b2o: boundary 2 online

The b2o Review is a non-peer reviewed publication, published and edited by the boundary 2 editorial collective and specific topic editors, featuring book reviews, interventions, videos, and collaborative projects.  

  • Richard Hill — States, Governance, and Internet Fragmentation (Review of Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment?)

    Richard Hill — States, Governance, and Internet Fragmentation (Review of Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment?)

    a review of Milton Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment? Sovereignty, Globalization and Cyberspace (Polity, 2017)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    Like other books by Milton Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment? is a must-read for anybody who is seriously interested in the development of Internet governance and its likely effects on other walks of life.  This is true because, and not despite, the fact that it is a tract that does not present an unbiased view. On the contrary, it advocates a certain approach, namely a utopian form of governance which Mueller refers to as “popular sovereignty in cyberspace”.

    Mueller, Professor of Information Security and Privacy at Georgia Tech, is an internationally prominent scholar specializing in the political economy of information and communication.  The author of seven books and scores of journal articles, his work informs not only public policy but also science and technology studies, law, economics, communications, and international studies.  His books Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance (MIT Press, 2010) and Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2002) are acclaimed scholarly accounts of the global governance regime emerging around the Internet.

    Most of Will the Internet Fragment? consists of a rigorous analysis of what has been commonly referred to as “fragmentation,” showing that very different technological and legal phenomena have been conflated in ways that do not favour productive discussions.  That so-called “fragmentation” is usually defined as the contrary of the desired situation in which “every device on the Internet should be able to exchange data packets with any other device that is was willing to receive them” (p. 6 of the book, citing Vint Cerf).  But. as Mueller correctly points out, not all end-points of the Internet can reach all other end-points at all times, and there may be very good reasons for that (e.g. corporate firewalls, temporary network outages, etc.).  Mueller then shows how network effects (the fact that the usefulness of a network increases as it becomes larger) will tend to prevent or counter fragmentation: a subset of the network is less useful than is the whole.  He also shows how network effects can prevent the creation of alternative networks: once everybody is using a given network, why switch to an alternative that few are using?  As Mueller aptly points out (pp. 63-66), the slowness of the transition to IPv6 is due to this type of network effect.

    The key contribution of this book is that it clearly identifies the real question of interest to whose who are concerned about the governance of the Internet and its impact on much of our lives.  That question (which might have been a better subtitle) is: “to what extent, if any, should Internet policies be aligned with national borders?”  (See in particular pp. 71, 73, 107, 126 and 145).  Mueller’s answer is basically “as little as possible, because supra-national governance by the Internet community is preferable”.  This answer is presumably motivated by Mueller’s view that “ institutions shift power from states to society” (p. 116), which implies that “society” has little power in modern states.  But (at least ideally) states should be the expression of a society (as Mueller acknowledges on pp. 124 and 136), so it would have been helpful if Mueller had elaborated on the ways (and there are many) in which he believes states do not reflect society and in the ways in which so-called multi-stakeholder models would not be worse and would not result in a denial of democracy.

    Before commenting on Mueller’s proposal for supra-national governance, it is worth commenting on some areas where a more extensive discussion would have been warranted.  We note, however, that the book the book is part of a series that is deliberately intended to be short and accessible to a lay public.  So Mueller had a 30,000 word limit and tried to keep things written in a way that non-specialists and non-scholars could access.  This no doubt largely explains why he didn’t cover certain topics in more depth.

    Be that as it may, the discussion would have been improved by being placed in the long-term context of the steady decrease in national sovereignty that started in 1648, when sovereigns agreed in the Treaty of Westphalia to refrain from interfering in the religious affairs of foreign states, , and that accelerated in the 20th century.  And by being placed in the short-term context of the dominance by the USA as a state (which Mueller acknowledges in passing on p. 12), and US companies, of key aspects of the Internet and its governance.  Mueller is deeply aware of the issues and has discussed them in his other books, in particular Ruling the Root and Networks and States, so it would have been nice to see the topic treated here, with references to the end of the Cold War and what appears to be re-emergence of some sort of equivalent international tension (albeit not for the same reasons and with different effects at least for what concerns cyberspace).  It would also have been preferable to include at least some mention of the literature on the negative economic and social effects of current Internet governance arrangements.

    Will the Internet Fragment? Sovereignty, Globalization and Cyberspace (Polity, 2017)It is telling that, in Will the Internet Fragment?, Mueller starts his account with the 2014 NetMundial event, without mentioning that it took place in the context of the outcomes of the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS, whose genesis, dynamics, and outcomes Mueller well analyzed in Networks and States), and without mentioning that the outcome document of the 2015 UN WSIS+10 Review reaffirmed the WSIS outcomes and merely noted that Brazil had organized NetMundial, which was, in context, an explicit refusal to note (much less to endorse) the NetMundial outcome document.

    The UN’s reaffirmation of the WSIS outcomes is significant because, as Mueller correctly notes, the real question that underpins all current discussions of Internet governance is “what is the role of states?,” and the Tunis Agenda states: “Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States. They have rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy issues.”

    Mueller correctly identifies and discusses the positive externalities created by the Internet (pp. 44-48).  It would have been better if he had noted that there are also negative externalities, in particular regarding security (see section 2.8 of my June 2017 submission to ITU’s CWG-Internet), and that the role of states includes internalizing such externalities, as well as preventing anti-competitive behavior.

    It is also telling the Mueller never explicitly mentions a principle that is no longer seriously disputed, and that was explicitly enunciated in the formal outcome of the WSIS+10 Review, namely that offline law applies equally online.  Mueller does mention some issues related to jurisdiction, but he does not place those in the context of the fundamental principle that cyberspace is subject to the same laws as the rest of the world: as Mueller himself acknowledges (p. 145), allegations of cybercrime are judged by regular courts, not cyber-courts, and if you are convicted you will pay a real fine or be sent to a real prison, not to a cyber-prison.  But national jurisdiction is not just about security (p. 74 ff.), it is also about legal certainty for commercial dealings, such as enforcement of contracts.  There are an increasing number of activities that depend on the Internet, but that also depend on the existence of known legal regimes that can be enforced in national courts.

    And what about the tension between globalization and other values such as solidarity and cultural diversity?  As Mueller correctly notes (p. 10), the Internet is globalization on steroids.  Yet cultural values differ around the world (p. 125).  How can we get the benefits of both an unfragmented Internet and local cultural diversity (as opposed to the current trend to impose US values on the rest of the world)?

    While dealing with these issues in more depth would have complicated the discussion, it also would have made it more valuable, because the call for direct rule of the Internet by and for Internet users must either be reconciled with the principle that offline law applies equally online, or be combined with a reasoned argument for the abandonment of that principle.  As Mueller so aptly puts it (p. 11): “Internet governance is hard … also because of the mismatch between its global scope and the political and legal institutions for responding to societal problems.”

    Since most laws, and almost all enforcement mechanisms are national, the influence of states on the Internet is inevitable.  Recall that the idea of enforceable rules (laws) dates back to at least 1700 BC and has formed an essential part of all civilizations in history.  Mueller correctly posits on p. 125 that a justification for territorial sovereignty is to restrict violence (only the state can legitimately exercise it), and wonders why, in that case, the entire world does not have a single government.  But he fails to note that, historically, at times much of the world was subject to a single government (think of the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire), and he does not explore the possibility of expanding the existing international order (treaties, UN agencies, etc.) to become a legitimate democratic world governance (which of course it is not, in part because the US does not want it to become one).  For example, a concrete step in the direction of using existing governance systems has recently been proposed by Microsoft: a Digital Geneva Convention.

    Mueller explains why national borders interfere with certain aspects of certain Internet activities (pp. 104, 106), but national borders interfere with many activities.  Yet we accept them because there doesn’t appear to be any “least worst” alternative.  Mueller does acknowledge that states have power, and rightly calls for states to limit their exercise of power to their own jurisdiction (p. 148).  But he posits that such power “carries much less weight than one would think” (p. 150), without justifying that far-reaching statement.  Indeed, Mueller admits that “it is difficult to conceive of an alternative” (p. 73), but does not delve into the details sufficiently to show convincingly how the solution that he sketches would not result in greater power by dominant private companies (and even corpotocracy or corporatism), increasing income inequality, and a denial of democracy.  For example, without the power of state in the form of consumer protection measures, how can one ensure that private intermediaries would “moderate content based on user preferences and reports” (p. 147) as opposed to moderating content so as to maximize their profits?  Mueller assumes that there would be a sufficient level of competition, resulting in self-correcting forces and accountability (p. 129); but current trends are just the opposite: we see increasing concentration and domination in many aspects of the Internet (see section 2.11 of my June 2017 submission to ITU’s CWG-Internet) and some competition law authorities have found that some abuse of dominance has taken place.

    It seems to me that Mueller too easily concludes that “a state-centric approach to global governance cannot easily co-exist with a multistakeholder regime” (p. 117), without first exploring the nuances of multi-stakeholder regimes and the ways that they could interface with existing institutions, which include intergovernmental bodies as well as states.  As I have stated elsewhere: “The current arrangement for global governance is arguably similar to that of feudal Europe, whereby multiple arrangements of decision-making, including the Church, cities ruled by merchant-citizens, kingdoms, empires and guilds co-existed with little agreement as to which actor was actually in charge over a given territory or subject matter.  It was in this tangled system that the nation-state system gained legitimacy precisely because it offered a clear hierarchy of authority for addressing issues of the commons and provision of public goods.”

    Which brings us to another key point that Mueller does not consider in any depth: if the Internet is a global public good, then its governance must take into account the views and needs of all the world’s citizens, not just those that are privileged enough to have access at present.  But Mueller’s solution would restrict policy-making to those who are willing and able to participate in various so-called multi-stakeholder forums (apparently Mueller does not envisage a vast increase in participation and representation in these; p. 120).  Apart from the fact that that group is not a community in any real sense (a point acknowledged on p. 139), it comprises, at present, only about half of humanity, and even much of that half would not be able to participate because discussions take place primarily in English, and require significant technical knowledge and significant time commitments.

    Mueller’s path for the future appears to me to be a modern version of the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC), but Mueller would probably disagree, since he is of the view that the IAHC was driven by intergovernmental organizations.  In any case, the IAHC work failed to be seminal because of the unilateral intervention of the US government, well described in Ruling the Root, which resulted in the creation of ICANN, thus sparking discussions of Internet governance in WSIS and elsewhere.  While Mueller is surely correct when he states that new governance methods are needed (p. 127), it seems a bit facile to conclude that “the nation-state is the wrong unit” and that it would be better to rely largely on “global Internet governance institutions rooted in non-state actors” (p. 129), without explaining how such institutions would be democratic and representative of all of the word’s citizens.

    Mueller correctly notes (p. 150) that, historically, there have major changes in sovereignty: emergence and falls of empires, creation of new nations, changes in national borders, etc.  But he fails to note that most of those changes were the result of significant violence and use of force.  If, as he hopes, the “Internet community” is to assert sovereignty and displace the existing sovereignty of states, how will it do so?  Through real violence?  Through cyber-violence?  Through civil disobedience (e.g. migrating to bitcoin, or implementing strong encryption no matter what governments think)?  By resisting efforts to move discussions into the World Trade Organization? Or by persuading states to relinquish power willingly?  It would have been good if Mueller had addressed, at least summarily, such questions.

    Before concluding, I note a number of more-or-less minor errors that might lead readers to imprecise understandings of important events and issues.  For example, p. 37 states that “the US and the Internet technical community created a global institution, ICANN”: in reality, the leaders of the Internet technical community obeyed the unilateral diktat of the US government (at first somewhat reluctantly and later willingly) and created a California non-profit company, ICANN.  And ICANN is not insulated from jurisdictional differences; it is fully subject to US laws and US courts.  The discussion on pp. 37-41 fails to take into account the fact that a significant portion of the DNS, the ccTLDs, is already aligned with national borders, and that there are non-national telephone numbers; the real differences between the DNS and telephone numbers are that most URLs are non-national, whereas few telephone numbers are non-national; that national telephone numbers are given only to residents of the corresponding country; and that there is an international real-time mechanism for resolving URLs that everybody uses, whereas each telephone operator has to set up its own resolving mechanism for telephone numbers.  Page 47 states that OSI was “developed by Europe-centered international organizations”, whereas actually it was developed by private companies from both the USA (including AT&T, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, etc.) and Europe working within global standards organizations (IEC, ISO, and ITU), who all happen to have secretariats in Geneva, Switzerland; whereas the Internet was initially developed and funded by an arm of the US Department of Defence and the foundation of the WWW was initially developed in a European intergovernmental organization.  Page 100 states that “The ITU has been trying to displace or replace ICANN since its inception in 1998”; whereas a correct statement would be “While some states have called for the ITU to displace or replace ICANN since its inception in 1998, such proposals have never gained significant support and appear to have faded away recently.”  Not everybody thinks that the IANA transition was a success (p. 117), nor that it is an appropriate model for the future (pp. 132-135; 136-137), and it is worth noting that ICANN successfully withstood many challenges (p. 100) while it had a formal link to the US government; it remains to be seen how ICANN will fare now that it is independent of the US government.  ICANN and the RIR’s do not have a “‘transnational’ jurisdiction created through private contracts” (p. 117); they are private entities subject to national law and the private contracts in question are also subject to national law (and enforced by national authorities, even if disputes are resolved by international arbitration).  I doubt that it is a “small step from community to nation” (p. 142), and it is not obvious why anti-capitalist movements (which tend to be internationalist) would “end up empowering territorial states and reinforcing alignment” (p. 147), when it is capitalist movements that rely on the power of territorial states to enforce national laws, for example regarding intellectual property rights.

    Despite these minor quibbles, this book, and its references (albeit not as extensive as one would have hoped), will be a valuable starting point for future discussions of internet alignment and/or “fragmentation.” Surely there will be much future discussion, and many more analyses and calls for action, regarding what may well be one of the most important issues that humanity now faces: the transition from the industrial era to the information era and the disruptions arising from that transition.

    _____

    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2 Review Digital Studies magazine.

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  • Anthony Galluzzo — Utopia as Method, Social Science Fiction, and the Flight From Reality (Review of Frase, Four Futures)

    Anthony Galluzzo — Utopia as Method, Social Science Fiction, and the Flight From Reality (Review of Frase, Four Futures)

    a review of Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (Verso Jacobin Series, 2016)

    by Anthony Galluzzo

    ~

    Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed British techno-dystopian television series, Black Mirror, returned last year in a more American-friendly form. The third season, now broadcast on Netflix, opened with “Nosedive,” a satirical depiction of a recognizable near future when user-generated social media scores—on the model of Yelp reviews, Facebook likes, and Twitter retweets—determine life chances, including access to basic services, such as housing, credit, and jobs. The show follows striver Lacie Pound—played by Bryce Howard—who, in seeking to boost her solid 4.2 life score, ends up inadvertently wiping out all of her points, in the nosedive named by the episode’s title. Brooker offers his viewers a nightmare variation on a now familiar online reality, as Lacie rates every human interaction and is rated in turn, to disastrous result. And this nightmare is not so far from the case, as online reputational hierarchies increasingly determine access to precarious employment opportunities. We can see this process in today’s so-called sharing economy, in which user approval determines how many rides will go to the Uber driver, or if the room you are renting on Airbnb, in order to pay your own exorbitant rent, gets rented.

    Brooker grappled with similar themes during the show’s first season; for example, “Fifteen Million Merits” shows us a future world of human beings forced to spend their time on exercise bikes, presumably in order to generate power plus the “merits” that function as currency, even as they are forced to watch non-stop television, advertisements included. It is television—specifically a talent show—that offers an apparent escape to the episode’s protagonists. Brooker revisits these concerns—which combine anxieties regarding new media and ecological collapse in the context of a viciously unequal society—in the final episode of the new season, entitled “Hated in the Nation,” which features robotic bees, built for pollination in a world after colony collapse, that are hacked and turned to murderous use. Here is an apt metaphor for the virtual swarming that characterizes so much online interaction.

    Black Mirror corresponds to what literary critic Tom Moylan calls a “critical dystopia.” [1] Rather than a simple exercise in pessimism or anti-utopianism, Moylan argues that critical dystopias, like their utopian counterparts, also offer emancipatory political possibilities in exposing the limits of our social and political status quo, such as the naïve techno-optimism that is certainly one object of Brooker’s satirical anatomies. Brooker in this way does what Jacobin Magazine editor and social critic Peter Frase claims to do in his Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, a speculative exercise in “social science fiction” that uses utopian and dystopian science fiction as means to explore what might come after global capitalism. Ironically, Frase includes both online reputational hierarchies and robotic bees in his two utopian scenarios: one of the more dramatic, if perhaps inadvertent, ways that Frase collapses dystopian into utopian futures

    Frase echoes the opening lines of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto as he describes the twin “specters of ecological catastrophe and automation” that haunt any possible post-capitalist future. While total automation threatens to make human workers obsolete, the global planetary crisis threatens life on earth, as we have known it for the past 12000 years or so. Frase contends that we are facing a “crisis of scarcity and a crisis of abundance at the same time,” making our moment one “full of promise and danger.” [2]

    The attentive reader can already see in this introductory framework the too-often unargued assumptions and easy dichotomies that characterize the book as a whole. For example, why is total automation plausible in the next 25 years, according to Frase, who largely supports this claim by drawing on the breathless pronouncements of a technophilic business press that has made similar promises for nearly a hundred years? And why does automation equal abundance—assuming the more egalitarian social order that Frase alternately calls “communism” or “socialism”—especially when we consider the  ecological crisis Frase invokes as one of his two specters? This crisis is very much bound to an energy-intensive technosphere that is already pushing against several of the planetary boundaries that make for a habitable planet; total automation would expand this same technosphere by several orders of magnitude, requiring that much more energy, materials, and  environmental sinks to absorb tomorrow’s life-sized iPhone or their corpses. Frase deliberately avoids these empirical questions—and the various debates among economists, environmental scientists and computer programmers about the feasibility of AI, the extent to which automation is actually displacing workers, and the ecological limits to technological growth, at least as technology is currently constituted—by offering his work as the “social science fiction” mentioned above, perhaps in the vein of Black Mirror. He distinguishes this method from futurism or prediction, as he writes, “science fiction is to futurism as social theory is to conspiracy theory.” [3]

    In one of his few direct citations, Frase invokes Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, who argues that conspiracy theory and its fictions are ideologically distorted attempts to map an elusive and opaque global capitalism: “Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” [4] For Jameson, a more comprehensive cognitive map of our planetary capitalist civilization necessitates new forms of representation to better capture and perhaps undo our seemingly eternal and immovable status quo. In the words of McKenzie Wark, Jameson proposes nothing less than a “theoretical-aesthetic practice of correlating the field of culture with the field of political economy.” [5] And it is possibly with this “theoretical-aesthetic practice” in mind that Frase turns to science fiction as his preferred tool of social analysis.

    The book accordingly proceeds in the way of a grid organized around the coordinates “abundance/scarcity” and “egalitarianism/hierarchy”—in another echo of Jameson, namely his structuralist penchant for Greimas squares. Hence we get abundance with egalitarianism, or “communism,” followed by its dystopian counterpart, rentism, or hierarchical plenty in the first two futures; similarly, the final futures move from an equitable scarcity, or “socialism” to a hierarchical and apocalyptic “exterminism.” Each of these chapters begins with a science fiction, ranging from an ostensibly communist Star Trek to the exterminationist visions presented in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, upon which Frase builds his various future scenarios. These scenarios are more often than not commentaries on present day phenomena, such as 3D printers or the sharing economy, or advocacy for various measures, like a Universal Basic Income, which Frase presents as the key to achieving his desired communist future.

    With each of his futures anchored in a literary (or cinematic, or televisual) science fiction narrative, Frase’s speculations rely on imaginative literature, even as he avoids any explicit engagement with literary criticism and theory, such as the aforementioned work of  Jameson.  Jameson famously argues (see Jameson 1982, and the more elaborated later versions in texts such as Jameson 2005) that the utopian text, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, simultaneously offers a mystified version of dominant social relations and an imaginative space for rehearsing radically different forms of sociality. But this dialectic of ideology and utopia is absent from Frase’s analysis, where his select space operas are all good or all bad: either the Jetsons or Elysium.

    And, in a marked contrast with Jameson’s symptomatic readings, some science fiction is for Frase more equal than others when it comes to radical sociological speculation, as evinced by his contrasting views of George Lucas’s Star Wars and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.  According to Frase, in “Star Wars, you don’t really care about the particularities of the galactic political economy,” while in Star Trek, “these details actually matter. Even though Star Trek and Star Wars might superficially look like similar tales of space travel and swashbuckling, they are fundamentally different types of fiction. The former exists only for its characters and its mythic narrative, while the latter wants to root its characters in a richly and logically structured social world.” [6]

    Frase here understates his investment in Star Trek, whose “structured social world” is later revealed as his ideal-type for a high tech fully automated luxury communism, while Star Wars is relegated to the role of the space fantasy foil. But surely the original Star Wars is at least an anticolonial allegory, in which a ragtag rebel alliance faces off against a technologically superior evil empire, that was intentionally inspired by the Vietnam War. Lucas turned to the space opera after he lost his bid to direct Apocalypse Now—which was originally based on Lucas’s own idea. According to one account of the franchise’s genesis, “the Vietnam War, which was an asymmetric conflict with a huge power unable to prevail against guerrilla fighters, instead became an influence on Star Wars. As Lucas later said, ‘A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now carried over into Star Wars.” [7]

    Texts—literary, cinematic, and otherwise—often combine progressive and reactionary, utopian and ideological elements. Yet it is precisely the mixed character of speculative narrative that Frase ignores throughout his analysis, reducing each of his literary examples to unequivocally good or bad, utopian or dystopian, blueprints for “life after capitalism.” Why anchor radical social analysis in various science fictions while refusing basic interpretive argument? As with so much else in Four Futures, Frase uses assumption—asserting that Star Trek has one specific political valence or that total automation guided by advanced AI is an inevitability within 25 years—in the service of his preferred policy outcomes (and the nightmare scenarios that function as the only alternatives to those outcomes), while avoiding engagement with debates related to technology, ecology, labor, and the utopian imagination.

