an authoritarian ruler and a populist—Marx says that he won over the poorer people by giving them champagne and sausages. Further, just like Trump, no one took him particularly seriously and no one thought that he was competent enough to lead France. And yet he prevailed to found the Second French Empire.
We can also glean this inverse relation in the late work of Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1970), where it is presented as the inverse relation of violence—explicitly associated with authoritarianism and totalitarianism—and power—linked with authority.
So, if understanding the function of authority is important in discerning the operation of power and in achieving our democratic ideals, then why is authority hardly discussed in political philosophy and theory today? According to a historical explanation, the power of authority starts waning since the Reformation, which precipitates a progressive change of its meaning, a process that the French revolution further accelerates (Marcuse 1973). This has led scholars to argue that authority is absent from our world today (Arendt 1961). But examples such as the ones offered above indicate that far from being absent from our world, authority still plays a determinative role through its inverse relation to authoritarianism.
A more plausible explanation for the absence of attention to authority today is a series of powerful shifts in academic discourse in the first half of the twentieth century that have also influenced the general discourse about politics. The most important are the following:
The shift of the meaning of authority to designate political power. Here, Weber’s work is critical. In German, the term “Herrschaft” comes to signify almost exclusively political authority, while the term “Authorität” denotes almost invariably ecclesiastical authority. Using the term Herrschaft, Weber develops his influential analysis of the charismatic leader who is authoritarian or fascist (Weber 2004), thereby obscuring the importance of a figure of authority in the sense of someone who cannot be argued with.
The gradual confinement of the meaning of authority to the psychological sphere. This is particularly due to the influence of behavioral psychology, and a particular landmark are the Milgram experiments (Milgram 1974). Even though psychoanalytic studies on authority are not be confused with behaviorism, they also tend to evade its political import (see Sennett 1980).
The substitution of authority with authoritarianism as an object of study in political philosophy and theory. Here the Frankfurt School is particularly important (see Adorno 1950), especially because of the influential insight that authoritarianism not only is opposed to democracy, but in fact it uses the population to prop itself.
The intense focus on totalitarianism as a system of governance that transcends the individual, which, as Hannah Arendt demonstrates (1962), was critical for understanding the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust.
The effect of Weber’s work has been to narrow the use of the word “authority” to refer only to political authority within an established state so as to function as a near synonym of sovereignty. All work in the past quarter century uses the term authority in this way (e.g. the most significant monograph Huemer 2013; work on political theory such as Flathman 1980 or Wendt 2016 or legal studies such as Raz 1979 or Edmundson 2010). The rich, two-millennial tradition that determines authority as a figure that cannot be argued with and which is incommensurate with power has all but disappeared from view.
Further, the circumscription of authority into psychology has shifted our view from authority’s political significance. The only political implication suggested by Milgram’s experiments is that regimes such as the USSR that rely on obedience deprive individuals from their freedom. But such political inferences that go beyond the immediate object of study of behavioral psychology seem more of an expedient expression of a shared opinion in the Zeitgeist of the Cold War.
To compound the above, the Frankfurt School and Arendt have helped focus on political phenomena such as authoritarianism at the expense of authority, while paying scant attention on their inverse relation. This does not mean that the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism was never noted. But the most perspicacious examples of the presentation of the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism from around that time remain free from the influence of a political theory and political philosophy that systematically seeks to repress the importance of the traditional concept of authority. I am thinking here of works of art such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) that presents an authoritarian figure whose affectations are so laughable as to be devoid of all authority.
The critical purchase of Weber, critical theory and Arendt is undisputed in shaping the political discussion as well as our understanding of politics today. For instance, since Trump’s election, there is a renewed interest in Arendt’s work on totalitarianism and its contemporary relevance (Berkowitz 2017). Or the rise of populism as a threat to democracy that simultaneously leads to the rise of authoritarianism is customarily interpreted along the framework provided by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, according to which authoritarianism is possible through the populist manipulation of the people (see Brown et al., 2018).