    Frase in this way evacuates the politically progressive and critical utopian dimensions from George Lucas’s franchise, elevating the escapist and reactionary dimensions that represent the ideological, as opposed to the utopian, pole of this fantasy. Frase similarly ignores the ideological elements of Roddenberry’s Star Trek: “The communistic quality of the Star Trek universe is often obscured because the films and TV shows are centered on the military hierarchy of Starfleet, which explores the galaxy and comes into conflict with alien races. But even this seems largely a voluntarily chosen hierarchy.” [8]

    Frase’s focus, regarding Star Trek, is almost entirely on the replicators  that can make something,  anything, from nothing, so that Captain Picard, from the eighties era series reboot, orders a “cup of Earl Grey, hot,” from one of these magical machines, and immediately receives Earl Grey, hot. Frase equates our present-day 3D printers with these same replicators over the course of all his four futures, despite the fact that unlike replicators, 3D printers require inputs: they do not make matter, but shape it.

    3D printing encompasses a variety of processes in which would-be makers create an image with a computer and CAD (computer aided design) software, which in turn provides a blueprint for the three-dimensional object to be “printed.” This requires either the addition of material—usually plastic—and the injection of that material into a mould.  The most basic type of 3D printing involves heating  “(plastic, glue-based) material that is then extruded through a nozzle. The nozzle is attached to an apparatus similar to a normal 2D ink-jet printer, just that it moves up and down, as well. The material is put on layer over layer. The technology is not substantially different from ink-jet printing, it only requires slightly more powerful computing electronics and a material with the right melting and extrusion qualities.” [9] This is still the most affordable and pervasive way to make objects with 3D printers—most often used to make small models and components. It is also the version of 3D printing that lends itself to celebratory narratives of post-industrial techno-artisanal home manufacture pushed by industry cheerleaders and enthusiasts alike. Yet, the more elaborate versions of 3D printing—“printing’ everything from complex machinery to  food to human organs—rely on the more complex and  expensive industrial versions of the technology that require lasers (e.g., stereolithography and selective laser sintering).  Frase espouses a particular left techno-utopian line that sees the end of mass production in 3D printing—especially with the free circulation of the programs for various products outside of our intellectual property regime; this is how he distinguishes his communist utopia from the dystopian rentism that most resembles our current moment,  with material abundance taken for granted. And it is this fantasy of material abundance and post-work/post-worker production that presumably appeals to Frase, who describes himself as an advocate of “enlightened Luddism.”

    This is an inadvertently ironic characterization, considering the extent to which these emancipatory claims conceal and distort the labor discipline imperative that is central to the shape and development of this technology, as Johan Söderberg argues, “we need to put enthusiastic claims for 3D printers into perspective. One claim is that laid-off American workers can find a new source of income by selling printed goods over the Internet, which will be an improvement, as degraded factory jobs are replaced with more creative employment opportunities. But factory jobs were not always monotonous. They were deliberately made so, in no small part through the introduction of the same technology that is expected to restore craftsmanship. ‘Makers’ should be seen as the historical result of the negation of the workers’ movement.” [10]

    Söderberg draws on the work of David Noble, who outlines how the numerical control technology central to the growth of post-war factory automation was developed specifically to de-skill and dis-empower workers during the Cold War period. Unlike Frase, both of these authors foreground those social relations, which include capital’s need to more thoroughly exploit and dominate labor, embedded in the architecture of complex megatechnical systems, from  factory automation to 3D printers. In collapsing 3D printers into Star Trek-style replicators, Frase avoids these questions as well as the more immediately salient issue of resource constraints that should occupy any prognostication that takes the environmental crisis seriously.

    The replicator is the key to Frase’s dream of endless abundance on the model of post-war US style consumer affluence and the end of all human labor. But, rather than a simple blueprint for utopia, Star Trek’s juxtaposition of techno-abundance with military hierarchy and a tacitly expansionist galactic empire—despite the show’s depiction of a Starfleet “prime directive” that forbids direct intervention into the affairs of the extraterrestrial civilizations encountered by the federation’s starships, the Enterprise’s crew, like its ostensibly benevolent US original, almost always intervenes—is significant. The original Star Trek is arguably a liberal iteration of Kennedy-era US exceptionalism, and reflects a moment in which relatively wide-spread first world abundance was underwritten by the deliberate underdevelopment, appropriation, and exploitation of various “alien races’” resources, land, and labor abroad. Abundance in fact comes from somewhere and some one.

    As historian H. Bruce Franklin argues, the original series reflects US Cold War liberalism, which combined Roddenberry’s progressive stances regarding racial inclusion within the parameters of the United States and its Starfleet doppelganger, with a tacitly anti-communist expansionist viewpoint, so that the show’s Klingon villains often serve as proxies for the Soviet menace. Franklin accordingly charts the show’s depictions of the Vietnam War, moving from a pro-war and pro-American stance to a mildly anti-war position in the wake of the Tet Offensive over the course of several episodes: “The first of these two episodes, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever‘ and ‘A Private Little War,’ had suggested that the Vietnam War was merely an unpleasant necessity on the way to the future dramatized by Star Trek. But the last two, ‘The Omega Glory‘ and ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,’ broadcast in the period between March 1968 and January 1969, are so thoroughly infused with the desperation of the period that they openly call for a radical change of historic course, including an end to the Vietnam War and to the war at home.” [11]

    Perhaps Frase’s inattention to Jameson’s dialectic of ideology and utopia reflects a too-literal approach to these fantastical narratives, even as he proffers them as valid tools for radical political and social analysis. We could see in this inattention a bit too much of the fan-boy’s enthusiasm, which is also evinced by the rather narrow and backward-looking focus on post-war space operas to the exclusion of the self-consciously radical science fiction narratives of Ursula LeGuin, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler, among others. These writers use the tropes of speculative fiction to imagine profoundly different social relations that are the end-goal of all emancipatory movements. In place of emancipated social relations, Frase too often relies on technology and his readings must in turn be read with these limitations in mind.

    Unlike the best speculative fiction, utopian or dystopian, Frase’s “social science fiction” too often avoids the question of social relations—including the social relations embedded in the complex megatechnical systems Frase  takes for granted as neutral forces of production. He accordingly announces at the outset of his exercise: “I will make the strongest assumption possible: all need for human labor in the production process can be eliminated, and it is possible to live a life of pure leisure while machines do all the work.” [12] The science fiction trope effectively absolves Frase from engagement with the technological, ecological, or social feasibility of these predictions, even as he announces his ideological affinities with a certain version of post- and anti-work politics that breaks with orthodox Marxism and its socialist variants.

    Frase’s Jetsonian vision of the future resonates with various futurist currents that  can we now see across the political spectrum, from the Silicon Valley Singulitarianism of Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk, on the right, to various neo-Promethean currents on the left, including so-called “left accelerationism.” Frase defends his assumption as a desire “to avoid long-standing debates about post-capitalist organization of the production process.” While such a strict delimitation is permissible for speculative fiction—an imaginative exercise regarding what is logically possible, including time travel or immortality—Frase specifically offers science fiction as a mode of social analysis, which presumably entails grappling with rather than avoiding current debates on labor, automation, and the production process.

    Ruth Levitas, in her 2013 book Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, offers a more rigorous definition of social science fiction via her eponymous “utopia as method.”  This method combines sociological analysis and imaginative speculation, which Levitas defends as “holistic. Unlike political philosophy and political theory, which have been more open than sociology to normative approaches, this holism is expressed at the level of concrete social institutions and processes.” [13] But that attentiveness to concrete social institutions and practices combined with counterfactual speculation regarding another kind of human social world are exactly what is missing in Four Futures. Frase uses grand speculative assumptions-such as the inevitable rise of human-like AI or the complete disappearance of human labor, all within 25 years or so—in order to avoid significant debates that are ironically much more present in purely fictional works, such as the aforementioned Black Mirror or the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, than in his own overtly non-fictional speculations. From the standpoint of radical literary criticism and radical social theory, Four Futures is wanting. It fails as analysis. And, if one primary purpose of utopian speculation, in its positive and negative forms, is to open an imaginative space in which wholly other forms of human social relations can be entertained, Frase’s speculative exercise also exhibits a revealing paucity of imagination.

    This is most evident in Frase’s most  explicitly utopian future, which he calls “communism,” without any mention of class struggle, the collective ownership of the means of production, or any of the other elements we usually associate with “communism”; instead, 3D printers-cum-replicators will produce whatever you need whenever you need it at home, an individualizing techno-solution to the problem of labor, production, and its organization that resembles alchemy in its indifference to material reality and the scarce material inputs required by 3D printers. Frase proffers a magical vision of technology so as to avoid grappling with the question of social relations; even more than this, in the coda to this chapter, Frase reveals the extent to which current patterns of social organization and stratification remain under Frase’s “communism.” Frase begins this coda with a question: “in a communist society, what do we do all day?”  To which he responds: “The kind of communism   I’ve described is sometimes mistakenly construed, by both its critics and its adherents,  as a society in which hierarchy and conflict are wholly absent. But rather than see the abolition of the capital-wage relation as a single shot solution to all possible social problems, it is perhaps better to think of it in the terms used by political scientist, Corey Robin, as a way to ‘convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.’” [14]

    Frase goes on to argue—rightly—that the abolition of class society or wage labor will not put an end to a variety of other oppressions, such as those based in gender and racial stratification; he in this way departs from the class reductionist tendencies sometimes on view in the magazine he edits.  His invocation of Corey Robin is nonetheless odd considering the Promethean tenor of Frase’s preferred futures. Robin contends that while the end of exploitation, and capitalist social relations, would remove the major obstacle to  human flourishing, human beings will remain finite and fragile creatures in a finite and fragile world. Robin in this way overlaps with Fredric Jameson’s remarkable essay on Soviet writer Andre Platonov’s Chevengur, in which Jameson writes: “Utopia is merely the political and social solution of collective life: it does not do away with the tensions and inherent contradictions  inherent in both interpersonal relations and in bodily existence itself (among them, those of sexuality), but rather exacerbates those and allows them free rein, by removing the artificial miseries of money and self-preservation [since] it is not the function of Utopia to bring the dead back to life nor abolish death in the first place.” [15] Both Jameson and Robin recall Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse’s distinction between necessary and surplus repression: while the latter encompasses all of the unnecessary miseries attendant upon a class stratified form of social organization that runs on exploitation, the former represents the necessary adjustments we make to socio-material reality and its limits.

    It is telling that while Star Trek-style replicators fall within the purview of the possible for Frase, hierarchy, like death, will always be with us, since he at least initially argues that status hierarchies will persist after the “organizing force of the capital relation has been removed” (59). Frase oscillates between describing these status hierarchies as an unavoidable, if unpleasant, necessity and a desirable counter to the uniformity of an egalitarian society. Frase illustrates this point in recalling Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom, a dystopian novel that depicts a world where all people’s needs are met at the same time that everyone competes for reputational “points”—called Whuffie—on the model of Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets. Frase’s communism here resembles the world of Black Mirror described above.  Although Frase shifts from the rhetoric of necessity to qualified praise in an extended discussion of Dogecoin, an alternative currency used to tip or “transfer a small number of to another Internet user in appreciation of their witty and helpful contributions” (60). Yet Dogecoin, among all cryptocurrencies, is mostly a joke, and like many cryptocurrencies is one whose “decentralized” nature scammers have used to their own advantage, most famously in 2015. In the words of one former enthusiast: “Unfortunately, the whole ordeal really deflated my enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies. I experimented, I got burned, and I’m moving on to less gimmicky enterprises.” [16]

    But how is this dystopian scenario either necessary or desirable?  Frase contends that “the communist society I’ve sketched here, though imperfect, is at least one in which conflict is no longer based in the opposition between wage workers and capitalists or on struggles…over scarce resources” (67). His account of how capitalism might be overthrown—through a guaranteed universal income—is insufficient, while resource scarcity and its relationship to techno-abundance remains unaddressed in a book that purports to take the environmental crisis seriously. What is of more immediate interest in the case of this coda to his most explicitly utopian future is Frase’s non-recognition of how internet status hierarchies and alternative currencies are modeled on and work in tandem with capitalist logics of entrepreneurial selfhood. We might consider Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural capital in this regard, or how these digital platforms and their ever-shifting reputational hierarchies are the foundation of what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.” [17]

    Yet Frase concludes his chapter by telling his readers that it would be a “misnomer” to call his communist future an “egalitarian configuration.” Perhaps Frase offers his fully automated Facebook utopia as counterpoint to the Cold War era critique of utopianism in general and communism in particular: it leads to grey uniformity and universal mediocrity. This response—a variation on Frase’s earlier discussion of Star Trek’s “voluntary hierarchy”—accepts the premise of the Cold War anti-utopian criticisms, i.e., how the human differences that make life interesting, and generate new possibilities, require hierarchy of some kind. In other words, this exercise in utopian speculation cannot move outside the horizon of our own present day ideological common sense.

    We can again see this tendency at the very start of the book. Is total automation an unambiguous utopia or a reflection of Frase’s own unexamined ideological proclivities, on view throughout the various futures, for high tech solutions to complex socio-ecological problems? For various flavors of deus ex machina—from 3D printers to replicators to robotic bees—in place of social actors changing the material realities that constrain them through collective action? Conversely, are the “crisis of scarcity” and the visions of ecological apocalypse Frase evokes intermittently throughout his book purely dystopian or ideological? Surely, since Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Population, apologists for various ruling orders have used the threat of scarcity and material limits to justify inequity, exploitation, and class division: poverty is “natural.” Yet, can’t we also discern in contemporary visions of apocalypse a radical desire to break with a stagnant capitalist status quo? And in the case of the environmental state of emergency, don’t we have a rallying point for constructing a very different eco-socialist order?

    Frase is a founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He nonetheless distinguishes himself from the reformist and electoral currents at those organizations, in addition to much of what passes for orthodox Marxism. Rather than full employment—for example—Frase calls for the abolition of work and the working class in a way that echoes more radical anti-work and post-workerist modes of communist theory. So, in a recent editorial published by Jacobin, entitled “What It Means to Be on the Left,” Frase differentiates himself from many of his DSA comrades in declaring that “The socialist project, for me, is about something more than just immediate demands for more jobs, or higher wages, or universal social programs, or shorter hours. It’s about those things. But it’s also about transcending, and abolishing, much of what we think defines our identities and our way of life.” Frase goes on to sketch an emphatically utopian communist horizon that includes the abolition of class, race, and gender as such. These are laudable positions, especially when we consider a new new left milieu some of whose most visible representatives dismiss race and gender concerns as “identity politics,” while redefining radical class politics as a better deal for some amorphous US working class within an apparently perennial capitalist status quo.

    Frase’s utopianism in this way represents an important counterpoint within this emergent left. Yet his book-length speculative exercise—policy proposals cloaked as possible scenarios—reveals his own enduring investments in the simple “forces vs. relations of production” dichotomy that underwrote so much of twentieth century state socialism with its disastrous ecological record and human cost.  And this simple faith in the emancipatory potential of capitalist technology—given the right political circumstances despite the complete absence of what creating those circumstances might entail— frequently resembles a social democratic version of the Californian ideology or the kind of Silicon Valley conventional wisdom pushed by Elon Musk. This is a more efficient, egalitarian, and techno-utopian version of US capitalism. Frase mines various left communist currents, from post-operaismo to communization, only to evacuate these currents of their radical charge in marrying them to technocratic and technophilic reformism, hence UBI plus “replicators” will spontaneously lead to full communism. Four Futures is in this way an important, because symptomatic, expression of what Jason Smith (2017) calls “social democratic accelerationism,” animated by a strange faith in magical machines in addition to a disturbing animus toward ecology, non-human life, and the natural world in general.

    _____

    Anthony Galluzzo earned his PhD in English Literature at UCLA. He specializes in radical transatlantic English language literary cultures of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colby College, and NYU.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] See Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).

    [2] Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. (London: Verso Books, 2016),
    3.

    [3] Ibid, 27.

    [4] Fredric Jameson,  “Cognitive Mapping.” In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 6.

    [5] McKenzie Wark, “Cognitive Mapping,” Public Seminar (May 2015).

    [6] Frase, 24.

    [7] This space fantasy also exhibits the escapist, mythopoetic, and even reactionary elements Frase notes—for example, its hereditary caste of Jedi fighters and their ancient religion—as Benjamin Hufbauer notes, “in many ways, the political meanings in Star Wars were and are progressive, but in other ways the film can be described as middle-of-the-road, or even conservative. Hufbauer, “The Politics Behind the Original Star Wars,” Los Angeles Review of Books (December 21, 2015).

    [8] Frase, 49.

    [9]  Angry Workers World, “Soldering On: Report on Working in a 3D-Printer Manufacturing Plant in London,” libcom. org (March 24, 2017).

    [10] Johan Söderberg, “A Critique of 3D Printing as a Critical Technology,” P2P Foundation (March 16, 2013).

    [11] Franklin, “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era,” Science Fiction Studies, #62 = Volume 21, Part 1 (March 1994).

    [12] Frase, 6.

    [13] Ruth Levitas, Utopia As Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xiv-xv.

    [14] Frase, 58.

    [15]  Jameson, “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 110.

    [16]  Kaleigh Rogers, “The Guy Who Ruined Dogecoin,” VICE Motherboard (March 6, 2015).

    [17] See Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left  Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Frase, Peter. 2016. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. New York: Verso.
    • Jameson, Fredric. 1982. “Progress vs. Utopia; Or Can We Imagine The Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9:2 (July). 147-158
    • Jameson, Fredric. 1996. “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
    • Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia As Method; The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press.
    • Smith, Jason E. 2017. “Nowhere To Go: Automation Then And Now.” The Brooklyn Rail (March 1).

     

  • Adrian Nathan West – A Review of Achille Mbembe’s “Critique of Black Reason”

    Adrian Nathan West – A Review of Achille Mbembe’s “Critique of Black Reason”

    by Adrian Nathan West

    Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press, 2017.

    The question of Blackness, of what it might or ought to mean, lies at the fault line between timeworn notions of race as a biological destiny, rechristened for the resurgent right as “human biodiversity” or “racial realism,” and identity theory in its various permutations. If the first is generally acknowledged to lack scientific fundament, the second’s refusal to dispense entirely with race, coupled with its difficulty in establishing strict criteria as to who may and may not claim a given ethnicity, has provided fodder for advocates of dubious identitarian positions from transracialism to White Lives Matter. Yet the alternative of avowed post-racialism has frequently served as a cover for the diminishment of the historical suffering of marginalized groups or an excuse for the advocacy of policies that work to these groups’ detriment. Amid the snares of these various approaches, is a different thinking of Blackness possible?

    This is the question posed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, whose impressive body of work has yet to achieve the prominence it deserves in the English-speaking world. Critique of Black Reason, his most accomplished book to date, opens by positing Blackness as a historical conception of a kind of being, neither entirely subject not object, elaborated over the course of three successive phases: first, the “organized despoliation of the Atlantic slave trade,” which transformed black flesh into “real estate,” in the words of a 1705 declaration of the Virginia Assembly, and led to the codification of racial difference following Bacon’s Rebellion in the seventeenth century; second, the birth of black writing, which Mbembe traces from the late eighteenth century, as an examination of blacks’ condition as “beings-taken-by-others” to its culmination in the dismantlement of segregation and apartheid; and third, the confluence of market globalization, economic liberalization, and technological and military innovation in the early twenty-first century (Mbembe 2017, 2-4). In this last, grim episode, the concentration of capital following the saturation of global markets, accompanied by processes of efficiency maximization, has led to the seclusion of the black subject on the irrelevant fringes of society and to a consequent “production of indifference,” or “altruicide,” that helps render this barbarity psychologically cost-efficient for the privileged (Mbembe 2017, 3). “If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital,” he states, “the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity.’ Capital hardly needs them any more to function” (Mbembe 2017, 3; 11). This novel arrangement, according to Mbembe, has given rise to “new imperial practices” that tend toward a universalization of the black condition that he refers to as the “Becoming Black of the world” (Mbembe 2017, 6).

    Mbembe defines race as a system of images tailored to the demands of rapacity that forestalls any encounter with an authentic subject. The briefest glance at the early literature of African exploration, from Jobson to Olfert Dapper, shows the extent to which fantasy superseded reality and public desire for the salacious and hair-raising left little room for ethnographic rigor. These accounts dished up the archetypes of those tropes of sloth, intellectual inferiority, wiliness, and concupiscence that remain in vigor even today and that would provide eventual justification for colonialism and enslavement. “To produce Blackness is to produce a social link of subjection and a body of extraction,” Mbembe affirms, and, being constituted far in advance of any earnest investigation of African history, sociology, or folkways, these primitive notions of Black life responded less to enlightened curiosity than to the question of “how to deploy large numbers of laborers within a commercial enterprise that spanned great distances” as a “racial subsidy” to the expanding plantation system (Mbembe 2017, 20).

    The question of Black reason proposed by the book pertains, first of all, to the body of knowledge concerning things and people “of African origin” that came to stand in for primary experience thereof and served as “the reservoir that provided the justifications for the arithmetic of racial domination” (Mbembe 2017, 27). Black reason categorized its more or less willfully misunderstood African subjects through a series of exemptions to normalcy that mutated in conformity with the scientific reasoning of successive eras, leaving them morally and juridically illegitimate, unfit for human endeavor, suited only to forced labor. The traces of Black reason, according to Mbembe, persist in the search for Black self-consciousness, the founding gesture of which is the question: “Am I, in truth, what people say I am?” (Mbembe 2017, 28). Against this grappling with the oppressive image of Blackness, Mbembe will propose, in the book’s later chapters, an engagement with tradition for the sake of a “truth of the self no longer outside the self,” with Aimé Césaire, Amos Tutuola, Frantz Fanon, and others as his guides (Mbembe 2017, 29).

    A brief caveat concerning language is in order. Translators from French frequently grapple with the word nègre, and the results are rarely ideal. It remains common in standard French as a term for ghostwriter (nègre) and in the now off-color expression travailler comme un nègre (equivalent to the once-current work like a nigger in English), but when used disparagingly, there is no doubt as to its intent. Mbembe’s title, and his use of nègre throughout the book, are not meant to be provocative, but they do draw on a long tradition of recalcitrant self-assertion embodied in Aimé Césaire’s famous phrase, “Nègre je suis, nègre je resterais,” which has its complement in the reappropriation of the word nigger by H. Rap Brown, Dick Gregory, and others (Césaire, 28). All this is elided in Laurent Dubois’s excellent translation; in his defense, there is no happy alternative.

    For Mbembe, the racialization of consciousness takes root with the legal effort to distinguish the greater rights and privileges owed to European indentured servants with respect to their African slave counterparts in America in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the growth of scientific racism and its subsequent application to African peoples in the heyday of colonialism, which coincided with the “capitulation to racism” in the southern states as described by C. Van Woodward, Blackness was reconstituted as an Außenwelt or “World-outside” in the Schmittian sense: a zone in which enmity was paramount, rapine permissible, and the supposition of reciprocity suspended (Woodward, 67-110). Though the rationalization of scientific racism granted the field an appearance of objectivity, as an ideology racism was never independent of “the logic of profit, the politics of power, and the instinct for corruption” (Mbembe 2017, 62). This is evident from the massive wave of resettlements starting in the 1960s in South Africa, the organized attacks on Black businesses and appropriation of black-owned lands in the United States after the Civil War, and the introduction of foreign land ownership in Haiti under Roosevelt. Whether predicated on Blacks’ irreparable inferiority, in the American case, or on the civilizing mission, in the French, the principle of race, as a “distinct moral classification,” educated the populace in “behaviors aimed at the growth of economic profitability” (Mbembe 2017, 73; 81).

    In the book’s second half, Mbembe turns from racism as such to an eloquent account of the development of Black self-consciousness, which necessarily takes over and diverts the discourse of race:

    The latent tension that has always broadly shaped reflection on Black identity disappears in the gap of race. The tension opposes a universalizing approach, one that proclaims a co-belonging to the human condition, with a particular approach that insists on difference and the dissimilar by emphasizing not originality as such but the principle of repetition (custom) and the values of autonomy […] We rebel not against the idea that Blacks constitute a distinct race but against the prejudice of inferiority attached to the race. The specificity of so-called African culture is not placed in doubt: what is proclaimed is the relativity of cultures in general. In this context, ‘work for the universal’ consists in expanding the Western ratio of the contributions brought by Black ‘values of civilization,’ the ‘specific genius’ of the Black race, for which ‘emotion’ in particular is considered the cornerstone (Mbeme 2017, 90).

    This notion of a peculiar set of Black values has informed the praxis of evocation essential to Pan-Africanist thinkers from Edward Blyden to Marcus Garvey, whose thought has special importance for Mbembe despite his own universalist principals. While praising the aptitude of what he terms “heretical genius” to promote a self-sustaining understanding of the African condition, Mbembe admits that this understanding itself is a falsification to be transcended (Mbembe 2017, 102).

    For Mbembe, Blackness resides above all in the individual’s inscription in the Black text, his term for the accrual of the collective recollections and reveries of people of African descent, at the core of which lies the memory of the colony. Memory he defines as “interlaced psychic images” that “appear in the symbolic and political fields,” and in the Black text, the primordial memory is the divestment of the subjectivity of the Black self (Mbembe 2017, 103). His discussion of Black consciousness in the colonial setting leans heavily on Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Here again, Mbembe’s dialectical proclivities show forth: while looking toward a future in which a new humanism might divest historical memory of the trappings of race, he pays homage to thinkers who insisted on the necessity of a specifically Black memory to combat colonial distortions; at the same time, without advocating violence, he quotes Fanon approvingly to the effect that violence, for the colonized, may prove the lone recourse able to establish reciprocity between oppressor and oppressed.

    Since his 2006 essay Necropolitics, death has been the axis on which Mbembe’s political philosophy turns, and its invocation in Critique of Black Reason makes for some of the book’s most resonant as well as exasperating passages. Mbembe is no doubt correct in positing the border between the capacity of the sovereign to kill and that of the subject to bring his own life to an end as the furthermost border and defining conflict of the experience of subjection, and its relevance is beyond debate in the political discourse of the present day, especially as it impends upon those regions of the world where weakened civil institutions have allowed for a merging of private and public power and their subordination to moneyed interests. Yet his frequent linkage of these considerations to theoretical concepts of French coinage is at times belabored. In particular, the concept of the remainder (le reste), the heritage of which stretches from Saussure to Derrida and Badiou, and which Mbembe relates to the Black subject’s life-in-death through Bataille’s notion of the accursed share, muddies rather than illuminates Mbembe’s ordinarily lucid prose.

    Mbembe concludes Critique of Black Reason with an examination of the prospects for overcoming the idea of Blackness in the service of a world freed of the burden of race, yet unbothered by difference and singularity. Considering négritude as a moment of “situated thinking,” borne of and proper to the lived experience of the racialized subject, he calls for the contextualization of Blackness within a theory of “the rise of humanity” (Mbembe 2017, 161; 156). Blackness, in the positive sense Mbembe’s favored thinkers impart to it, would then become “a metaphysical and aesthetic envelope” directed against a specific and historically bound set of degradations and toward a humanism of the future; and the question that emerges for all liberatory struggles is “how to belong fully in this world that is common to all of us” (Mbembe 2017, 176). It is curious to read his sanguine meditations on the dialectical transcendence of Blackness against the collapse of the ideal of a post-racial America, particularly toward the end of Obama’s second term, and the re-legitimation of overt racism in the Trump era. Whereas Mbembe largely dispenses with the fictions of race to conceive of Blackness in political terms, present-day racism on the right has held onto the Black person as a biological subject while discrediting the political implications of ethnicity. Mbembe is not blind to the consequences of this decoupling of ethnic origin and political status, which has given impetus both to the annulment of protections afforded to African-Americans as well as to a revival of stereotypes of thugs and welfare cheats whose alleged malfeasance is undetermined by history or circumstance: he decries post-racialism as a fiction, advocating instead for a “post-Césairian era [in which] we embrace and retain the signifier ‘Black’ not with the goal of finding solace within it but rather as a way of clouding the term in order to gain distance from it” (Mbembe 2017, 173).

    Increasingly, the diffusion of Blackness into the common human heritage may devolve as much from oppression and destitution as from any humane disposition toward fraternity. In his 1999 essay “On Private Indirect Government,” Mbembe spoke ominously of the “direct relation that exists between the mercantile imperative, the upsurge in violence, and the installation of private military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional authorities” (Mbembe 1999). Mbembe was writing specifically of Africa, and well in advance of the economic crisis in the West that permitted an unheralded transfer of wealth into the hands of a minuscule proportion of the global elite. Since then, Americans have witnessed a newly militarized police force engaged in profiteering via civil asset forfeiture, the yields of which now exceed total losses from burglary; at the same time, privatization of education, public services, and infrastructure has made a growth industry of what once were thought of as human rights. The escalation process of capital mentioned by Mbembe in the book’s preface has meant that the citizens of countries that once dictated the brutal debt adjustment regimes imposed on the Third World now find themselves burdened by austerity as the global periphery expands and the core grows ever more restricted.

    In the epilogue, “There is Only One World,” Mbembe characterizes the progressive devaluation of the forces of production, along with the reduction of subjectivity to neurologically fixed and algorithmically exploitable market components, recently criticized by philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han, as a not-yet complete “retreat from humanity” to which he opposes “the reservoirs of life” (Mbembe 2017, 179; 181). For Mbembe, this situation confronts the individual with the most basic existential questions: what the world is, what are the extant and ideal relations between the parts that compose it, what is its telos, how should it end, how should one live within it. To conceive of a response, it is necessary to embrace the “vocation of life” as the basis for all thinking about politics and culture (Mbembe 2017, 182). Mbembe closes with a layered reference to “the Open,” which draws on Agamben, Heidegger, and finally Rilke to specify a state of plenitude, an absence of resentment, in which a care is made possible beyond the distortions of abstraction through the acknowledgement and inclusion of the no-longer other. The “proclamation of difference,” he concludes, “is only one facet of a larger project––the project of a world that is coming” (Mbembe 2017, 183).

    Adrian Nathan West is author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature.

     

    Bibliography

    Césaire, Aimé. Nègre Je Suis, Nègre Je Resterai. Entretiens avec François Vergès. Paris: Albin Michel, 2013.

    Mbembe, Achille, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

    Mbembe, A. 1999. “Du Gouvernement Privé Indirect.” Politique Africaine, 73 (1), 103-121. doi:10.3917/polaf.073.0103.

    Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

    Works Consulted

    Agamben, Giorgo. L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002.

    Dapper, Olfert. Umbständliche und eigentliche Beschreibung von Afrika, Anno 1668. https://archive.org/details/UmbstandlicheUndEigentlicheBeschreibungVonAfrikaAnno1668

    Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

    Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2007.

    Feldman, Ari. “Human Diversity: the Pseudoscientific Racism of the Alt-Right. Forward, 5 August 2016. http://forward.com/opinion/national/346533/human-biodiversity-the-pseudoscientific-racism-of-the-alt-right/

    H. Rap Brown. Die Nigger Die. New York: Dial Press, 1969.

    Han, Byung-Chul. Im Schwarm. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013.

    Ingraham, Christopher. “Law Enforcement Took More Stuff from People than Burglars Last Year.” Washington Post, 23 February 2015.

    Hallett, Robin. “Desolation on the Veld: Forced Removals in South Africa.” African Affairs 83, no. 332 (1984): 301-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/722350.

    Heidegger, Martin. “Wozu Dichter?” in Gesamtausgabe Band 5: Holzwege. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977.

    Jobson, Richard. The Golden Trade. 1623. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/jobson/

    Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

    Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duineser Elegien. Leipzig: Insel, 1923.

    Rucker, Walter, and James Nathaniel Upton, eds. Encyclopedia of American Race Riots. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenfield Press, 2007.

    Schmitt, Carl. Politische Romantik. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919.

     

     

  • Martin Woessner — The Sociologists and the Squirrel — Review of “Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary”

    Martin Woessner — The Sociologists and the Squirrel — Review of “Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary”

    by Martin Woessner

    Review of Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2017).

    Georg Simmel only began to be recognized as one of the founding figures of modern sociology shortly before his death in 1918.  The recognition came too late and generally amounted to the backhanded compliment in which scholars specialize: Simmel was brilliant, but. As an academic discipline in continental Europe and North America, sociology was still in the process of finding its methodological and institutional footing at the time.  It had neither the heritage nor the prestige of philosophy, but modernity was on its side.  It was the discipline of the future.  Sociologists were rigorous, scientific, and systematic—everything that Simmel supposedly was not.  Especially in comparison to Durkheim and Weber, Simmel’s work seemed dilettantish, more subjective and speculative than objective or empirical; more like poetry, in other words, than sociology.  It was a strange complaint to make of somebody who wrote a tome like The Philosophy of Money, which was hundreds of pages long and chock full of concrete examples. But it stuck.

    In the early decades of the twentieth century, as sociology became ever more scientific, Simmel’s fame became that of the negative example.  Neither his methodological preoccupations, which were wide-ranging, nor his intellectual style, which shunned footnotes and bibliographies, fit within the narrowing confines of academic sociology. He thus had to be written into and out of the discipline simultaneously.  In a 1936 survey of social thought across the Rhine, Raymond Aron conceded that “the development of sociology as an autonomous discipline can, in fact, scarcely be explained without taking his work into account,” but then proceeded to dispatch Simmel in just a few short pages, as if he were some kind of embarrassing distant relative who had to be acknowledged, but not necessarily celebrated.[1]  Another, perhaps more poetic but no less dismissive portrait came from Jose Ortega y Gasset, who likened Simmel to a “philosophical squirrel,” more content to leap from branch to branch, indeed from tree to tree, than to harvest the insights of any one particular area of inquiry.[2]

    Simmel may have ended up a squirrel by necessity rather than by choice.  Unable to secure a fully funded academic post until very late in his career, and then only in out-of-the-way Strasbourg—rather than, say, Heidelberg, where, with the help of Weber, he had hoped to obtain an appointment, or Berlin, where he lived and studied and taught as an unsalaried lecturer for most of his life—Simmel never enjoyed the academic security that might have lent itself to less squirrelish, more scientific pursuits.  His Berlin lectures were fabled performances—attended by everyone from Rainer Maria Rilke to George Santayana, who praised them to his Harvard colleague William James—but he nevertheless “remained,” as Elizabeth Goodstein argues in her new book, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, “at the margins of the academic establishment.”[3]

    Goodstein revisits Simmel’s marginality because she thinks it is the key to understanding not just his career, which was simultaneously storied and tenuous, but also his curious absence from academic debates today.  Something essential about Simmel has been lost, she argues, in the narrative that transformed Simmel into a sociological ancestor, in the “decoupling” of his more sociological work from its philosophical foundations.[4]  Indeed, as David Frisby pointed out some time ago, Simmel never really thought of himself as a sociologist anyhow.[5]  There was a reason he didn’t call it The Sociology of Money.  Writing to a French colleague already in 1899, Simmel confessed that “it is altogether rather painful for me that abroad I am only known as a sociologist—whereas I am a philosopher, see my life’s vocation in philosophy, and only pursue sociology as a sideline.”[6]

    Heeding this remark, Goodstein urges us to see Simmel more as he saw himself: a marginalized figure, caught between ascendant “social science” on the one hand and “a kind of philosophy that was passing away” on the other.[7]   If we do so, we might begin to appreciate how very relevant Simmel’s work is to contemporary debates not just in sociology, but also across the humanities and social sciences more generally. In the vicissitudes of Simmel’s career and legacy, in other words, Goodstein sees a parable or two for the current intellectual epoch, in which academic disciplines seem to be in the process of reforming themselves along new and sometimes competing lines of inquiry.

    Instead of presenting us with Simmel as squirrel, then, Goodstein offers us a portrait of Simmel as conflicted interdisciplinarian.  It is reassuring, I suppose, to think that what our academic colleagues dismiss as our most evident weaknesses might one day be viewed as our greatest strengths, that what seems scatterbrained now may be heralded as innovative in the future.  For those of us who work in the amorphous field of interdisciplinary studies, Goodstein’s book might serve as both legitimation and justification—a defense of our squirreliness to our colleagues over in the harder sciences maybe.  Still, it is difficult to shake the idea that interdisciplinarity is, like disciplinarity was a century ago, just another fad, another way to demonstrate to society that what we academics do behind closed doors is valuable and worthy of recognition, if not also funding.

    As Louis Menand and others have argued, talk of interdisciplinarity is, at root, an expression of anxiety.[8]  In the academy today there is certainly plenty to be anxious about, but, like Menand, I’m not sure that the discourse of interdisciplinarity adequately addresses any of it.  Interdisciplinarity does not address budget crises, crumbling infrastructure, or the increasingly contingent nature of academic labor.  In fact, it may even exacerbate these problems, insofar as it questions the rationale for having distinct disciplinary departments in the first place: why not collapse two or three different programs in the humanities into one, cut half their staff, and run a leaner, cheaper interdisciplinary program instead?  If we are all doing “theory” anyways, what difference does it make if we are attached to a literature department, a philosophy department, or a sociology department?

    That sounds paranoid, I know.  Interdisciplinarity is not an evil conspiracy concocted by greedy administrators.  It is simply the academic buzzword of our times.  But like all buzzwords, it says a lot without saying anything of substance, really.  It repackages what we already do and sells it back to us.  Like any fashion or fad, it is unique enough to seem innovative, but not so unique as to be truly independent.  Well over a century ago Simmel suggested that fashion trends were reflections of our competing desires for both “imitation” and “differentiation.”[9]  Interdisciplinarity’s fashionable status in the contemporary academy suggests that these desires have found a home in higher education.  In an effort to differentiate ourselves from our colleagues, we try to imitate the innovators.  We buy into the trend.  Interdisciplinary programs, built around interdisciplinary pedagogy, now produce and promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship, the end results of which are interdisciplinary curricula, conferences, journals, and textbooks.  All of them come at a price.  None of them, it seems to me, are worth it.

    When viewed from this perspective at least, Goodstein’s book isn’t about Simmel at all.  It is about what has been done to Simmel by the changing tides of academic fashion.  The reception of his work becomes, in Goodstein’s hands, a cautionary tale about the plight of disciplinary thinking in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.  The first section of the book, which investigates the way in which Simmel became a “(mostly) forgotten founding father” of modern sociology, shows how “Simmel’s oeuvre came to be understood as simultaneously foundational for and marginal to the modern social sciences.”[10]  Insofar as he made social types (including “the stranger” and “the adventurer”) and forms of social interaction (such as “exchange” and “conflict,” but also including “sociability” itself) topics worthy of academic scrutiny Simmel proved indispensible; insofar as he did so in an impressionistic as opposed to empirical or quantitative style he was expendable.  He was both imitated and ignored.  Simmel helped make the discipline of sociology possible, but he would remain forever a stranger to it—“a philosophical Monet,” as his student György Lukács described him, surrounded by conventional realists.[11]

    Goodstein uses the Simmel case to warn against the dangers of what now gets called, in those overpriced textbooks, “disciplinary reductionism.”  She doesn’t use that term, but she is not immune to similar sounding jargon, which is part and parcel of interdisciplinary branding.  “In exploring the history of Simmel’s representation as (proto)sociologist,” she writes, “I render more visible the highly tendentious background narratives on which the plausibility of that metadisciplinary (imagined, lived) order as a whole depends—and call into question the (largely tacit) equation of the differentiation and specialization knowledge practices with intellectual progress.”[12]  An explanatory footnote tacked on to this sentence doesn’t clarify things all that much: “My purpose is not to argue against the value disciplines or to discount the modes of knowing they embody and perpetuate, but to emphasize that meta-, inter-, pre-, trans-, and even anti-disciplinary approaches are not just supplements or correctives to disciplinary knowledge practices but are themselves valuable constitutive features of a vibrant intellectual culture.”[13]  Sounds squirrely to me, and not necessarily in a good way.

    If Simmel’s reception in academic sociology serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of disciplinary knowledge for Goodstein, his writings represent something else entirely: a light of inspiration at the end of the disciplinary tunnel.  They offer “an alternative vision of inquiry into human cultural or social life as a whole,” one that rejects the narrow tunnel-vision of specialized, compartmentalized, disciplinary frameworks.[14]  It is a vision that might also help us to think critically about interdisciplinarity as well, for as Goodstein points out later in the book, in a more critical voice, “the contemporary turn to interdisciplinarity remains situated in a discursive space shaped and reinforced by disciplinary divisions.”[15]

    The middle section of Goodstein’s book is devoted to a close reading of The Philosophy of Money.  Its three chapters argue, each from a slightly different angle, that Simmel’s magnum opus substantiates just such an “alternative vision.”  Here Simmel is presented not as the academic as which sociologists came to portray him, but as what he so desperately wanted to be seen, namely a philosopher.  Goodstein argues that Simmel should be understood as a  “modernist philosopher,” a kind of missing link, as it were, between Nietzsche on the one side and Husserl and Heidegger on the other.  Simmel takes from Nietzsche the importance of post-Cartesian perspectivism, and, in applying it to social and cultural life, anticipates not just the phenomenology of Husserl and the existential philosophy of Heidegger, but also the critical theory of Lukács, and, later, the Frankfurt School.  This is the theory you have been waiting for, the one that brings it all together.