The few attempts in political theory to rescue the concept of authority are conducted with the provision of overcoming the traditional concept of authority—according to which one has authority when one cannot be argued with (Arendt 1961; Kojève 2014; Ricoeur 2007). Thus Richard Flathman interrogates the relation of authority and “the authoritative” in The Practice of Political Authority but the framing does not allow him to note the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism. Bonnie Honig (Honig 1993) attempts to rescue a concept of authority through a re-interpretation of Arendt, but her strategy is again to leave behind the “outdated” concept of authority and present authority instead as a form of a performative that, like the Declaration of Independence, can provide a foundation that allows for the new. It allows for what Honig refers to as “(re)founding.”
No matter how perceptive such analyses are, they find it hard to account for phenomena such as the laughter at Trump in the UN Assembly. They also fall short in recognizing the discrepancy between sovereign power and authority, and they forget about the positive role that authority can play in a democratic polity. As a result of forgetting authority, contemporary discourse often lapses into a despair about the fate of democracy when authoritarianism is on the march (Brown et al., 2018). This despair is due to the perception that sovereignty in neoliberalism no longer encounters enough political resistance or friction.
There is a grave danger to democracy when authority is obscured from view while authoritarianism flourishes. The reason is that authority does not disappear. Rather, it is displaced in ways that authorize those in power to promote their interests. For instance, it is beneficial to Trump to lack authority because this allows the religious right in the US to authorize him to act on their behalf. This authorization is supported by having a Vice President who is aligned with the religious right. And it essentially moves Trump to subvert institutions such as the High Court by installing judges likely to regress on a host of issues such as civil and reproductive rights.
This process of authorization often operates on the logic of the least evil (Weizman 2012). The majority of the religious right in the US do not like Trump and they do not really want to vote for him. Rather, they voted for him in 2016 and they continue to support him because he is seen as more likely to serve their interests. The fact that he lacks authority makes it more likely that he will support the base who elected him, and vice versa. Democracy is in grave danger of being overwhelmed with short term interests and populist leadership if the function of authority is not taken into account.
My resolution of the antinomy of sovereignty suggests that the analytic power of the political discourse is stunted when the discourse is too squarely focused on authoritarianism as the expense of authority. Well-analyzed and systematically research phenomena such as authoritarianism and populism may be enriched when the traditional concept of authority is also introduced, since it is the concept of authority as impervious to argumentation that has had such a determinative influence on how key political ideas developed over two millennia—concepts that still determine how political practice and its understanding unfold today.
For this, we need to keep the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism in sight. It is actually Arendt who in her late work describes the inverse relation of authority. As I note above, her earlier work contributed to the idea that authority is absent from our world today (Arendt 1961, Arendt 1962), replaced by categories such as totalitarianism. However, in On Violence (Arendt 1970) she draws a distinction between power, which is explicitly linked to authority, and violence, associated with authoritarianism and totalitarianism. A key feature of this distinction is their inverse relation. This is presented from both sides. First, “tyranny … [is] the most violent and least powerful of forms of government” (Arendt 1970, 41), and, second, “every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence” (Arendt 1970, 87). The decrease of authoritarianism contributes to the increase of authority and the decrease of authority to the increase of authoritarianism.
Even though Arendt notes the inverse relation and provides a quasi-phenomenological description, especially in the third chapter of On Violence, still nowhere does she note why this inverse relation matter for a democratic politics. This is another way of saying that Arendt does not note the paradox of a sovereignty that is both frictionless and imbued in friction when she considers the relation of power and violence, or of authority and authoritarianism. I hold that an answer to explore this paradox of frictionless sovereignty requires that we note the way in which authority contributes to the well-functioning of a democratic polity.
The traditional definition of authority as being “impervious to argumentation” (Spinoza 2001, 139) may appear at first to be a threat to democracy in the sense that authority appears to stifle the pluralism of ideas that democracy thrives on. This is certainly true, and that’s why a democrat like Spinoza is fiercely critical of figures of authority. Because a leader with too much authority stifles the public disputes that are necessary for democracy, the ancient Athenians had an extraordinary law, according to which when a leader became popular, he was expelled from the city (Nietzsche 2016). We certainly need to remain vigilant when we encounter authority.