    In Goodstein’s view, The Philosophy of Money attempts nothing less than an inquiry into all social and cultural life through the subject of money relations. As such, it is neither “inter- or transdisciplinary.”  “It is,” she writes, “metadisciplinary.”[16]  It operates at a level all its own.  It uses the phenomena associated with money—abstraction, valuation, and signification, for example—to explore larger questions associated with epistemology, ethics, and even metaphysics more generally.  It shuttles back and forth between the most concrete and immediate observations to the most far-reaching speculations.  It helps us understand how calculation, objectivity, and relativity, for example, become the defining features of modernity.  It shows us how seemingly objective social and cultural forms—from artistic styles to legal and political norms—emerge out of intimate, subjective experience.  But it also shows how these forms come to reify the forms of life out of which they initially sprang.[17]

    In Simmel’s hands, money becomes a synecdoche—the “synecdoche of synecdoche” Goodstein repeats, one too many times—for social and cultural life as a whole.[18]  What Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit did for history, The Philosophy of Money does for cold, hard cash.  In this regard, at least, Goodstein’s efforts to re-categorize Simmel as a “modernist philosopher”—to put the philosophy back into the book, as it were—are insightful.  Still, as I read Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, I couldn’t help but wonder if it might not be more valuable these days to put some of the money back into it instead.  Given all the ways in which interdisciplinarity has been sold to us, and given the neoliberal reforms that are sweeping through the academy, now might be the time to focus on money as money, and not merely as synecdoche.

    The problems we face today, both within and beyond the academy, are tremendous.  We live in an age, as Goodstein puts it, of “accelerating ecological, economic, and sociopolitical crises.”[19]  No matter what its promotional materials suggest, interdisciplinarity will not rescue us from any of them.  Goodstein eventually admits as much: “the proliferation of increasingly differentiated inter-, trans-, and post-disciplinary practices reinforces rather than challenges the philosophical—ethical, but also metaphysical—insufficiencies of the modern disciplinary imaginary.”[20]  In the final section of her book she emphasizes not so much the disciplining of Simmel’s work by those narrow-minded sociologists as the liberating theoretical potential of his “practices of thought,” which “even today do not comfortably fit into existing institutional frameworks.”[21]  After depicting Simmel as a victim of academic rationalization, Goodstein now presents him as a potential savior—a way out of the mess of disciplinarity altogether.

    Attractive as that sounds, I’m not sure that Simmel’s “modernist philosophy” will rescue us, either.  In fact, I’m not sure that any philosophical or theoretical framework will, by itself, give us what we need to confront the challenges we face.  Worrying about finding the right intellectual perspective may not be as important as worrying about where, in our society, the money comes from and where—and to whom—it goes at the end of the day.  We need some advocacy to go along with our philosophy, and fretting over the merits of inter-, trans-, post-, meta-, anti-disciplinarity may just get in the way of it.

    Simmel predicted that he would “die without spiritual heirs,” which was, in his opinion, “a good thing.”  In a revealing quotation that serves as the guiding leitmotif of Goodstein’s book, he likened his intellectual legacy to “cold cash divided among many heirs, and each converts his portion into an enterprise of some sort that corresponds to his nature; whose provenance in that inheritance is not visible.”[22]  Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imagination goes a long way towards reestablishing that provenance.  Maybe it’s about time we start calling for an inheritance tax to be imposed upon the current practitioners and proponents of interdisciplinarity, who have turned that cold cash into gold.

    Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History & Society at The City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education.  He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge UP, 2011).

    Notes

    [1] Raymond Aron, German Sociology, trans. Mary and Thomas Bottomore (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 5 n.1.  Aron’s text was first published in French in 1936.

    [2] Quoted in Lewis Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, Second Edition (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1997), 199.

    [3] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 15.

    [4] Ibid., 112.

    [5] David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986), 64.

    [6] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 41.

    [7] Ibid., 29.

    [8] Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010), 97.

    [9] Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 296.

    [10] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 106.

    [11] “Introduction to the Translation,” in Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 29.

    [12] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 33.

    [13] Ibid., note 43.

    [14] Ibid., 67.

    [15] Ibid., 131.

    [16] Ibid., 155.

    [17] This point is emphasized in Simmel’s final work, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, trans. John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine, with an introduction by Donald N. Levine and Daniel Silver, and an appendix, “Journal Aphorisms, with an Introduction” edited, translated, and with an introduction by John A.Y. Andrews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 351-352.

    [18] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 171.

    [19] Ibid., 329.

    [20] Ibid., 258.

    [21] Ibid., 254.

    [22] Ibid., 1.

  • Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    a review of Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press Forerunners Series, 2016)

    by Michael Miller

    ~

    All existence is Beta, basically. A ceaseless codependent improvement unto death, but then death is not even the end. Nothing will be finalized. There is no end, no closure. The search will outlive us forever

    — Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

    Being a (in)human is to be a beta tester

    — Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Too many people have access to your state of mind

    — Renata Adler, Speedboat

    Whenever I read through Vilém Flusser’s vast body of work and encounter, in print no less, one of the core concepts of his thought—which is that “human communication is unnatural” (2002, 5)––I find it nearly impossible to shake the feeling that the late Czech-Brazilian thinker must have derived some kind of preternatural pleasure from insisting on the ironic gesture’s repetition. Flusser’s rather grim view that “there is no possible form of communication that can communicate concrete experience to others” (2016, 23) leads him to declare that the intersubjective dimension of communication implies inevitably the existence of a society which is, in his eyes, itself an unnatural institution. One can find all over in Flusser’s work traces of his life-long attempt to think through the full philosophical implications of European nihilism, and evidence of this intellectual engagement can be readily found in his theories of communication.

    One of Flusser’s key ideas that draws me in is his notion that human communication affords us the ability to “forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of ‘nature’” (2002, 4). In order to help stave off the inexorable tide of nature’s muted nothingness, Flusser suggests that humans communicate by storing memories, externalized thoughts whose eventual transmission binds two or more people into a system of meaning. Only when an intersubjective system of communication like writing or speech is established between people does the purpose of our enduring commitment to communication become clear: we communicate in order “to become immortal within others” (2016, 31). Flusser’s playful positing of the ironic paradox inherent in the improbability of communication—that communication is unnatural to the human but it is also “so incredibly rich despite its limitations” (26)––enacts its own impossibility. In a representatively ironic sense, Flusser’s point is that all we are able to fully understand is our inability to understand fully.

    As Flusser’s theory of communication can be viewed as his response to the twentieth-century’s shifting technical-medial milieu, his ideas about communication and technics eventually led him to conclude that “the original intention of producing the apparatus, namely, to serve the interests of freedom, has turned on itself…In a way, the terms human and apparatus are reversed, and human beings operate as a function of the apparatus. A man gives an apparatus instructions that the apparatus has instructed him to give” (2011,73).[1] Flusser’s skeptical perspective toward the alleged affordances of human mastery over technology is most assuredly not the view that Apple or Google would prefer you harbor (not-so-secretly). Any cursory glance at Wired or the technology blog at Insider Higher Ed, to pick two long-hanging examples, would yield a radically different perspective than the one Flusser puts forth in his work. In fact, Flusser writes, “objects meant to be media may obstruct communication” (2016, 45). If media objects like the technical apparatuses of today actually obstruct communication, then why are we so often led to believe that they facilitate it? And to shift registers just slightly, if everything is said to be an object of some kind—even technical apparatuses––then cannot one be permitted to claim daily communion with all kinds of objects? What happens when an object—and an object as obsolete as a book, no less—speaks to us? Will we still heed its call?

    ***

    Speaking in its expanded capacity as neither narrator nor focalized character, the book as literary object addresses us in a direct and antagonistic fashion in the opening line to Joshua Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands” (5), the book-object warns. As Cohen’s narrative tells the story of a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen (whose backstory corresponds mostly to the historical-biographical author Joshua Cohen) who is contracted to ghostwrite the memoir of another Joshua Cohen (who is the CEO of a massive Google-type company named Tetration), the novel’s middle section provides an “unedited” transcript of the conversation between the two Cohens in which the CEO recounts his upbringing and tremendous business success in and around the Bay Area from the late 1970s up to 2013 of the narrative’s present. The novel’s Silicon Valley setting, nominal and characterological doubling, and structural narrative coupling of the two Cohens’ lives makes it all but impossible to distinguish the personal histories of Cohen-the-CEO and Cohen-the-narrator from the cultural history of the development of personal computing and networked information technologies. The history of one Joshua Cohen––or all Joshua Cohens––is indistinguishable from the history of intrusive computational/digital media. “I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics,” Cohen-the-narrator laments. In other words, as Cohen-the-narrator ghostwrites another Cohen’s memoir within the context of the broad history of personal computing and the emergence of algorithmic governance and surveillance, the novel invites us to consider how the history of an individual––or every individual, it does not really matter––is also nothing more or anything less than the surveilled history of its data usage, which is always written by someone or something else, the ever-present Not-Me (who just might have the same name as me). The Self is nothing but a networked repository of information to be mined in the future.

    While the novel’s opening line addresses its hypothetical reader directly, its relatively benign warning fixes reader and text in a relation of rancor. The object speaks![2] And yet tech-savvy twenty-first century readers are not the only ones who seem to be fed up with books; books too are fed up with us, and perhaps rightly so. In an age when objects are said to speak vibrantly and withdraw infinitely; processes like human cognition are considered to be operative in complex technical-computational systems; and when the only excuse to preserve the category of “subjective experience” we are able to muster is that it affords us the ability “to grasp how networks technically distribute and disperse agency,” it would seem at first glance that the second-person addressee of the novel’s opening line would intuitively have to be a reading, thinking subject.[3] Yet this is the very same reading subject who has been urged by Cohen’s novel to politely “fuck off” if he or she has chosen to read the text on a screen. And though the text does not completely dismiss its readers who still prefer “paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth” (5), a slight change of preposition in its title points exactly to what the book fears most of all: Book as Numbers. The book-object speaks, but only to offer an ominous admonition: neither the book nor its readers ought to be reducible to computable numbers.

    The transduction of literary language into digital bits eliminates the need for a phenomenological, reading subject, and it suggests too that literature––or even just language in a general sense––and humans in particular are ontologically reducible to data objects that can be “read” and subsequently “interpreted” by computational algorithms. As Cohen’s novel collapses the distinction between author, narrator, character, and medium, its narrator observes that “the only record of my one life would be this record of another’s” (9). But in this instance, the record of one’s (or another’s) life is merely the history of how personal computational technologies have effaced the phenomenological subject. How have we arrived at the theoretically permissible premise that “People matter, but they don’t occupy a privileged subject position distinct from everything else in the world” (Huehls 20)? How might the “turn toward ontology” in theory/philosophy be viewed as contributing to our present condition?

    * **

    Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (2016) provides a brief, yet stylistically ironic and incisive interrogation into how recent iterations of post- or inhumanist theory have found a strange bedfellow in the rhetorical boosterism that accompanies the alleged affordances of digital technologies and big data. Despite the differences between these two seemingly unrelated discourses, they both share a particularly critical or diminished conception of the anthro- in “anthropocentrism” that borrows liberally from the postulates of the “ontological turn” in theory/philosophy (Rosenberg n.p.). While the parallels between these discourses are not made explicit in Jarzombek’s book, Digital Stockholm Syndrome asks us to consider how a shared commitment to an ontologically diminished view of “the human” that galvanizes both technological determinism’s anti-humanism and post- or inhumanist theory has found its common expression in recent philosophies of ontology. In other words, the problem Digital Stockholm Syndrome takes up is this: what kind of theory of ontology, Being, and to a lesser extent, subjectivity, appeals equally to contemporary philosophers and Silicon Valley tech-gurus? Jarzombek gestures toward such an inquiry early on: “What is this new ontology?” he asks, and “What were the historical situations that produced it? And how do we adjust to the realities of the new Self?” (x).

    A curious set of related philosophical commitments united by their efforts to “de-center” and occasionally even eject “anthropocentrism” from the critical conversation constitute some of the realities swirling around Jarzombek’s “new Self.”[4] Digital Stockholm Syndrome provocatively locates the conceptual legibility of these philosophical realities squarely within an explicitly algorithmic-computational historical milieu. By inviting such a comparison, Jarzombek’s book encourages us to contemplate how contemporary ontological thought might mediate our understanding of the historical and philosophical parallels that bind the tradition of in humanist philosophical thinking and the rhetoric of twenty-first century digital media.[5]

    In much the same way that Alexander Galloway has argued for a conceptual confluence that exceeds the contingencies of coincidence between “the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism” (347), Digital Stockholm Syndrome argues similarly that today’s world is “designed from the micro/molecular level to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological” (italics in original, x).[6] We now understand Being as the informatic/algorithmic byproduct of what ubiquitous computational technologies have gathered and subsequently fed back to us. Our personal histories––or simply the records of our data use (and its subsequent use of us)––comprise what Jarzombek calls our “ontic exhaust…or what data experts call our data exhaust…[which] is meticulously scrutinized, packaged, formatted, processed, sold, and resold to come back to us in the form of entertainment, social media, apps, health insurance, clickbait, data contracts, and the like” (x).

    The empty second-person pronoun is placed on equal ontological footing with, and perhaps even defined by, its credit score, medical records, 4G data usage, Facebook likes, and threefold of its Tweets. “The purpose of these ‘devices,’” Jarzombek writes, “is to produce, magnify, and expose our ontic exhaust” (25). We give our ontic exhaust away for free every time we log into Facebook because it, in return, feeds back to us the only sense of “self” we are able to identify as “me.”[7] If “who we are cannot be traced from the human side of the equation, much less than the analytic side.‘I’ am untraceable” (31), then why do techno-determinists and contemporary oracles of ontology operate otherwise? What accounts for their shared commitment to formalizing ontology? Why must the Self be tracked and accounted for like a map or a ledger?

    As this “new Self,” which Jarzombek calls the “Being-Global” (2), travels around the world and checks its bank statement in Paris or tags a photo of a Facebook friend in Berlin while sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, it leaks ontic exhaust everywhere it goes. While the hoovering up of ontic exhaust by GPS and commercial satellites “make[s] us global,” it also inadvertently redefines Being as a question of “positioning/depositioning” (1). For Jarzombek, the question of today’s ontology is not so much a matter of asking “what exists?” but of asking “where is it and how can it be found?” Instead of the human who attempts to locate and understand Being, now Being finds us, but only as long as we allow ourselves to be located.

    Today’s ontological thinking, Jarzombek points out, is not really interested in asking questions about Being––it is too “anthropocentric.”[8] Ontology in the twenty-first century attempts to locate Being by gathering data, keeping track, tracking changes, taking inventory, making lists, listing litanies, crunching the numbers, and searching the database. “Can I search for it on Google?” is now the most important question for ontological thought in the twenty-first century.

    Ontological thinking––which today means ontological accounting, or finding ways to account for the ontologically actuarial––is today’s philosophical equivalent to a best practices for data management, except there is no difference between one’s data and one’s Self. Nonetheless, any ontological difference that might have once stubbornly separated you from data about you no longer applies. Digital Stockholm Syndrome identifies this shift with the formulation: “From ontology to trackology” (71).[9] The philosophical shift that has allowed data about the Self to become the ontological equivalent to the Self emerges out of what Jarzombek calls an “animated ontology.”

    In this “animated ontology,” subject position and object position are indistinguishable…The entire system of humanity is microprocessed through the grid of sequestered empiricism” (31, 29). Jarzombek is careful to distinguish his “animated ontology” from the recently rebooted romanticisms which merely turn their objects into vibrant subjects. He notes that “the irony is that whereas the subject (the ‘I’) remains relatively stable in its ability to self-affirm (the lingering by-product of the psychologizing of the modern Self), objectivity (as in the social sciences) collapses into the illusions produced by the global cyclone of the informatic industry” (28).”[10] By devising tricky new ways to flatten ontology (all of which are made via po-faced linguistic fiat), “the human and its (dis/re-)embodied computational signifiers are on equal footing”(32). I do not define my data, but my data define me.

    ***

    Digital Stockholm Syndrome asserts that what exists in today’s ontological systems––systems both philosophical and computational––is what can be tracked and stored as data. Jarzombek sums up our situation with another pithy formulation: “algorithmic modeling + global positioning + human scaling +computational speed=data geopolitics” (12). While the universalization of tracking technologies defines the “global” in Jarzombek’s Being-Global, it also provides us with another way to understand the humanities’ enthusiasm for GIS and other digital mapping platforms as institutional-disciplinary expressions of a “bio-chemo-techno-spiritual-corporate environment that feeds the Human its sense-of-Self” (5).

    Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    One wonders if the incessant cultural and political reminders regarding the humanities’ waning relevance have moved humanists to reconsider the very basic intellectual terms of their broad disciplinary pursuits. How come it is humanities scholars who are in some cases most visibly leading the charge to overturn many decades of humanist thought? Has the internalization of this depleted conception of the human reshaped the basic premises of humanities scholarship, Digital Stockholm Syndrome wonders? What would it even mean to pursue a “humanities” purged of “the human?” And is it fair to wonder if this impoverished image of humanity has trickled down into the formation of new (sub)disciplines?”[11]

    In a late chapter titled “Onto-Paranoia,” Jarzombek finally arrives at a working definition of Digital Stockholm Syndrome: data visualization. For Jarzombek, data-visualization “has been devised by the architects of the digital world” to ease the existential torture—or “onto-torture”—that is produced by Security Threats (59). Security threats are threatening because they remind us that “security is there to obscure the fact that whole purpose is to produce insecurity” (59). When a system fails, or when a problem occurs, we need to be conscious of the fact that the system has not really failed; “it means that the system is working” (61).[12] The Social, the Other, the Not-Me—these are all variations of the same security threat, which is just another way of defining “indeterminacy” (66). So if everything is working the way it should, we rarely consider the full implications of indeterminacy—both technical and philosophical—because to do so might make us paranoid, or worse: we would have to recognize ourselves as (in)human subjects.

    Data-visualizations, however, provide a soothing salve which we can (self-)apply in order to ease the pain of our “onto-torture.” Visualizing data and creating maps of our data use provide us with a useful and also pleasurable tool with which we locate ourselves in the era of “post-ontology.”[13] “We experiment with and develop data visualization and collection tools that allow us to highlight urban phenomena. Our methods borrow from the traditions of science and design by using spatial analytics to expose patterns and communicating those results, through design, to new audiences,” we are told by one data-visualization project (http://civicdatadesignlab.org/).  As we affirm our existence every time we travel around the globe and self-map our location, we silently make our geo-data available for those who care to sift through it and turn it into art or profit.

    “It is a paradox that our self-aestheticizing performance as subjects…feeds into our ever more precise (self-)identification as knowable and predictable (in)human-digital objects,” Jarzombek writes. Yet we ought not to spend too much time contemplating the historical and philosophical complexities that have helped create this paradoxical situation. Perhaps it is best we do not reach the conclusion that mapping the Self as an object on digital platforms increases the creeping unease that arises from the realization that we are mappable, hackable, predictable, digital objects––that our data are us. We could, instead, celebrate how our data (which we are and which is us) is helping to change the world. “’Big data’ will not change the world unless it is collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit,” the same data visualization project announces on its website’s homepage.

    While it is true that I may be a little paranoid, I have finally rested easy after having read Digital Stockholm Syndrome because I now know that my data/I are going to good use.[14] Like me, maybe you find comfort in knowing that your existence is nothing more than a few pixels in someone else’s data visualization.

    _____

    Michael Miller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rice University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in symplokē and the Journal of Film and Video.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] I am reminded of a similar argument advanced by Tung-Hui Hu in his A Prehistory of the Cloud (2016). Encapsulating Flusser’s spirit of healthy skepticism toward technical apparatuses, the situation that both Flusser and Hu fear is one in which “the technology has produced the means of its own interpretation” (xixx).

    [2] It is not my aim to wade explicitly into discussions regarding “object-oriented ontology” or other related philosophical developments. For the purposes of this essay, however, Andrew Cole’s critique of OOO as a “new occasionalism” will be useful. “’New occasionalism,’” Cole writes, “is the idea that when we speak of things, we put them into contact with one another and ourselves” (112). In other words, the speaking of objects makes them objectively real, though this is only possible when everything is considered to be an object. The question, though, is not about what is or is not an object, but is rather what it means to be. For related arguments regarding the relation between OOO/speculative realism/new materialism and mysticism, see Sheldon (2016), Altieri (2016), Wolfendale (2014), O’Gorman (2013), and to a lesser extent Colebrook (2013).

    [3] For the full set of references here, see Bennett (2010), Hayles (2014 and 2016), and Hansen (2015).

    [4] While I cede that no thinker of “post-humanism” worth her philosophical salt would admit the possibility or even desirability of purging the sins of “correlationism” from critical thought all together, I cannot help but view such occasional posturing with a skeptical eye. For example, I find convincing Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s recent essay “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Negotiations, Collisions,” in which she compares the drive in contemporary critical theory to displace “the human” from humanistic inquiry to the impossible and equally incomprehensible task of overcoming the “‘astro’-centrism of astronomy or the biocentrism of biology” (359).

    [5] In “Modest Proposal for the Inhuman,” Julian Murphet identifies four interrelated strands of post- or inhumanist thought that combine a kind of metaphysical speculation with a full-blown demolition of traditional ontology’s conceptual foundations. They are: “(1) cosmic nihilism, (2) molecular bio-plasticity, (3) technical accelerationism, and (4) animality. These sometimes overlapping trends are severally engaged in the mortification of humankind’s stubborn pretensions to mastery over the domain of the intelligible and the knowable in an era of sentient machines, routine genetic modification, looming ecological disaster, and irrefutable evidence that we share 99 percent of our biological information with chimpanzees” (653).

    [6] The full quotation from Galloway’s essay reads: “Why, within the current renaissance of research in continental philosophy, is there a coincidence between the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism? [….] Why, in short, is there a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business?” (347). Digital Stockholm Syndrome begins by accepting Galloway’s provocations as descriptive instead of speculative. We do not necessarily wonder in 2017 if “there is a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business”; we now wonder instead how such a confluence came to be.

    [7] Wendy Hui Kyun Chun makes a similar point in her 2016 monograph Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. She writes, “If users now ‘curate’ their lives, it is because their bodies have become archives” (x-xi). While there is not ample space here to discuss the  full theoretical implications of her book, Chun’s discussion of the inherently gendered dimension to confession, self-curation as self-exposition, and online privacy as something that only the unexposed deserve (hence the need for preemptive confession and self-exposition on the internet) in digital/social media networks is tremendously relevant to Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, as both texts consider the Self as a set of mutable and “marketable/governable/hackable categories” (Jarzombek 26) that are collected without our knowledge and subsequently fed back to the data/media user in the form of its own packaged and unique identity. For recent similar variations of this argument, see Simanowski (2017) and McNeill (2012).

    I also think Chun’s book offers a helpful tool for thinking through recent confessional memoirs or instances of “auto-theory” (fictionalized or not) like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010), Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013), and perhaps to a lesser degree Tao Lin’s Richard Yates (2010), Taipei (2013), Natasha Stagg’s Surveys, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). The extent to which these texts’ varied formal-aesthetic techniques can be said to be motivated by political aims is very much up for debate, but nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that many of them revel in the reveal. That is to say, via confession or self-exposition, many of these novels enact the allegedly performative subversion of political power by documenting their protagonists’ and/or narrators’ certain social/political acts of transgression. Chun notes, however, that this strategy of self-revealing performs “resistance as a form of showing off and scandalizing, which thrives off moral outrage. This resistance also mimics power by out-spying, monitoring, watching, and bringing to light, that is, doxing” (151). The term “autotheory,” which was has been applied to Nelson’s The Argonauts in particular, takes on a very different meaning in this context. “Autotheory” can be considered as a theory of the self, or a self-theorization, or perhaps even the idea that personal experience is itself a kind of theory might apply here, too. I wonder, though, how its meaning would change if the prefix “auto” was understood within a media-theoretical framework not as “self” but as “automation.” “Autotheory” becomes, then, an automatization of theory or theoretical thinking, but also a theoretical automatization; or more to the point: what if “autotheory” describes instead a theorization of the Self or experience wherein “the self” is only legible as the product of automated computational-algorithmic processes?

    [8] Echoing the critiques of “correlationism” or “anthropocentrism” or what have you, Jarzombek declares that “The age of anthrocentrism is over” (32).

    [9] Whatever notion of (self)identity the Self might find to be most palatable today, Jarzombek argues, is inevitably mediated via global satellites. “The intermediaries are the satellites hovering above the planet. They are what make us global–what make me global” (1), and as such, they represent the “civilianization” of military technologies (4). What I am trying to suggest is that the concepts and categories of self-identity we work with today are derived from the informatic feedback we receive from long-standing military technologies.

    [10] Here Jarzombek seems to be suggesting that the “object” in the “objectivity” of “the social sciences” has been carelessly conflated with the “object” in “object-oriented” philosophy. The prioritization of all things “objective” in both philosophy and science has inadvertently produced this semantic and conceptual slippage. Data objects about the Self exist, and thus by existing, they determine what is objective about the Self. In this new formulation, what is objective about the Self or subject, in other words, is what can be verified as information about the self. In Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (2014), Ronald Day argues that these global tracking technologies supplant traditional ontology’s “ideas or concepts of our human manner of being” and have in the process “subsume[d] and subvert[ed] the former roles of personal judgment and critique in personal and social beings and politics” (1). While such technologies might be said to obliterate “traditional” notions of subjectivity, judgment, and critique, Day demonstrates how this simultaneous feeding-forward and feeding back of data-about-the-Self represents the return of autoaffection, though in his formulation self-presence is defined as information or data-about-the-self whose authenticity is produced when it is fact-checked against a biographical database (3)—self-presence is a presencing of data-about-the-Self. This is all to say that the Self’s informational “aboutness”–its representation in and as data–comes to stand in for the Self’s identity, which can only be comprehended as “authentic” in its limited metaphysical capacity as a general informatic or documented “aboutness.”

    [11] Flusser is again instructive on this point, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way­­. Drawing attention to the strange unnatural plurality in the term “humanities,” he writes, “The American term humanities appropriately describes the essence of these disciplines. It underscores that the human being is an unnatural animal” (2002, 3). The plurality of “humanities,” as opposed to the singular “humanity,” constitutes for Flusser a disciplinary admission that not only the category of “the human” is unnatural, but that the study of such an unnatural thing is itself unnatural, as well. I think it is also worth pointing out that in the context of Flusser’s observation, we might begin to situate the rise of “the supplemental humanities” as an attempt to redefine the value of a humanities education. The spatial humanities, the energy humanities, medical humanities, the digital humanities, etc.—it is not difficult to see how these disciplinary off-shoots consider themselves as supplements to whatever it is they think “the humanities” are up to; regardless, their institutional injection into traditional humanistic discourse will undoubtedly improve both(sub)disciplines, with the tacit acknowledgment being that the latter has just a little more to gain from the former in terms of skills, technical know-how, and data management. Many thanks to Aaron Jaffe for bringing this point to my attention.

    [12] In his essay “Algorithmic Catastrophe—The Revenge of Contingency,” Yuk Hui notes that “the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle” (125). Drawing from the work of Bernard Stiegler, Hui shows how the pharmacological dimension of “technics, which aims to overcome contingency, also generates accidents” (127). And so “as the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle…it no longer plays the role it did with the laws of nature” (132). Simply put, by placing algorithmic catastrophe on par with a failure of reason qua the operations of mathematics, Hui demonstrates how “algorithms are open to contingency” only insofar as “contingency is equivalent to a causality, which can be logically and technically deduced” (136). To take Jarzombek’s example of the failing computer or what have you, while the blue screen of death might be understood to represent the faithful execution of its programmed commands, we should also keep in mind that the obverse of Jarzombek’s scenario would force us to come to grips with how the philosophical implications of the “shit happens” logic that underpins contingency-as-(absent) causality “accompanies and normalizes speculative aesthetics” (139).

    [13] I am reminded here of one of the six theses from the manifesto “What would a floating sheep map?,” jointly written by the Floating Sheep Collective, which is a cohort of geography professors. The fifth thesis reads: “Map or be mapped. But not everything can (or should) be mapped.” The Floating Sheep Collective raises in this section crucially important questions regarding ownership of data with regard to marginalized communities. Because it is not always clear when to map and when not to map, they decide that “with mapping squarely at the center of power struggles, perhaps it’s better that not everything be mapped.” If mapping technologies operate as ontological radars–the Self’s data points help point the Self towards its own ontological location in and as data—then it is fair to say that such operations are only philosophically coherent when they are understood to be framed within the parameters outlined by recent iterations of ontological thinking and its concomitant theoretical deflation of the rich conceptual make-up that constitutes the “the human.” You can map the human’s data points, but only insofar as you buy into the idea that points of data map the human. See http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.

    [14] “Mind/paranoia: they are the same word!”(Jarzombek 71).

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Adler, Renata. Speedboat. New York Review of Books Press, 1976.
    • Altieri, Charles. “Are We Being Materialist Yet?” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016):241-57.
    • Calloway, Marie. what purpose did i serve in your life. Tyrant Books, 2013.
    • Chun, Wendy Hui Kyun. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. The MIT Press, 2016.
    • Cohen, Joshua. Book of Numbers. Random House, 2015.
    • Cole, Andrew. “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies.” minnesota review 80 (2013): 106-118.
    • Colebrook, Claire. “Hypo-Hyper-Hapto-Neuro-Mysticism.” Parrhesia 18 (2013).
    • Day, Ronald. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. The MIT Press, 2014.
    • Floating Sheep Collective. “What would a floating sheep map?” http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.
    • Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
    • –––. The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication. 1975. Metaflux, 2016.
    • –––. Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl. Translated by Erik Eisel. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
    • Galloway, Alexander R. “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” Critical Inquiry 39.2 (2013): 347-366.
    • Hansen, Mark B.N. Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Duke University Press, 2015.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014):199-220.
    • –––. “The Cognitive Nonconscious: Enlarging the Mind of the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 42 (Summer 2016): 783-808.
    • Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara. “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Collisions, Negotiations.” Common Knowledge  22.3 (2016):353-72.
    • Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? Picador, 2010.
    • Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. The MIT Press, 2016.
    • Huehls, Mitchum. After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age. Oxford University Press, 2016.
    • Hui, Yuk. “Algorithmic Catastrophe–The Revenge of Contingency.” Parrhesia 23(2015): 122-43.
    • Jarzombek, Mark. Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
    • Lin, Tao. Richard Yates. Melville House, 2010.
    • –––. Taipei. Vintage, 2013.
    • McNeill, Laurie. “There Is No ‘I’ in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82.
    • Murphet, Julian. “A Modest Proposal for the Inhuman.” Modernism/Modernity 23.3(2016): 651-70.
    • Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf P, 2015.
    • O’Gorman, Marcel. “Speculative Realism in Chains: A Love Story.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18.1 (2013): 31-43.
    • Rosenberg, Jordana. “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” Theory and Event 17.2 (2014):  n.p.
    • Sheldon, Rebekah. “Dark Correlationism: Mysticism, Magic, and the New Realisms.” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016): 137-53.
    • Simanowski, Roberto. “Instant Selves: Algorithmic Autobiographies on Social Network Sites.” New German Critique 44.1 (2017): 205-216.
    • Stagg, Natasha. Surveys. Semiotext(e), 2016.
    • Wolfendale, Peter. Object Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes. Urbanomic, 2014.
  • David Thomas – On No-Platforming

    David Thomas – On No-Platforming

    by David Thomas

    No-platforming has recently emerged as a vital tactical response to the growing mainstream presence of the self-styled alt-right. Described by proponents as a form of cordon sanitaire, and vilified by opponents as the work of coddled ideologues, no-platforming entails the struggle to prevent political opponents from accessing institutional means of amplifying their views. The tactic has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Former US President Barack Obama was himself so disturbed by the phenomenon that during the closing days of his tenure he was moved to remark:

    I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. …I gotta tell you I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view…Sometimes I realized maybe I’ve been too narrow-minded, maybe I didn’t take this into account, maybe I should see this person’s perspective. …That’s what college, in part, is all about…You shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say” … That’s not the way we learn either. (qtd. Kingkade 2017 [2015])

    Obama’s words here nicely crystalize one traditional understanding of the social utility of free speech. In classical liberal thought, free speech is positioned as the cornerstone of a utilitarian account of political and technological progress, one that views the combat of intellectually dexterous elites as the crucible of social progress. The free expression of informed elite opinion is imagined as an indispensable catalyst to modernity’s ever-accelerating development of new knowledge. The clash of unfettered intellects is said to serve as the engine of history.

    For John Stuart Mill, one of the first to formulate this particular approach to the virtues of free expression, the collision of contrary views was necessary to establish any truth. Mill explicitly derived his concept of the truth-producing “free market of ideas” from Adam Smith’s understanding of how markets work. In both cases, moderns were counselled to entrust themselves to the discretion of a judicious social order, one that was said to emerge spontaneously as rational individuals exerted their vying bids for self-expression and self-actualization. These laissez faire arguments insisted that an optimal ordering of ends and means would ultimately be produced out of the mass of autonomous individual initiatives, one that would have been impossible to orchestrate from the vantage point of any one individual or group. In both cases – free speech and free markets – it was said that if we committed to the lawful exercise of individual freedoms we could be sure that the invisible hand will take care of the rest, sorting the wheat from the chaff, sifting and organizing initiatives according to the outcomes that best befit the social whole, securing our steady collective progress toward the best of all possible worlds. No surprise, then, that so much worried commentary on the rise of the alt-right has cautioned us to abide by the established rules, insisting that exposure to the free speech collider chamber will wear the “rough edges” off the worst ideas, allowing their latent kernels of rational truth to be developed and revealed, whilst permitting what is noxious and unsupportable to be displayed and refuted.

    A key point, then, about no-platforming is that its practice cuts against the grain of this vision of history and against the theory of knowledge on which it is founded. For in contrast to proponents of Mill’s proceduralist epistemology, student practioners of no-platforming have appropriated to themselves the power to directly intervene in the knowledge factories where they live and work, “affirmatively sabotaging” (Spivak 2014) the alt-right’s strategic attempts to build out its political legitimacy. And it is this use of direct action, and the site-specific rejection of Mill’s model of rational debate that it has entailed, that has brought student activists to the attention of university administrators, state leaders, and law enforcement.

    We should not mistake the fact that these students have been made the object of ire precisely because of their performative unruliness, because of their lack of willingness to defer to the state’s authority to decide what constitutes acceptable speech. One thing often left unnoticed in celebrations of the freedoms afforded by liberal democracies is the role that the state plays in conditioning the specific kinds of autonomy that individuals are permitted to exercise. In other words, our autonomy to express opposition as we see fit is already much more intensively circumscribed than recent “free speech” advocates care to admit.

    Representations of no-platforming in the media bring us to the heart of the matter here. Time and again, in critical commentary on the practice, the figure of the wild mob resurfaces, often counter-posed to the disciplined, individuated dignity of the accomplished orator:

    [Person X] believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue. But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings. Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement. Given this set of assumptions, perhaps it is no surprise that the students behave like bullies even as they see themselves as victims. (Friedersdorf 2015)

    These remarks are exemplary of a certain elective affinity for a particular model citizen – a purportedly non-bullying parliamentarian agent or eloquent spokesperson who is able to establish an argument’s legitimacy with calm rationality. These lofty incarnations of “rational discourse” are routinely positioned as the preferred road to legitimate political influence. Although some concessions are made to the idea of “peaceful protest,” in the present climate even minimal appeals to the politics of collective resistance find themselves under administrative review (RT 2017). Meanwhile, champions of free speech quietly endorse specific kinds of expression. Some tones of voice, some placard messages, some placements of words and bodies are celebrated; others are reviled. In practice, the promotion of ostensibly “free” speech often just serves to idealize and define the parameters of acceptable public conduct.

    No-platforming pushes back against these regulatory mechanisms. In keeping with longstanding tactics of subaltern struggle, its practice demonstrates that politics can be waged through a diversity of means, showing that alongside the individual and discursive propagation of one’s political views, communities can also act as collective agents, using their bodies and their capacity for self-organization to thwart the rise of political entities that threaten their wellbeing and survival. Those conversant with the history of workers’ movements will of course recognize the salience of such tactics. For they lie at the heart of emancipatory class politics, in the core realization that in standing together in defiance of state violence and centralized authority, disenfranchised communities can find ways to intervene in the unfolding of their fates, as they draw together in the unsanctioned shaping and shielding of their worlds.

    It is telling that so much media reportage seems unable to identify with this history, greeting the renewed rise of collective student resistance with a combination of bafflement and recoil. The undercurrent of pearl-clutching disquiet that runs through such commentary might also be said to perform a subtle kind of rhetorical work, perhaps even priming readers to anticipate and accept the moment when police violence will be deployed to restore “order,” to break up the “mob,” and force individuals back onto the tracks that the state has ordained.

    Yet this is not to say there is nothing new about this new wave of free speech struggles. Instead, they supply further evidence that longstanding strategies of collective resistance are being displaced out of the factory systems – where we still tend to look from them – and into what Joshua Clover refers to, following Marx, as the sphere of circulation, into the marketplaces and the public squares where commodities and opinions circulate in search of valorization and validation. Disenfranchised communities are adjusting to the debilitating political legacies of deindustrialization. As waves of automation have rendered workers unable to express their resistance through the slowdown or sabotage of the means of production, the obstinacy of the strike has been stripped down to its core. And as collective resistance to the centralized administration of social conduct now plays out beyond the factory’s walls, it increasingly takes on the character of public confrontation with the state. Iterations of this phenomenon play out in flashpoints as remote and diverse as Berkeley, Ferguson, and Standing Rock. And as new confrontations fall harder on the heels of the old, they make a spectacle of the deteriorating condition of the social contract.

    If it seems odd to compare the actions of students at elite US universities and workers in the industrial factory systems of old, consider the extent to which students have themselves become increasingly subject to proletarianization and precarity – to indebtedness, to credit wages, and to job prospects that are at best uncertain. This transformation of the university system – from bastion of civil society and inculcator of elite modes of conduct, to frenetic producer of indebted precarious workers – helps to account for the apparent inversion of campus radicalism’s orientation to the institution of free speech.

    Longtime observers will recall that the same West Coast campuses that have been key flashpoints in this wave of free speech controversies were once among the most ardent champions of the institution. Strange, then, that in today’s context the heirs to Mario Savio’s calls to anti-racist civil disobedience seem more prone to obstruct than to promote free speech events. Asked about Savio’s likely response to this trend, social scientist and biographer Robert Cohen finds that “Savio would almost certainly have disagreed with the faculty and students who urged the administration to ban Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, and been heartened by the chancellor’s refusal to ban a speaker” (Cohen 2017). The alt-right has delighted in trolling student radicals over this apparent break with tradition:

    Milo Inc.’s first event will be a return to the town that erupted in riots when he was invited to speak earlier this year. In fact, Yiannopoulos said that he is planning a “week-long celebration of free speech” near U.C. Berkeley, where a speech by his fellow campus agitator, Ann Coulter, was recently canceled after threats of violence. It will culminate in his bestowing something called the Mario Savio Award for Free Speech. (The son of Savio, one of the leaders of Berkeley’s Free Speech movement during the mid-1960s, called the award “some kind of sick joke”.) (Nguyen 2017)

    Yet had Milo named his free speech prize after Savio’s would-be mentor John Searle, then the logic of current events might have appeared a little more legible. For as Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Beezer de Martelly have recently reminded us, in the period between 1965 and 1967 when the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was emerging as the home of more militant forms of student resistance, the US government commission Searle to research the movement. The resulting publication would eventually come to serve “as a manual for university administrators on how to most efficiently dismantle radical student protests” (Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly 2017). One of the keys to Searle’s method was the effort to “encouraged students to focus on their own … abstract rights to free speech,” a move that was to “shift campus momentum away from Black labor struggles and toward forming a coalition between conservatives and liberals on the shared topic of free speech rights” (Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly 2017). Summing up the legacies of this history from today’s vantage, Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly remark:

    In hindsight, it becomes clear that the “alt-right”‘s current use of the free speech framework as a cover for the spread of genocidal politics is actually a logical extension of the FSM — not, as some leftists would have it, a co-optation of its originally “radical” intentions. In addition to the increasingly violent “free speech rallies” organized in what “alt-right” members have dubbed “The Battle for Berkeley,” the use of free speech as a legitimating platform for white supremacist politics has begun to spread throughout the country. (Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly 2017)

    It is in relation to this institutional history that we might best interpret the alt-right’s use of free speech and the responses of the student left. For as Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly suggest, the alt-right’s key avatars such as Milo and Richard Spenser have now succeeded in building out the reach of Searle’s tactics. Their ambitions have extended beyond defusing social antagonisms and shoring up the prevailing status quo; indeed, in an eerie echo of Savio’s hopes for free speech, the alt-right now sees the institution as a site where dramatic social transformations can be triggered.

    But why then is the alt-right apt to see opportunities in this foundational liberal democratic institution, while the student left is proving more prone to sabotage its smooth functioning? It certainly appears that Searle’s efforts to decouple free speech discourse and anti-racist struggle have been successful. Yet to grasp the overall stakes of these struggles it can be helpful to pull back from the abstract debates that Searle proved so adept in promoting, to make a broader assessment of prevailing socio-economic and climatic conditions.

    For in mapping how the terrain has changed since the time of Salvo and Searle we might take account of the extent to which the universal summons to upward mobility, and the global promise of endless material and technological enfranchisement that defined the social experience of postwar modernization, have lately begun to ring rather hollow. Indeed as we close in on the third decade of the new millennium, there seems to be no end to the world system’s economic woes in sight, and no beginning to its substantive reckoning with problem of anthropogenic climate change.

    In response, people are changing the way they orient themselves toward the centrist state. In another instance of his welcome and ongoing leftward drift, Bruno Latour argues that global politics are now defined by the blowback of a catastrophically failed modernization project:

    The thing we share with these migrating peoples is that we are all deprived of land. We, the old Europeans, are deprived because there is no planet for globalization and we must now change the entire way we live; they, the future Europeans, are deprived because they have had to leave their old, devastated lands and will need to learn to change the entire way they live.

    This is the new universe. The only alternative is to pretend that nothing has changed, to withdraw behind a wall, and to continue to promote, with eyes wide open, the dream of the “American way of life,” all the while knowing that billions of human beings will never benefit from it. (Latour 2017)

    Apprehending the full ramifications of the failure of modernization will require us to undertake what the Club of Rome once referred to as a “Copernican revolution of the mind” (Club of Rome 1972: 196). And in many respects the alt-right has been quicker to begin this revolution than the technocratic guardians of the globalist order. In fact, it seems evident that the ethnonationalists look onto the same prospects as Latour, while proscribing precisely the opposite remedies. Meantime, guardians of the “center” remain all too content to repeat platitudinous echoes of Mills’ proceduralism, assuring us all that – evidence to the contrary – the market has the situation in invisible hand.