But there is also another side to it. It consists in that, by its definition as being beyond dispute, authority raises the possibility of truth. When the judge delivers a verdict in the courtroom, the judge is assumed to be extracting the truth from the given evidence. When a general issues a command, the troops assume that it conforms with a battle strategy and the information the general has at his disposal. A teacher has authority in the classroom when it is assumed that the teacher is communicating true knowledge to the students.
The judge and the general may of course be wrong. They may have made a mistake. And the knowledge the teacher is communicating may have been superseded. It is possible to make judgments about the judge, the general and the teacher because they aspire to a certain truth. By contrast, when a populist authoritarian like Trump proclaims “send them home,” the visible racism of such a statement unburdens Trump of any appeal to veracity. This diminishes his authority but also makes it impossible to critique a populist leader by appeal to truth. Authoritarianism does not need truth. Conversely, to speak with authority, one aspires to be beyond dispute, not because one is simply attracting support, but because one espouses a position that others also can see as tenable—as true.
A figure of authority puts an end to a dispute or conversation by virtue of the fact of being perceived to occupy the truth. But no one has absolute authority. The possibility always remains that one will be able to offer a more compelling account of the true (Lucchese 2009). A figure of authority can never be certain that someone else will not raise their voice in reaction (Vardoulakis 2020). Allowing for the operation of authority is the opposite of a “society of the spectacle” where everyone is encouraged to raise their voice, in unified conformity, so that their voice in fact no longer matters.
Authority is important for democracy because it enables the voice raised to make a point matter. Paying attention to authority in the political discourse is to encourage everyone to take responsibility as an indispensable condition for the optimal operation of democracy. Even though there will never be any guarantee that the right decisions will be taken, and even though mistakes will be made, democracy can only operate when the voice is not lost in a crowd that mindlessly follows an authoritarian figure. Thus authority shows that friction is indispensable for a determination of political power.
But there is another side too. Authority requires the possibility of friction but it also requires the idea of the frictionlessness of sovereignty. The most readily available illustration is in cases of crisis or emergency. During a medical emergency, we defer to the authority of the doctors. During a financial crisis we listen to the economists. In the case of a pandemic, the politicians and the public seek the expert advice of public health authorities.
In political philosophy, the need to submit to authority in certain circumstances is often discussed. In the seventeenth century, this was customarily done with reference to the figure of Moses (Vardoulakis 2019). Leading the Jews through the desert in search for a state, Moses demanded authority. The attainment of the end required that his authority is strong, which was the case since it was both theological and political as he was both a prophet and the political leader of his people (Ricoeur 2007).
This tradition that valorizes the function of obedience to authority does not suggest that the value of political judgment is secondary or diminished. It does not mean that the political decisions we are called upon to make and which create the political friction described earlier disappear. To the contrary, it points to the paradox according to which under certain conditions the prudent or rational thing to do is to suspend one’s judgment and to submit to someone else’s authority. This paradoxical function of authority, suspended between the possibilities of challenging it or submitting to it, can lead to a radical democratic position, as for instance in the political philosophy of Spinoza (Vardoulakis 2020).
So what does the antinomy of the frictionless sovereignty teach us? It shows that interminable resistance and frictionless obedience are the obverse sides of the same coin, namely, authority. Not only is authority not eliminated in our “post-modern” world. Moreover, it shows the precariousness of our political judgment to obey or disobey. And because our political judgments are unstable, never purely rational and hence impossible to lead to an absolute truth, it puts the onus on the political agents—individuals, associations, organizations, parties, states and state alliances—to remain vigilant about the way in which they may fail or succeed.
Let me put this in a different way: If the idea that sovereignty relies on friction often leads to a despair about our contemporary political predicament that lacks resistance, and if an illusion of frictionless sovereignty defers our political fulfilment to some unattainable future—then a politics attuned to authority may have, unexpectedly, the capacity to galvanize our energies and to bring us face to face with the exigency to assess our circumstances so as to decide whether we ought to obey or disobey. In this sense, authority has the capacity to generate a space where contestation, dissensus and disagreement can be allowed to be productive forces that make possible “the space in between” (as Arendt puts it) where the political thrives.
Dimitris Vardoulakis was the inaugural chair of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010), Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013), Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016), Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (2018), and Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020). He is the director of “Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society,” and the co-editor of the book series “Incitements” (Edinburgh University Press).
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