    This larger historical frame is key to understanding campus radicalism’s turn to no-platforming, which seems to register – on the level of praxis – that the far right has capitalized far more rapidly on emergent conditions that the center or the left. In understanding why this has occurred, it is worth considering the relationship between the goals of the FSM and the socioeconomic conditions that prevailed in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the movement was at its peak.

    For Savio and his anti-racist allies at the FSM, free speech afforded radicals both a platform from to which protest US imperialism with relative impunity, and an institutional lodestar by which to steer a course that veered away from the purges and paranoia of the Stalinist culture of command. It seemed that the institution itself served as a harbinger of a radicalized and “socialized” state, one that was capable of executing modernization initiatives that would benefit everyone.

    The postwar program of universal uplift then seemed apt to roll out over the entire planet, transforming the earth’s surface into a patchwork of independent modern nation states all locked into the same experience of ongoing social and technological enfranchisement. In such a context Savio and other contemporary advocates of free-speech saw the institution as a foreshadowing of the modern civil society into which all would eventually be welcomed as enfranchised bearers of rights. Student activism’s commitment to free speech thus typified the kind of statist radicalism that prevailed in the age of decolonization, a historical period when the postcolonial state seemed poised to socialize wealth, and when the prospect of postcolonial self-determination was apt to be all but synonymous with national modernization programs.

    Yet in contrast to this expansive and incorporative modernizing ethos, the alt-right savior state is instead being modeled around avowedly expulsive and exclusionary initiatives. This is the state reimagined as a gated community writ large, one braced – with its walls, border camps, and guards – to resist the incursion of “alien” others, all fleeing the catastrophic effects of a failed postwar modernization project. While siphoning off natural wealth to the benefit of the enwalled few, this project has unleashed the ravages of climate change and the impassive violence of the border on the exposed many. The alt-right response to this situation is surprisingly consonant with the Pentagon’s current assessment, wherein the US military is marketed as a SWAT team serving at the dispensation of an urban super elite:

    https://vimeo.com/187475823

    Given the lines along which military and official state policy now trends, it is probably a mistake to characterize far-right policy proposals as a wholescale departure from prevailing norms. Indeed, it seems quite evident that – as Latour remarks – the “enlightened elite” have known for some time that the advent of climate change has given the lie to the longstanding promises of the postwar reconstruction:

    The enlightened elites soon started to pile up evidence suggesting that this state of affairs wasn’t going to last. But even once elites understood that the warning was accurate, they did not deduce from this undeniable truth that they would have to pay dearly.

    Instead they drew two conclusions, both of which have now led to the election of a lord of misrule to the White House: Yes, this catastrophe needs to be paid for at a high price, but it’s the others who will pay, not us; we will continue to deny this undeniable truth. (Latour 2017)

    From such vantages it can be hard to determine to what extent centrist policies actually diverge from those of the alt-right. For while they doggedly police the exercise of free expression, representatives of centrist orthodoxy often seem markedly less concerned with securing vulnerable peoples against exposure to the worst effects of climate change and de-development. In fact, it seems all too evident that the centrist establishment will more readily defend people’s right to describe the catastrophe in language of their own choosing than work to provide them with viable escape routes and life lines.

    Contemporary free speech struggles are ultimately conflicts over policy rather than ironic contests over theories of truth. For it has been in the guise of free speech advocacy that the alt-right has made the bulk of its initial gains, promoting its genocidal vision through the disguise of ironic positional play, a “do it for the lolz” mode of summons that marshals the troops with a nod and wink. It seems that in extending the logic of Searle’s work at Berkley, the alt-right has thus managed to “hack” the institution of free speech, navigating it with such a deft touch that defenses of the institution are becoming increasingly synonymous with the mainstream legitimation of their political project.

    Is it then so surprising that factions of the radical left are returning full circle to the foundationally anti-statist modes of collective resistance that defined radical politics at its inception? Here, Walter Benjamin’s concept of “the emergency brake” suggests itself, though we can adjust the metaphor a little to better grasp current conditions (Benjamin 2003: 401). For it is almost as if the student left has responded to a sense that the wheel of history had taken a sickening lurch rightward, by shaking free of paralysis, by grabbing hold of the spokes and pushing back, greeting the overawing complexities of our geopolitical moment with local acts of defiance. It is in this defiant spirit that we might approach the free speech debates, arguing not for the implementation of draconian censorship mechanisms (if there must be a state, better that it is at least nominally committed to freedom of expression than not) but against docile submission to a violent social order—an order with which adherence to the doctrine of free speech is perfectly compatible. The central lesson that we might thus draw from the activities of Berkley’s unruly students is that the time for compliant faith in the wisdom of our “guardians” is behind us (Stengers 2015: 30).

    David Thomas is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholar in the Department of English at Carleton University. His thesis explores narrative culture in post-workerist Britain, and unfolds around the twin foci of class and climate change.

    Bibliography

    Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938 – 1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Clover, Joshua. 2016. Riot. Strike. Riot. London: Verso.

    Cohen, Robert. 2017. “What Might Mario Savio Have Said About the Milo Protest at Berkeley?” Nation, February 7. www.thenation.com/article/what-might-mario-savio-have-said-about-the-milo-protest-at-berkeley/

    Friedersdorf, Conor. 2015. “The New Intolerance of Student Activism.” Atlantic, November 9. www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/

    Hofmann-Kuroda, Lisa, and Beezer de Martelly. 2017. “The Home of Free Speech™: A Critical Perspective on UC Berkeley’s Coalition With the Far-Right.” Truth Out, May 17. www.truth-out.org/news/item/40608-the-home-of-free-speech-a-critical-perspective-on-uc-berkeley-s-coalition-with-the-far-right

    Kingkade, Tyler. 2015. “Obama Thinks Students Should Stop Stifling Debate On Campus.” Huffington Post, September 9. [Updated February 2, 2017]: www.huffingtonpost .com/entry/obama-college-political-correctness_us_55f8431ee4b00e2cd5e80198

    Latour, Bruno. 2017.  “The New Climate.” Harpers, May. harpers.org/archive/2017/05/the-new-climate/

    “Right to Protest?: GOP State Lawmakers Push Back Against Public Dissent.” 2017. RT, February 4. www.rt.com/usa/376268-republicans-seek-outlaw-protest/

    Nguyen, Tina. 2017. “Milo Yiannopoulos Is Starting a New, Ugly, For-Profit Troll Circus.” Vanity Fair, April 28. www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/milo-yiannopoulos-new-media-venture

    Spivak, Gayatri. 2014. “Herald Exclusive: In conversation with Gayatri Spivak,” by Nazish Brohiup. Dawn, Dec 23. www.dawn.com/news/1152482

    Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press. openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Stengers 2015 In Catastrophic-Times.pdf

  • Eugene Thacker – Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: A Review of “The Weird and the Eerie” by Mark Fisher

    Eugene Thacker – Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: A Review of “The Weird and the Eerie” by Mark Fisher

    by Eugene Thacker

    Review of Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater, 2017)

    For a long time, the horror genre was not generally considered worthy of critical, let alone philosophical, reflection; it was the stuff of cheap thrills, pulp magazines, B-movies. Much of this has changed in the ensuing years, as a robust and diverse critical literature has emerged around the horror genre, much of which not only considers the horror genre as a reflection of society, but as an autonomous platform for posing far-reaching questions concerning the fate of the humans species, the species that has named itself. These are sentiments that have preoccupied recent writing on the horror genre, much of which borrows from developments in contemporary philosophy, and is attempting to expand the confines of horror beyond the usual fixation on gore, violence, and shock tactics. This hasn’t always been the case. Even today, writing on genre horror often tends towards “list” books (of the type The Top 100 Italian Horror Films From 1977, Volume IV), or books that are basically print-on-demand databases (The Encyclopedia of Asian Ghost Stories from the Beginning of Time, and Before That). These are rounded out by a plethora of introductory textbooks and surveys, usually aimed at film studies undergraduates (e.g. Key Terms in Cultural Studies: Splatterpunk), and opaque academic monographs of Lacanian psychoanalytic semiotic readings of horror film that themselves seem to be part of some kind of academic cult.

    While such books can be informative and helpful, reading them can be akin to the slightly woozy feeling one has after having gone down a combined Google/Wikipedia/YouTube rabbit-hole, emerging with bewildered eyes and terabytes of regurgitated data. However, recent writing on the horror genre takes a different approach, eschewing the poles of either the popular or the academic for a perhaps yet-to-be-named third space. One book that takes up this challenge is Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, published this year. (Fisher is likely known to readers through his blog K-punk, which had been running for almost two decades before his untimely death.) What Fisher’s study shares with other like-minded books is an interest in expanding our understanding of the horror genre beyond the genre itself, and he does this by focusing on one of the deepest threads in the horror genre: the limits of human beings living in a human-centric world.

    As a case study, consider the opening passage from H.P. Lovecraft’s well-known short story “The Call of Cthulhu”:

    The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

    With this – arguably the most foreboding opener ever written for a story – Lovecraft sets the stage for what is really an extended meditation on human finitude. Originally published in the February 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, “Cthulhu” ostensibly brings together the perspectives of deep time and deep space to reflect on the comparatively myopic and humble non-event that is human civilization – at least that’s how Lovecraft himself puts it. It is well known that Lovecraft took cues from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen – influences that he himself notes. Equally well known is Lovecraft’s notorious xenophobia (often expressed in his correspondence as outright racism). Yet in spite of – or because of – this, Lovecraft remained unambiguous in his own approach to the horror genre. In his numerous essays, notes, and letters, he notes, with an unflinching misanthropy, how a horror story should evoke “an atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces,” forces that point towards a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” The “monsters” in such tales were far from the usual line-up of vampires, werewolves, zombies, and demons – all of which, for Lovecraft and his colleagues, end up serving as mere solipsistic reflections of human-centric hopes and fears. They are often described in abstract, elemental, almost primordial ways: “the colour out of space,” “the shadow out of time,” or simply “the lurking fear.”

    The story of “Cthulhu” itself  – which details the discovery of a cult devoted to an ancient, malefic, Elder Deity vaguely resembling a oozing winged cephalopod emerging from a hidden tomb of impossibly-shaped Cyclopean black geometry foretelling not only the end of the world but the deeper futility of the entirety of human civilization – the story itself has since obtained a cult status among horror authors, critics, and fans alike. In the early 20th century, like-minded tales of cosmic misanthropy were written by Lovecraft contemporaries Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Bloch, as well as by later authors of the weird tale such as Ramsey Campbell, Claitlín Kiernan, China Miéville, and Junji Ito. Like a slow-moving, tentacular meme, the Cthulhu “mythos” has reached far beyond the confines of literary horror. Film adaptations abound (the term “straight-to-video” no longer applies, but is still apt here). Video games, which nearly always end in despair and/or death. Role-playing games, complete with impossibly-shaped 10-sided black dice. A visit to any Comic Con will yield a dizzying array of comics, ‘zines, artwork, posters, bumper stickers, hoodies, Miskatonic University course catalogs, editions of the dreaded Necronomicon, and even Cthulhu plushies for the Lovecraft toddler. An industry is born. Today, distant cousins of Cthulhu can be seen in the Academy Award-nominated Arrival (2016), and the distinctly un-nominated burlesque that is Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). Cthulhu, it seems, has gone mainstream.

    Amid all the fondness for such abysmal and tentacular monstrosities, it is easy to overlook the themes that run through Lovecraft’s short tale, themes at once disturbing and compelling, and which mark the tradition often referred to as “supernatural horror” or “cosmic horror.” When Lovecraft characters happen upon strange creatures like Cthulhu (or worse, the Shoggoths), they don’t have the typical reactions. “Fear” is too simple a term to describe it; it encompasses everything without saying anything. But neither are they overcome by the more literary affects of “terror” or “horror,” like the characters of an old gothic novel. They have neither the time nor the patience for the critical distance afforded by a psychoanalytic “uncanny,” or the literary structures of the “fantastic.” Confronted with Cthulhu, Lovecraft’s characters simply freeze. They become numb. They go dark. Frozen thought. They can’t wrap their heads around that is right before them. What they “feel” is exactly this “inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Forget the fear of death, I’ve just discovered a primordial, other-dimensional, slime-ridden necropolis of obsidian blasphemy that throws into question all human knowledge on this now-forsaken speck of cosmic dust we laughably call “our” planet.

    Yet, in all their pulpy, melodramatic, low-brow seriousness, the questions raised by Lovecraft and other writers in Weird Tales are also philosophical questions. They are questions that address the limits of human knowledge in a rapidly-changing world, a world that seems indifferent to the machinations of science or doctrinal exuberance of religion, impassive before the hubris of technological advance or the lures of political ideology – a cold “crawling chaos” lurking just beneath the fragile fabric of humanity. What the characters of such stories discover (aside from the usual train of madness, dread, and, well, death) is a kind of stumbling humbleness, the human brain discovering its own limit, enlightened only of its own hubris – the humility of thought.

    *

    This theme  – the limits of what can be known, the limits of what can be felt, the limits of what can be done – is central to Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie. This is markedly different from other approaches to horror, which, however critical they may seem, often regard the horror genre as having an essentially therapeutic function, enabling us to purge, cope with, or work through our collective fears and anxieties. This therapeutic view of horror often becomes polarized between reactionary readings (a horror story that promotes the establishing or re-establishing of norms) or progressive readings (a horror story that promotes otherness, difference, and transgression of norms). And yet, in the final analysis, it is also hard to escape the sense that there is a certain kind of solipsism to the horror genre, that it is we human beings that remain at the center of it all, who have either constructed boundaries and bunkers and have once again staved off another threat to our collective identity, or who have devised clever ways of creating hybrids, fusions, and monstrous couplings with the other, thereby extending humanity’s long dreamed-of share of immortality.

    Whether reactionary or progressive, both responses to the horror genre involve a strategy in which the world in all its strangeness is transformed into a world made in our own image (anthropomorphism), or a world rendered useful for us as human beings (anthropocentrism). In spite of all the horrifying things that happen to the characters in horror stories, there is a sense in which the horror genre is ultimately a kind of humanism, a panegyric to the limitless potential of human knowledge, the immeasurable capacity for human feeling, the infinite promise of human sovereignty. This is, of course, not surprising, given the somber didactics of even the most extreme zombie apocalypses, vampiric mutations, or demonic plagues. Species self-interest is at stake. Humanity may be brought to the brink of extinction, only so that that same humanity may extend its mastery (self-mastery and mastery over its environment), and even obtain some form of ascendency over its own tenuous, existential status. Subtending the survivalist imperative of the horror genre and its pragmatic arsenal of mastering monsters of all kinds is another kind of mastery – a metaphysical mastery.

    But this is only one way of understanding the horror genre. The insight of books like Fisher’s is that the horror genre is also capable of chipping away at this species-specific sovereignty, taking aim at the twin pillars of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. Instead of being concerned with species self-interest and mastery, such horror stories tend more towards humility, hubris, and even, in its darkest moments, futility. It is a project that is doomed to failure, of course, and perhaps this why so many of the characters in the tales of Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, or Izumi Kyoka find themselves in worlds that are both untenable and unlivable. They end up with nothing but a bit of useless quasi-wisdom, scribbling away madly in a darkened forest room trying to make sense of it all not making any sense. Or they detach themselves from the humdrum human world of plans and projects, finding themselves inexorably pulled headlong into the ambivalent abyss of self-abnegation. Or worse – they simply continue to exist. What results is what we might call a “bleak humanism” – a horror story interested in humanity only to the extent that humanity is defined by its uncertainties, its finitude, its doubts – the humility of being human.

    Fisher’s terms are relatively clear. “What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange.” For Fisher, the strange is, quite simply, “a fascination for the outside […] that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.” But the weird and the eerie are quite different in how they apprehend the strange. As Fisher writes, “the weird is constituted by a presence – the presence of that which does not belong.” There is something exorbitant, out-of-place, and incongruous about the weird. It is the part that does not fit into the whole, or the part that disturbs the whole – threshold worlds populated by portals, gateways, time loops, and simulacra. Fundamental presumptions about self, other, knowledge, and reality will have to be rethought. “The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. There is something where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.” Here we encounter disembodied voices, lapses in memory, selves that are others, revelations of the alien within, and nefarious motives buried in the unconscious, inorganic world in which we are embedded.

    The weird and the eerie are not exclusive to the more esoteric regions of cosmic horror; they are also embedded in and bound up with quotidian notions of selfhood and the everyday relationship between self and world. The weird and eerie crop up in those furtive moments when we suspect we are not who we think we are, when we wonder if we do not act so much as we are acted upon. When everything we assumed to be a cause is really an effect. The weird and eerie are, ultimately, inseparable from the fabric of the social, cultural, and political landscape in which we are embedded. Fisher: “Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” There is a sense in which, for Fisher, the weird and the eerie constitute the poles of our ubiquitous “capitalist realism,” prompting us to re-examine not only presumptions concerning human agency, intentionality, and control, but also inviting a darker, more disturbing reflection on the strange agency of the inanimate and impersonal materiality of the world around us and within us.

    Fisher’s interest in Lovecraft stems from this shift in perspective from the human-centric to the nonhuman-oriented – not simply a psychology of “fear,” but the unnerving, impersonal calm of the weird and eerie. As scholars of the horror genre frequently note, Lovecraft’s tales are distinct from genre fantasy, in that they rarely posit an other world beyond, beneath, or parallel to this one. And yet, anomalous and strange events do take place within this world. Furthermore, they seem to take place according to some logic that remains utterly alien to the human world of moral codes, natural law, and cosmic order. If such anomalies could simply be dismissed as anomalies, as errors or aberrations in nature, then the natural order of the world would remain intact. But they cannot be so easily dismissed, and neither can they simply be incorporated into the existing order without undermining it entirely. Fisher nicely summarizes the dilemma: “a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least that it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to the make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.”

    *

    This dilemma (which literary critic Tzvetan Todorov called “the fantastic”) is presented in unique ways by authors of the weird tale and cosmic horror. Such authors refuse to identify the weird with the supernatural, and often refuse the distinction between the natural and supernatural entirely. They do so not via mythology or religion, but via science – or at least a peculiar take on science. In cosmic horror, the strange reality described by science is often far more unreal than any vampire, werewolf, or zombie. Fisher highlights this: “In many ways, a natural phenomenon such as a black hole is more weird than a vampire.” Why? Because the existence of the vampire, anomalous and transgressive as it may seem, actually reinforces the boundary between the natural order “in here” and a transcendent, supernatural order “out there.” “Compare this to a black hole,” Fisher continues, “the bizarre ways in which it bends space and time are completely outside our common experience, and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos – a cosmos which must therefore be much stranger than our ordinary experience can comprehend.” Science, for all its explanatory power, inadvertently reveals the hubris of the explanatory impulse of all human knowledge, not just science.

    Authors such as Lovecraft were well aware of this shift in their approach to the horror genre. An oft-cited passage from one of Lovecraft’s letters reads: “…all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.” To write the truly weird tale, Lovecraft notes, “one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.” So much for humanism, then. But Fisher is also right to note that Lovecraft’s tales are not simply horror tales. As Lovecraft himself repeatedly noted, the affects of fear, terror, and horror are merely consequences of human being confronting an impersonal and indifferent non-human world – what Lovecraft once called “indifferentism” (which, as he jibes, wonders “whether the cosmos gives a damn one way or the other”). There is an allure to the unhuman that is, at the same time, opaque and obscure. As Fisher writes, “it is not horror but fascination – albeit a fascination usually mixed with a certain trepidation – that is integral to Lovecraft’s rendition of the weird…the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention.”

    This reaches a pitch in Fisher’s writing on author Nigel Kneale and his series of Quatermass films and TV shows. The Quatermass and the Pit series, for instance, opens with the shocking discovery of an alien spaceship buried within the bowels of a London tube station (which station I will not say). The strange, quasi-insect remains inside the ship point to another, very different form of life than that of terrestrial life. But the science tells them that the alien spaceship is actually a relic from the distant past. It seems that not only geology and cosmology, but human history will have to be rethought. Gradually, the scientists learn that the alien relics are millions of years old, and in fact a distant, early progenitor of human beings. We, in turns, out, are they – or vice-versa. The Quatermass series not only demonstrates the efficacy of scientific inquiry, it puts forth a further proposition: that science works too well. “Kneale shows that an enquiry into the nature of what the world is like is also inevitably an unraveling of what human beings had taken themselves to be…if human beings fully belong to the so-called natural world, then on what grounds can a special case be made for them?” Reality turns out to be weirder and more eerie than any fantastical world or alien civilization. This is what Fisher calls “Radical Enlightenment,” a kind of physics that goes all the way, a materialism to the nth degree, even at the cost of disassembling the self-aware and self-privileging human brain that conceives of it. Reversals and inversions abound. What if humanity itself is not the cause of world history but the effect of material and physical laws that we can only dimly intuit?

    This theme of Radical Enlightenment runs through Fisher’s book. While he does discuss works of fiction or film one would expect in relation to the horror genre (Lovecraft, Kubrick’s The Shining, David Lynch’s recent films), Fisher also offers ruminations on contemporary works (such as Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin), as well as a number of evocative comparisons, such as a chapter on the weird effects of time loops in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film World on a Wire and Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out Of Joint. There are also several surprises, including a meditation on the strange “vanishing landscapes” in M.R. James’s ghost stories and Brian Eno’s 1982 ambient album On Land. Also welcome is Fisher’s attentiveness to under-appreciated works in the horror genre, including the disquieting short fiction of Daphne du Maurier. In the span of a few carefully-written pages, Fisher follows the twists and turns of his twin concepts one chapter at a time, one example at a time, until it is revealed exactly how enmeshed the weird and the eerie are in culture generally.

    *

    The Weird and the Eerie is an evocative and carefully-written short study in cultural aesthetics. Far from the familiar line-up of vampires, zombies, and demons, Fisher’s eclectic examples speak directly to one of the central themes of the horror genre: the limits of human knowledge, the metamorphic shapes of fear, and the blurriness of boundaries of all types. His simple conceptual distinction quickly gives way to reversals, permutations, and complications, ultimately refusing any notion of a monstrous or alien unhumanness  “out there”; with Fisher, the unhuman is more likely to reside within the human itself (or as Lovecraft might write it, “the unhuman is discovered to reside within the human itself”).

    Many books on the horror genre are concerned with providing answers, using varieties of taxonomy and psychology to provide a therapeutic application to “our” lives, helping us to cathartically purge collective anxieties and fears. For Fisher, the emphasis is more on questions, questions that target the vanity and presumptuousness of human culture, questions regarding human consciousness elevating itself above all else, questions concerning the presumed sovereignty of the species at whatever cost – perhaps questions it’s better not to pose, at the risk of undermining the entire endeavor to begin with.

    I should let the reader decide which approach makes more sense, given the weird and/or eerie “Waldo-moment” in which we currently find ourselves. But the weird and the eerie are scalable, pervading broad cultural structures as well as the minutiae of personal ruminations. I’ve known Fisher as a colleague for some time. About a week after I had agreed to do this review, I heard via email of Fisher’s suicide. Someone I knew was previously there, over there, doing what they do, they way we so often presume a person’s presence in between moments of punctuated interaction. And then, suddenly, they’re not there. About a week after this, The Weird and the Eerie arrived in the mail. It was hard not to pick up the book and feel it had a kind of aura around it, as if it was some kind of final statement, a last communiqué. I had it on the table in a short stack with other books, and I kept half-expecting it to also vanish, as if its very presence there were incongruous. I would occasionally pick up the book and flip through it, as if secretly hoping to discover pages that weren’t there before. But my copy was the same as all the others. Besides, isn’t that essentially what a book is, a last word written by someone either long dead or who will die in the future? Maybe all books are eerie in this way.

    Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust Of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011) and Cosmic Pessimism (Univocal, 2015).

  • Alexander R. Galloway — Brometheanism

    Alexander R. Galloway — Brometheanism

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    In recent months I’ve remained quiet about the speculative turn, mostly because I’m reticent to rekindle the “Internet war” that broke out a couple of years ago mostly on blogs but also in various published papers. And while I’ve taught accelerationism in my recent graduate seminars, I opted for radio silence when accelerationism first appeared on the scene through the Accelerationist Manifesto, followed later by the book Inventing the Future. Truth is I have mixed feelings about accelerationism. Part of me wants to send “comradely greetings” to a team of well-meaning fellow Marxists and leave it at that. Lord knows the left needs to stick together. Likewise there’s little I can add that people like Steven Shaviro and McKenzie Wark haven’t already written, and articulated much better than I could. But at the same time a number of difficulties remain that are increasingly hard to overlook. To begin I might simply echo Wark’s original assessment of the Accelerationist Manifesto: two cheers for accelerationism, but only two!

    What’s good about accelerationism? And what’s bad? I love the ambition and scope. Certainly the accelerationists’ willingness to challenge leftist orthodoxies is refreshing. I also like how the accelerationists demand that we take technology and science seriously. And I also agree that there are important tactical uses of accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic interventions (Eugene Thacker and I have referred to them as exploits). Still I see accelerationism essentially as a tactic mistaken for a strategy. At the same time this kind of accelerationism is precisely what dot-com entrepreneurs want to see from the left. Further, and ultimately most important, accelerationism is paternalistic and thus suffers from the problems of elitism and ultimately reactionary politics.

    Let me explain. I’ll talk first about Srnicek and Williams’ 2015 book Inventing the Future, and then address one of the central themes fueling the accelerationist juggernaut, Prometheanism. Well written, easy to read, and exhaustively footnoted, Inventing the Future is ostensibly a follow up to the Accelerationist Manifesto, although the themes of the two texts are different and they almost never mention accelerationism in the book. (Srnicek in particular is nothing if not shrewd and agile: present at the christening of #A, we also find him on the masthead of the speculative realist reader, and today nosing in on “platform studies.” Wherever he alights next will doubtless portend future significance.) The book is vaguely similar to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Declaration from 2012 in that it tries to assess the current condition of the left while also providing a set of specific steps to be taken for the future. And while the accelerationists have garnered significantly more attention of late, mostly because it feels so fresh and new, Hardt and Negri’s is the better book (and interestingly Srnicek and Williams never cite them).

    Inventing the Future

    Inventing the Future has essentially two themes. The first consists in a series of denunciations of what they call “folk politics” defined in terms of Occupy, the Zapatistas, Tiqqun, localism, and direct democracy, ostensibly in favor of a new “hegemony” of planetary social democracy (also known as Leninism). The second theme concerns an anti-work polemic focused on the universal basic income (UBI) and shortening the work week. Indeed even as these two authors collaborate and mix their thoughts, there seem to be two books mixed together into one. This produces an interesting irony: while the first half of the book unabashedly denigrates anarchism in favor of Leninism, the second half of the book focuses on that very theme (anti-work) that has defined anarchist theory since the split in the First International, if not since time immemorial.

    What’s so wrong with “folk politics”? There are a few ways to answer this question. First the accelerationists are clearly frustrated by the failures of the left, and rightly so, a left debilitated by “apathy, melancholy and defeat” (5). There’s a demographic explanation as well. This is the cri de coeur of a younger generation seeking to move beyond what are seen as the sclerotic failures of postmodern theory with all of its “culturalist” baggage (which too often is a codeword for punks, queers, women, and people of color — more on that in a moment).

    Folk politics includes “the fetishization of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds” (3); it privileges the “small-scale, the authentic, the traditional and the natural” (10). The following virtues help fill out the definition:

    immediacy…tactics…inherently fleeting…the past…the voluntarist and spontaneous…the small…withdrawal or exit…the everyday…feeling…the particular…the ethical…the suffering of the particular and the authenticity of the local (10-11)

    Wow, that’s a lot of good stuff to get rid of. Still, they don’t quit there, targeting horizontalism of various kinds. Radical democracy is in the crosshairs too. Anti-representational politics is out as well. All the “from below” movements, from the undercommons to the black bloc, anything that smacks of “anarchism, council communism, libertarian communism and autonomism” (26) — it’s all under indictment. This unceasing polemic culminates in the book’s most potent sentence, if not also its most ridiculous, where the authors dismiss all of the following movements in one fell swoop:

    Occupy, Spain’s 15M, student occupations, left communist insurrectionists like Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, most forms of horizontalism, the Zapatistas…localism…slow-food (11-12)

    That scoops up a lot of people. And the reader is left to quibble over whatever principal of decision might group all these disparate factions together. But the larger point is clear: for Srnicek and Williams folk politics emerged because of an outdated Left (i.e. the abject failures of social democracy and communism) (16-), and an outmaneuvered Left (i.e. the rampant successes of neoliberalism) (19-). Thus their goal is to update the left with a new ideology, and overhaul its infrastructure allowing it to modernize and scale up to the level of the planet.

    In the second half of the book, particularly in chapters 5 and 6, Srnicek and Williams elaborate their vision for anti-work and post-work. This hinges on the concept of full automation, and they provocatively assert that “the tendencies towards automation and the replacement of human labor should be enthusiastically accelerated” (109). Yet the details are scant. What kind of tech are we talking about? We get some vague references at the outset to “Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing” (1), then again later to “data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data)” and so on (110). But one thing this book does not provide is an examination of the technology of modern capitalism. (Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism is an improvement thematically but not substantively: he provides an analysis of political economy, but no tech audit.) Thus Inventing the Future has a sort of Wizard of Oz problem at its core. It’s not clear what clever devices are behind the curtain, we’re just supposed to assume that they will be sufficiently communistical if we all believe hard enough.

    At the same time the authors come across as rather tone deaf on the question of labor, bemoaning above all “the misery of not being exploited,” as if exploitation is some grand prize awarded to the subaltern. Further, they fail to address adequately the two key challenges of automation, both of which have been widely discussed in political and economic theory: first that automation eliminates jobs for people who very much want and need them, leading to surplus populations, unemployment, migration, and intrenched poverty; and second that automation transforms the organic composition of labor through deskilling and proletarianization, the offshoring of menial labor, and the introduction of technical and specialist labor required to design, build, operate, and repair those seemingly “automagical” machines. In other words, under automation some people work less, but everyone works differently. Automation reduces work for some, but changes (and in fact often increases) work for others. Marx’s analysis of machines in Capital is useful here, where he addresses all of these various tendencies, from the elimination of labor and the increase in labor, to the transformation of the organic composition of labor — the last point being the most significant. (And while machines might help lubricate and increase the productive forces — not a bad thing — it’s clear that machines are absolutely not revolutionary actors for Marx. Optimistic interpretations gleaned from the Grundrisse notwithstanding, Marx defines machines essentially as large batteries for value. I have yet to find any evidence that today’s machines are any different.)

    So the devil is in the details: what kind of technology are we talking about? But perhaps more importantly, if you get rid of the “folk,” aren’t you also getting rid of the people? Srnicek and Williams try to address this in chapter 8, although I’m more convinced by Hardt and Negri’s “multitude,” Harney and Moten’s “undercommons,” or even formulations like “the part of no part” or the “inoperative community” found scattered across a variety of other texts. By the end Srnicek and Williams out themselves as reticular pessimists: let’s not specify “the proper form of organization” (162), let’s just let it happen naturally in an “ecology of organizations” (163). The irony being that we’re back to square one, and these anti-folk evangelists are hippy ecologists after all. (The reference to function over form [169] appears as a weak afterthought to help rationalize their decision, but it re-introduces the problem of techno-fetishism, this time a fetishism of the function.)

    To summarize, accelerationism presents a rich spectrum of problems. The first stems from the notion that technology/automation will save us, replete with vague references to “the latest technological developments” unencumbered by any real details. Second is the question of capitalism itself. Despite the authors’ Marxist tendencies, it’s not at all clear that accelerationism is anti-capitalist. In fact accelerationism would be better described as a form of post-capitalism, what Zizek likes to mock as “capitalism with a friendly face.” What is post-capitalism exactly? More capitalism? A modified form of capitalism? For this reason it becomes difficult to untangle accelerationism from the most visionary dreams of the business elite. Isn’t this exactly what dot-com entrepreneurs are calling for? Isn’t the avant-garde of acceleration taking place right now in Silicon Valley? This leads to a third point: accelerationism is a tactic mistaken for a strategy. Certainly accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic methods are useful in a provisional, local, which is to say tactical way. But accelerationism is, in my view, naïve about how capitalism works at a strategic level. Capitalism wants nothing more than to accelerate. Adding to the acceleration will help capitalism not hinder it. Capitalism is this accelerating force, from primitive accumulation on up to today. (Accelerationists don’t dispute this; they just simply disagree on the moral status of capitalism.) Fourth and finally is the most important problem revealed by accelerationism, the problem of elitism and reactionary politics. Given unequal technological development, those who accelerate will necessarily do so on the backs of others who are forced to proletarianize. Thus accelerationists are faced with a kind of “internal colonialism” problem, meaning there must be a distinction made between those who accelerate and those who facilitate acceleration through their very bodies. We already know who suffers most under unequal technological acceleration, and it’s not young white male academics living in England. Thus their skepticism toward the “folk” is all too often a paternalistic skepticism toward the wants and needs of the generic population. Hence the need for accelerationists to talk glowingly about things like “engineering consent.” It’s hard to see where this actually leads. Or more to the point who leads: if not Leninists then who, technocrats? Philosopher kings?

    *

    Accelerationism gains much inspiration from the philosophy of Prometheanism. If accelerationism provides a theory of political economy, Prometheanism supplies a theory of the subject. Yet it’s not always clear what people mean by this term. In a recent lecture titled “Prometheanism and Rationalism” Peter Wolfendale defines Prometheanism in such general terms that it becomes a synonym for any number of things: history and historical change; being against fatalism and messianism; being against the aristocracy; being against Fukuyama; being for feminism; the UBI and post-capitalism; the Enlightenment and secularism; deductive logic; overcoming (perceived) natural limits; technology; “automation” (which as I’ve just indicated is the most problematic concept of them all). Even very modest and narrow definitions of Prometheanism — technology for humans to overcome natural limit — present their own problems and wind up largely deflating the sloganeering of it all. “Okay so both the hydrogen bomb and the contraceptive pill are equally Promethean? So then who adjudicates their potential uses?” And we’re left with Prometheanism as the latest YAM philosophy (Yet Another Morality).

    Still, Prometheanism has a particular vision for itself and it’s worth describing the high points. I can think of six specific qualities. (1) Prometheanism defines itself as posthuman or otherwise antihuman. (2) Prometheanism is an attempt to transcend the bounds of physical limitation. (3) Prometheanism promotes freedom, as in for instance the freedom to change the body through hormone therapy. (4) Prometheanism sees itself as politically progressive. (5) Prometheanism sees itself as being technologically savvy. (6) Prometheanism proposes to offer technical solutions to real problems.

    But is any of this true? Interestingly Bernard Stiegler provided an answer to some of these questions already in 1994, and it’s worth returning to his book from that year Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus to fill out a conversation that has, thus far, been mostly one-sided. Stiegler’s book is long and complicated, and touches on many different things including technology and the increased rationalization of life, by way of some of Stiegler’s key influences including Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Bertrand Gille. Let me focus however on the second part of the book, where Stiegler examines the two brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus.

    A myth about powers and qualities, the fable of Epimetheus and Prometheus is recounted by the sophist Protagoras starting at line 320c in Plato’s dialogue of that name. In Stiegler’s retelling of the story, we begin with Epimetheus, who, via a “principle of compensation” governed by notions of difference and equilibrium, hands out powers and qualities to all the animals of the Earth. For instance extra speed might be endowed to the gazelle, but only by way of balanced compensation given to another animal, say a boost in strength bestowed upon the lion. Seemingly diligent in his duties, Epimetheus nevertheless tires before the job is complete, shirking his duties before arriving at humankind, who is left relatively naked without a special power or quality of its own. To compensate humankind, Prometheus absconds with “the gift of skill in the arts and fire” — “τὴν ἔντεχνον σοφίαν σὺν πυρί” — captured from Athena and Hephaestus, respectively, conferring these two gifts to humanity (Plato, “Protagoras,” 321d).

    In this way humans are defined first not via technical supplement but through an elemental fault — this is Stiegler’s lingering poststructuralism — the fault of Epimetheus. Epimetheus forgets about us, leaving us until the end, and hence “Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing” (188). But it’s more than that: a fault followed by a theft, and hence a twin fault. Humanity is the “fruit of a double fault–an act of forgetting [by Epimetheus], then of theft [by Prometheus]” (188). Humans are thus a forgotten afterthought, remedied afterward by a lucky forethought.

    “Afterthought” and “forethought” — Stiegler means these terms quite literally. Who is Epimetheus? And who is Prometheus? Greek names often have etymological if not allegorical significance, as is the case here. Both names share the root “-metheus,” cognate with manthánō [μανθάνω], which means learning, study, or cultivation of knowledge. Hence a mathitís [μαθητής] is a learner or a student. (And in fact in a very literal sense “mathematics” simply refers to the things that one learns, not to arithmetic or geometry per se.) The two brothers are thus both varieties of learners, both varieties of thinkers. The key is which variety. The key is the Epi– and the Pro-.

    “Epi carries the character of the accidentally and artificial factuality of something happening, arriving, a primordial ‘passibility,’” Stiegler explains. “Epimetheia means heritage. Heritage is always epimathesis. Epimetheia would also mean then tradition-originating in a fault that is always already there and that is nothing but technicity” (206-207). Hence Epimetheus means something like “learning on the basis of,” “thinking after,” or, more simply, or “afterthought” or “hindsight.” This is why Epimetheus forgets, why he is at fault, why he acts foolishly, because these are all the things that generate hindsight.

    Prometheus on the other hand is “foresight” or “fore-thought.” If Epimetheus means “thinking and learning on the basis of,” Prometheus means something more like “thinking and learning in anticipation of.” In this way, Prometheus comes to stand in for cleverness (but also theft), ingenuity, and thus technics as a whole.

    But is that all? Is the lesson simply to restore Epimetheus to his position next to Prometheus? To remember the Epimethean omission along with the Promethean endowment? In fact the old Greek myth isn’t quite finished, and, after initially overlooking the ending, Stiegler eventually broaches the closing section on Hermes. For even after benefiting from its Promethean supplement, humanity remains incomplete. Specifically, the gods notice that Man has a tendency toward war and political strife. Thus Hermes is tasked to implant a kind of socio-political virtue, supplementing humanity with “the qualities of respect for others [αἰδώ] and a sense of justice [δίκη]” (Plato 322c). In other words, a second supplement is necessary, only this time a supplement not rooted in the identitarian logic of heterogeneous qualities. “Another tekhnē is required,” writes Stiegler, “a tekhnē that is no longer paradoxically…the privilege of specialists” (201). This point about specialists is key — all you Leninists take note — because on Zeus’s command Hermes delivers respect and justice generically and equally across all persons, not via the “principle of compensation” based on difference and equilibrium used previously by Epimetheus to divvy up the powers and qualities of the animals. Thus while some people may have a talent for the piano, and others might be gifted in some other way, justice and respect are bestowed equally to all.

    This is why politics is always a question of the “hermeneutic community,” that is, the ad hoc translation and interpretation of real political dynamics; it comes from Hermes (201). At the same time politics also means “the community of those who have no community” because there is no adjudication of heterogenous qualities, no truth or law stipulated in advance, except for the very “conditions” of the political (those “hermeneutic conditions,” namely αἰδώ and δίκη, respect and justice).

    To summarize, the Promethean story has three moments, not one, and all three ought to be given full voice:

    1. Default of origin (being forgotten about by Epimetheus/Hindsight)
    2. Gaining technicity (fire and skills from Prometheus/Foresight)
    3. Revealing the generic (“respect for others and a sense of justice” from Hermes)

    This strikes me as a much better way to think about Prometheanism overall, better than the narrow definition of “using technology to overcome natural limits.” Recognizing all three moments, Prometheanism (if we can still call it that) entails not just technological advancement, but also insufficiency and failure, along with a political consciousness rooted in generic humanity.

    And now would be a good time to pass the baton over to the Xenofeminists, who make much better use of accelerationism than its original authors do. The Xenofeminist manifesto provides a more holistic picture of what might simply be called a “universalism from below” — yes, that very folk politics that Srnicek and Williams seek to suppress — doing justice not only to Prometheus, but to Epimetheus and Hermes as well:

    Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects — the abolition of class, gender, and race — hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up — or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars — namely Eurocentric universalism — whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even — especially — when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’ campaign against trans women is proof enough of this). (0x0F)


    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

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  • Ben Parker — What Is A Theory of the Novel Good For?

    Ben Parker — What Is A Theory of the Novel Good For?

    by Ben Parker

    Review of Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel, translated from the Italian (2011) by Zakiya Hanafi, Harvard University Press, 2017.

    Because the novel is the most important product of modernity, any theory of the novel is also a theory of modernity. That modernity has been characterized in a variety of ways: as an unremitting catastrophe of Being—Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel or René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel; as the vulnerable legacy of humanist secularism—Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis; or epistemologically—Michel Foucault’s reading of Don Quixote as a crisis of signification. As Guido Mazzoni tells the story in his Theory of the Novel, modernity has been a long process of liberation from the implicit transcendence of collective cultural projects. We have now arrived at a moment where “the particular life represents the only horizon of sacredness that modern culture still recognizes.” Modernity is therefore the disruptive entropy of “unbelonging,” the triumph of “individualistic, anarchic, dispersive, centrifugal” forces over those of “collective transcendence.” By Mazzoni’s scorekeeping, the signal accomplishments of modernity are human rights, democracy, and relativism, but above all, “the concrete capacity to construct small spheres of autonomy.” The novel therefore marks “the entrance of democracy into literature,” because it is the vehicle par excellence of particularized private experience. Mazzoni prizes the novel for “its ability to make us see the world through the eyes and conscience of someone else, its ability to allow us to step into a possible life that is not ours.”

    Given this endpoint of absolute relativism—“Each person is an epicenter of absolute meaning”—Mazzoni has to construct his history of the novel retrospectively, as a gradual disburdening of the possibility of transcendence and collective horizons. He casts this ontological flattening in the light of an inner liberation of the novel form, although it could as easily be felt as a suffocating reduction. Mazzoni describes the first two centuries (1550-1750) of the novel’s history as an emancipation from the conceptual scaffolding of allegory and moral didacticism, on one hand, and from the strict delineations of classicist poetics (tragedy depicts a higher type of character, and comedy a lower) on the other. Because he was trained as a philologist, Mazzoni plunges the reader into a slough of terminological distinctions attending the birth of the novel: le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, romanice loqui, romanz, romance, novella, nouvelle, novela, novel. But his theory of genre rests upon a dubious metaphysics: rather than timeless Platonic forms, genres are “universals in re,” knots of emerging practices bound up with contemporary definitions and prescriptions. Instead of defining “the novel” retrospectively, which would mean fitting works like Tristam Shandy and The Golden Ass into the same Procrustean bed, Mazzoni sees the genre as the outcome of a complex fusion of heterogeneous conventions and literary corpuses. His approach is to “reconstruct the dialectic between the object and the words that enabled the object to be defined in the first place.” The drawback to this method is that the definition is never immanent to the novels themselves, but is derived from the belletristic scaffolding that is Mazzoni’s preferred archive. The scholarship on display—Mazzoni seems to have read every treatise and preface from the period—is unimpeachably exhaustive, even overwhelming. We learn that Don Quixote, for example, was not welcomed into the world as a novel but as a “comic romance.” But Mazzoni declines to pursue the question, what process of generic self-definition is Don Quixote itself engaged in? Nor does he see the retrospective genealogy of the novel as in large part an invention of the novel itself (as, for instance, the shelf of books in David Copperfield’s library). In any event, the upshot of this formative period is that the novel emerges as the “book of particular life,” a record of private persons, caught up in the “anarchy of the real,” rather than idealized or public figures made into abstract examples.

    Once the novel has broken free from allegory (whose political dimensions, overlooked by Mazzoni, have been detailed by Fredric Jameson), and we find ourselves in the nineteenth century, the next constraint to be discarded is melodrama. Melodrama gets painted as the bad outward form of psychology, which Mazzoni contrasts to the subtle analysis of interior life that culminates in James, Proust, and Woolf.  Thus melodrama turns out to be a convenient sorting mechanism for arriving at a set of all-too familiar preferences: Austen (but not Scott), Flaubert (but not Balzac), Eliot and Tolstoy (but not Dickens or Hugo). As with allegory, melodrama is classed as a transcendental and collective schema, averse to the finer gradations of “real life.” For melodrama, we are informed, belonged to a moment where “history had become a lived experience of the masses,” though “at a certain point this paradigm proved to be unrealistic.” It was no longer “plausible to think that people, subjects, or witnesses of an unprecedented transformation were involved in absolute conflicts.” What we have instead of large-scale history is the gradual extension of “our understanding of the interior life,” an ever-refined representational accuracy comparable to “the gains made in physics, astronomy, or anatomy.”

    By the time we reach the contemporary novel, the sphere of freedom that Mazzoni wants to find in the novel has been narrowed down to the horizon of sheer everydayness. We have exchanged the wild explorations of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Edward Waverley, Natty Bumppo, and Huckleberry Finn for the boredom of Emma Bovary. All we are left with is the bad infinity of “real life” in its banal givenness. Freedom is surreptitiously redefined, from the kind of “unbelonging” of the earlier mode of “lighting out for the territory,” to the unbelonging of grousing individual discontent. No surprise that the contemporary authors Mazzoni endorses are Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee (singling out Boyhood and Youth), Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles), and Jonathan Littell. He doesn’t provide a reading of any of these novels (although he does cite a negative review of Littell’s The Kindly Ones). Knausgaard’s novel is something like an empirical confirmation of Mazzoni’s thesis about the tendency of the novel towards absolutely private particularity, absent any transcendent justification. Mazzoni’s concluding observation—“Inside our small local worlds, everything at stake has an unquestionable value” —could just as easily have been written by Knausgaard as a summary of the exhausting strife of representability at the heart of his book.

    In outline, then, Mazzoni’s account recapitulates the problematic of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel—“the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical  life,” the pulverization of all transcendent projects—in order to render it unproblematic. What Lukács saw as “the dissonance special to the novel” was its capturing of the devastating ironies and grotesque realizations that the transcendent ideal is exposed to. For Mazzoni, however, such dissonance is simply “implausible,” a failure of perspective insufficiently immersed in the proliferating contingencies of “real life.” So, what for Lukács was the constitutive problematic of the novel—the hard-fought contest between the ideal and an inert (but ultimately victorious) reality—here turns out to be a detachable “extra” or a historical vestige. Mazzoni sees the struggle with the ideal as something that was gradually exorcised or shed during the novel’s development, as opposed to something essential to defining the genre. His argument then turns out to be another entry in the “end of grand narratives” narrative, or an instance of what Alain Badiou calls “democratic materialism”: we no longer believe in any Truths striving to be realized in the world, only in local particulars. With oracular resignation, Mazzoni announces that, starting with some generalized metaphysical eclipse in the nineteenth century, “Universal forces were no longer revealed in the experience of private persons.” One imagines him lecturing the great characters of fiction like a stern guidance counselor, for their stubborn lack of realism, in those moments of Lukácsian “dissonance” where they confront a churning abyss of unbearable meaning underlying an ongoing and inessential life: Don Quixote for attempting to revive chivalry by mounting his gaunt nag and donning a pasteboard visor; or Catherine Earnshaw for proclaiming, “I am Heathcliff!”; or Captain Ahab for hurling himself against the whale as striking at some “inscrutable malice” behind a mask; or Marlow for detecting, in the depths of the Congo, “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

    To be sure, Mazzoni’s claim that the novel has freed itself from the transcendental has the force of self-evidence, if one surveys contemporary fiction. Mazzoni’s reading of novels in English cuts off at 2002, but (in addition to Knausgaard) Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Rachel Cusk would all be pertinent here, as instances of flattened, quotidian perception, where the “microcosm” of private existence—voided of melodrama or narrative artifice—is elevated to “absolute importance.” Going further back, one could add other instances. John Updike, Frederick Exley, and Renata Adler come immediately to mind. Mazzoni doesn’t mention Norman Mailer, who is on quite another track, but whose “nonfiction novel” would be additional confirmation of the novel’s tendency to represent a reality divested of transcendent impulses. (At this point, however, one wonders whether it were not fictionality itself that represents the final burden of transcendence, whether Mazzoni’s sense of “the novel” is not just headed towards the documentary status of journalism, memoir, travel writing, etc.)

    On the other hand, some of the most acclaimed novels of recent years have resuscitated either melodrama (Hana Yanagihara’s A Little Life), or transcendental (religious) preoccupations (Marilynne Robinson’s work), or allegory (Yann Martel’s Life of Pi). To remark these works are also somewhat middlebrow and embarrassing, would introduce a dimension of aesthetic evaluation that Mazzoni never broaches. It’s worth noting, too, that Mazzoni’s own examples are not unproblematic. Although Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles does duty for Mazzoni, his more recent The Possibility of an Island and Submission don’t fit the pulverization-of-collective-transcendence thesis at all. Houellebecq emerges, instead, as an (unevenly satirical) utopian thinker, closer to Jonathan Swift in the Houyhnhnms section of Gulliver’s Travels than to Roth’s Zuckerman novels. Mazzoni also cites the autobiographical novels of J.M. Coetzee, but his latest novels, The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, whatever else they may be, are obvious violations of Mazzoni’s rule against allegory.

    The unbearable scene he cites from Buddenbrooks, when little Hanno draws two lines under the last entry in the family tree, muttering, “I thought… I thought… there wouldn’t be anything more,” is indeed a powerful image of finitude. But Mann then went on to write the highly allegorical The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. Dostoevsky is invoked in a number of contradictory ways—he is, on one hand, one of the first authors who is “still contemporary,” because of his techniques of characterization, but on the other hand, he presents a regrettable and lingering case of melodrama. What is never mentioned is that Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, from start to finish, is rent through with transcendental preoccupations. To take only the case of The Brothers Karamazov, what does one make of the beautiful moment in the final chapter, where the father of the slain child Ilyusha sees a flower fall on the snow, and rushes “to pick it up as though everything in the world depended on the loss of that flower”? This sense of absolute responsibility, of “everything in the world” depending on one’s posture towards salvation and loss, is the hard core of Dostoevsky’s meaning. If Mazzoni wants to insist that “we cannot go beyond” our immersion in factical being, that it is “the sole layer of existence that… distinguishes us from nothing,” then he will have to lose The Brothers Karamazov as a forward-looking work.

    I wrote above that the novel is the most important product of modernity. I forgot to add that modernity is in large part the product of the novel. The novel is one of the “workshops where ideals are manufactured,” to take an image from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. For instance, the continuous and rigorous thinking of responsibility throughout the novels of the Victorian period (paradigmatically, Great Expectations, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Lord Jim) constitutes as central a development of our ethical life as the subsequent Freudian theorization of same. The self-representation of the nineteenth-century social imaginary is largely created through the ways novels develop of “giving an account of oneself,” in Judith Butler’s phrase. The ultimate trouble with Theory of the Novel is that Mazzoni oscillates between seeing the novel as a co-creator of modernity, whereby “an essential aspect of the Western form of life takes shape and becomes an object of knowledge only through mimesis and fiction,” and seeing the novel (or cultural production as a whole) as validating (or falling into line with) larger systemic results, e.g. “the disintegrative force implicit in modern individualism,” or “the relativistic deflation of collective values.” We don’t know, finally, whether the Western “crisis of transcendence”—what for Lukács was an ongoing schism constitutive of the novel form—is simply a fait accompli restricting literary possibility, or whether one might hold the history of the novel itself accountable for this disintegration. Nor does Mazzoni see the novel as a possible reflection upon these outcomes, a perspective-taking that would refuse the enforcement of deflationary relativism.

    But might not the greatest novels be precisely such refusals? To return again to The Brothers Karamazov, we find there (in the remembrances of Father Zosima) a forestalling of Mazzoni’s conclusions, in almost identical language: “For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing people away from himself… He is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people or in mankind.” For Dostoevsky, at least, the novel is not a story of emancipation from transcendence. If the novel has nevertheless brought about this anomie and purgation of values, the novel goes on only in a perpetual fight against what it hath wrought.

    Ben Parker is assistant professor of English at Brown University. His current research is on recognition scenes in the nineteenth-century novel. He tweets @exyoungperson.

  • Zachary Loeb — Who Moderates the Moderators? On the Facebook Files

    Zachary Loeb — Who Moderates the Moderators? On the Facebook Files

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    Speculative fiction is littered with fantastical tales warning of the dangers that arise when things get, to put it amusingly, too big. A researcher loses control of their experiment! A giant lizard menaces a city! Massive computer networks decide to wipe out humanity! A horrifying blob metastasizes as it incorporates all that it touches into its gelatinous self!

    Such stories generally contain at least a faint hint of the absurd. Nevertheless, silly stories can still contain important lessons, and some of the morals that one can pull from such tales are: that big things keep getting bigger, that big things can be very dangerous, and that sometimes things that get very big very fast wind up doing a fair amount of damage as what appears to be controlled growth is revealed to actually be far from managed. It may not necessarily always be a case of too big, as in size, but speculative fiction features no shortage of tragic characters who accidentally unleash some form of horror upon an unsuspecting populace because things were too big for that sorry individual to control. The mad scientist has a sad corollary in the figure of the earnest scientist who wails “I meant well” while watching their creation slip free from their grasp.

    Granted, if you want to see such a tale of the dangers of things getting too big and the desperate attempts to maintain some sort of control you don’t need to go looking for speculative fiction.

    You can just look at Facebook.

    With its publication of The Facebook Files, The Guardian has pried back the smiling façade of Zuckerberg’s monster to reveal a creature that an overwhelmed staff is desperately trying to contain with less than clear insight into how best to keep things under control. Parsing through a host of presentations and guidelines that are given to Facebook’s mysterious legion of content moderators, The Facebook Files provides insight into how the company determines what is and is not permitted on the website. It’s a tale that is littered with details about the desperate attempt to screen things that are being uploaded at a furious rate, with moderators often only having a matter of seconds in which they can make a decision as to whether or not something is permitted. It is a set of leaks that are definitely worth considering, as they provide an exposé of the guidelines Facebook moderators use when considering whether things truly qualify as revenge porn, child abuse, animal abuse, self-harm, unacceptable violence, and more. At the very least, the Facebook Files are yet another reminder of the continuing validity of Erich Fromm’s wise observation:

    What we use is not ours simply because we use it. (Fromm 2001, 225)

    In considering the Facebook Files it is worthwhile to recognize that the moderators are special figures in this story – they are not really the villains. The people working as actual Facebook moderators are likely not the same people who truly developed these guidelines. In truth, they likely weren’t even consulted. Furthermore, the moderators are almost certainly not the high-profile Facebook executives espousing techno-utopian ideologies in front of packed auditoriums. To put it plainly, Mark Zuckerberg is not checking to see if the thousands of photos being uploaded every second fit within the guidelines. In other words, having a measure of sympathy for the Facebook moderators who spend their days judging a mountain of (often disturbing) content is not the same thing as having any sympathy for Facebook (the company) or for its figureheads. Furthermore, Facebook has already automated a fair amount of the moderating process, and it is more than likely that Facebook would love to be able to ditch all of its human moderators in favor of an algorithm. Given the rate at which it expects them to work it seems that Facebook already thinks of its moderators as being little more than cogs in its vast apparatus.

    That last part helps point to one of the reasons why the Facebook Files are so interesting – because they provide a very revealing glimpse of the type of morality that a machine might be programmed to follow. The Facebook Files – indeed the very idea of Facebook moderators – is a massive hammer that smashes to bits the idea that technological systems are somehow neutral, for it puts into clear relief the ways in which people are involved in shaping the moral guidelines to which the technological system adheres. The case of what is and is not allowed on Facebook is a story playing out in real time of a company (staffed by real live humans) trying to structure the morality of a technological space. Even once all of this moderating is turned over to an algorithm, these Files will serve as a reminder that the system is acting in accordance with a set of values and views that were programmed into it by people. And this whole tale of Facebook’s attempts to moderate sensitive/disturbing content points to the fact that morality can often be quite tricky. And the truth of the matter, as many a trained ethicist will attest, is that moral matters are often rather complex – which is a challenge for Facebook as algorithms tend to do better with “yes” and “no” than they do with matters that devolve into a lot of complex philosophical argumentation.

    Thus, while a blanket “zero nudity” policy might be crude, prudish, and simplistic – it still represents a fairly easy way to separate allowed content from forbidden content. Similarly, a “zero violence” policy runs the risk of hiding the consequences of violence, masking the gruesome realities of war, and covering up a lot of important history – but it makes it easy to say “no videos of killings or self-harm are allowed at all.” Likewise, a strong “absolutely no threats of any sort policy” would make it so that “someone shoot [specific political figure” and “let’s beat up people with fedoras” would both be banned. By trying to parse these things Facebook has placed its moderators in tricky territory – and the guidelines it provides them with are not necessarily the clearest. Had Facebook maintained a strict “black and white” version of what’s permitted and not permitted it could have avoided the swamp through which it is now trudging with mixed results. Again, it is fair to have some measure of sympathy for the moderators here – they did not set the rules, but they will certainly be blamed, shamed, and likely fired for any failures to adhere to the letter of Facebook’s confusing law.

    Part of the problem that Facebook has to contend with is clearly the matter of free speech. There are certainly some who will cry foul at any attempt by Facebook to moderate content – crying out that such things are censorship. While still others will scoff at the idea of free speech as applied to Facebook seeing as it is a corporate platform and therefore all speech that takes place on the site already exists in a controlled space. A person may live in a country where they have a government protected right to free speech – but Facebook has no such obligation to its users. There is nothing preventing Facebook from radically changing its policies about what is permissible. If Facebook decided tomorrow that no content related to, for example, cookies was to be permitted, it could make and enforce that decision. And the company could make that decision regarding things much less absurd than cookies – if Facebook wanted to ban any content related to a given protest movement it would be within its rights to do so (which is not to say that would be good, but to say that it would be possible). In short, if you use Facebook you use it in accordance with its rules, the company does not particularly care what you think. And if you run afoul of one of its moderators you may well find your account suspended – you can cry “free speech” but Facebook will retort with “you agreed to our terms of use, Facebook is a private online space.” Here, though, a person may try to fire back at Facebook that in the 21st century, to a large extent, social media platforms like Facebook have become a sort of new public square.

    And, yet again, that is part of the reason why this is all so tricky.

    Facebook clearly wants to be the new “public square” – it wants to be the space where people debate politics, where candidates have forums, and where activists organize. Yet it wants all of these “public” affairs to take place within its own enclosed “private” space. There is no real democratic control of Facebook, the company may try to train its moderators to respect various local norms but the people from those localities don’t get to have a voice in determining what is and isn’t acceptable. Facebook is trying desperately to have it all ways – it wants to be the key space of the public sphere while simultaneously pushing back against any attempts to regulate it or subject it to increased public oversight. As lackluster and problematic as the guidelines revealed by the Facebook Files are, they still demonstrate that Facebook is trying (with mixed results) to regulate itself so that it can avoid being subject to further regulation. Thus, free speech is both a sword and a shield for Facebook – it allows the company to hide from the accusations that the site is filled with misogyny and xenophobia behind the shield of “free speech” even as the site can pull out its massive terms of service agreement (updated frequently) to slash users with the blade that on the social network there is no free speech only Facebook speech. The speech that Facebook is most concerned with is its own, and it will say and do what it needs to say and do, to protect itself from constraints.

    Yet, to bring it back to the points with which this piece began, many of the issues that the Facebook Files reveal have a lot to do with scale. Sorting out the nuance of an image or a video can take longer than the paltry few seconds most moderators are able to allot to each image/video. And it further seems that some of the judgments that Facebook is asking its moderators to make have less to do with morality or policies than they have to do with huge questions regarding how the moderator can possibly know if something is in accordance with the policies or not. How does a moderator not based in a community really know if something is up to a community’s standard? Facebook is hardly some niche site with a small user base and devoted cadre of moderators committed to keeping the peace – its moderators are overworked members of the cybertariat (a term borrowed from Ursula Huws), the community they serve is Facebook not those from whence the users hail. Furthermore, some of the more permissive policies – such as allowing images of animal abuse – couched under the premise that they may help to alert the authorities seems like more of an excuse than an admission of responsibility. Facebook has grown quite large, and it continues to grow. What it is experiencing is not so much a case of “growing pains” as it is a case of the pains that are inflicted on a society when something is allowed to grow out of control. Every week it seems that Facebook becomes more and more of a monopoly – but there seems to be little chance that it will be broken up (and it is unclear what that would mean or look like).

    Facebook is the science project of the researcher which is always about to get too big and slip out of control, and the Facebook Files reveal the company’s frantic attempt to keep the beast from throwing off its shackles altogether. And the danger there, from Facebook’s stance, is that – as in all works where something gets too big and gets out of control – the point when it loses control is the point where governments step in to try to restore order. What that would look like in this case is quite unclear, and while the point is not to romanticize regulation the Facebook Files help raise the question of who is currently doing the regulating and how are they doing it? That Facebook is having such a hard time moderating content on the site is actually a pretty convincing argument that when a site gets too big, the task of carefully moderating things becomes nearly impossible.

    To deny that Facebook has significant power and influence is to deny reality. While it’s true that Facebook can only set the policy for the fiefdoms it controls, it is worth recognizing that many people spend a heck of a lot of time ensconced within those fiefdoms. The Facebook Files are not exactly a shocking revelation showing a company that desperately needs some serious societal oversight – rather what is shocking about them is that they reveal that Facebook has been allowed to become so big and so powerful without any serious societal oversight. The Guardian’s article leading into the Facebook Files quotes Monika Bickert, ‎Facebook’s head of global policy management, as saying that Facebook is:

    “not a traditional technology company. It’s not a traditional media company. We build technology, and we feel responsible for how it’s used.”

    But a question lingers as to whether or not these policies are really reflective of responsibility in any meaningful sense. Facebook may not be a “traditional” company in many respects, but one area in which it remains quite hitched to tradition is in holding to a value system where what matters most is the preservation of the corporate brand. To put it slightly differently, there are few things more “traditional” than the monopolistic vision of total technological control reified in Facebook’s every move. In his classic work on the politics of technology, The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner emphasized the need to seriously consider the type of world that technological systems were helping to construct. As he put it:

    We should try to imagine and seek to build technical regimes compatible with freedom, social justice, and other key political ends…If it is clear that the social contract implicitly created by implementing a particular generic variety of technology is incompatible with the kind of society we deliberately choose—that is, if we are confronted with an inherently political technology of an unfriendly sort—then that kind of device or system ought to be excluded from society altogether. (Winner 1989, 55)

    The Facebook Files reveal the type of world that Facebook is working tirelessly to build. It is a world where Facebook is even larger and even more powerful – a world in which Facebook sets the rules and regulations. In which Facebook says “trust us” and people are expected to obediently go along.

    Yes, Facebook needs content moderators, but it also seems that it is long-past due for there to be people who moderate Facebook. And those people should not be cogs in the Facebook machine.

    _____

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

    Back to the essay
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    Works Cited

    • Fromm, Erich. 2001. The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge Classics.
    • Winner, Langdon. 1989. The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.