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.  

  • The Reticular Fallacy

    The Reticular Fallacy

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    We live in an age of heterogenous anarchism. Contingency is king. Fluidity and flux win over solidity and stasis. Becoming has replaced being. Rhizomes are better than trees. To be political today, one must laud horizontality. Anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism are the order of the day. Call it “vulgar ’68-ism.” The principles of social upheaval, so associated with the new social movements in and around 1968, have succeed in becoming the very bedrock of society at the new millennium.

    But there’s a flaw in this narrative, or at least a part of the story that strategically remains untold. The “reticular fallacy” can be broken down into two key assumptions. The first is an assumption about the nature of sovereignty and power. The second is an assumption about history and historical change. Consider them both in turn.

    (1) First, under the reticular fallacy, sovereignty and power are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, foundation, or rigid creeds of whatever kind (viz. dogma, be it sacred or secular). Thus the sovereign is the one who is centralized, who stands at the top of a vertical order of command, who rests on an essentialist ideology in order to retain command, who asserts, dogmatically, unchangeable facts about his own essence and the essence of nature. This is the model of kings and queens, but also egos and individuals. It is what Barthes means by author in his influential essay “Death of the Author,” or Foucault in his “What is an Author?” This is the model of the Prince, so often invoked in political theory, or the Father invoked in psycho-analytic theory. In Derrida, the model appears as logos, that is, the special way or order of word, speech, and reason. Likewise, arkhe: a term that means both beginning and command. The arkhe is the thing that begins, and in so doing issues an order or command to guide whatever issues from such a beginning. Or as Rancière so succinctly put it in his Hatred of Democracy, the arkhe is both “commandment and commencement.” These are some of the many aspects of sovereignty and power as defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation.

    (2) The second assumption of the reticular fallacy is that, given the elimination of such dogmatic verticality, there will follow an elimination of sovereignty as such. In other words, if the aforementioned sovereign power should crumble or fall, for whatever reason, the very nature of command and organization will also vanish. Under this second assumption, the structure of sovereignty and the structure of organization become coterminous, superimposed in such a way that the shape of organization assumes the identical shape of sovereignty. Sovereign power is vertical, hence organization is vertical; sovereign power is centralized, hence organization is centralized; sovereign power is essentialist, hence organization, and so on. Here we see the claims of, let’s call it, “naïve” anarchism (the non-arkhe, or non foundation), which assumes that repressive force lies in the hands of the bosses, the rulers, or the hierarchy per se, and thus after the elimination of such hierarchy, life will revert so a more direct form of social interaction. (I say this not to smear anarchism in general, and will often wish to defend a form of anarcho-syndicalism.) At the same time, consider the case of bourgeois liberalism, which asserts the rule of law and constitutional right as a way to mitigate the excesses of both royal fiat and popular caprice.

    reticular connective tissue
    source: imgkid.com

    We name this the “reticular” fallacy because, during the late Twentieth Century and accelerating at the turn of the millennium with new media technologies, the chief agent driving the kind of historical change described in the above two assumptions was the network or rhizome, the structure of horizontal distribution described so well in Deleuze and Guattari. The change is evident in many different corners of society and culture. Consider mass media: the uni-directional broadcast media of the 1920s or ’30s gradually gave way to multi-directional distributed media of the 1990s. Or consider the mode of production, and the shift from a Fordist model rooted in massification, centralization, and standardization, to a post-Fordist model reliant more on horizontality, distribution, and heterogeneous customization. Consider even the changes in theories of the subject, shifting as they have from a more essentialist model of the integral ego, however fraught by the volatility of the unconscious, to an anti-essentialist model of the distributed subject, be it postmodernism’s “schizophrenic” subject or the kind of networked brain described by today’s most advanced medical researchers.

    Why is this a fallacy? What is wrong about the above scenario? The problem isn’t so much with the historical narrative. The problem lies in an unwillingness to derive an alternative form of sovereignty appropriate for the new rhizomatic societies. Opponents of the reticular fallacy claim, in other words, that horizontality, distributed networks, anti-essentialism, etc., have their own forms of organization and control, and indeed should be analyzed accordingly. In the past I’ve used the concept of “protocol” to describe such a scenario as it exists in digital media infrastructure. Others have used different concepts to describe it in different contexts. On the whole, though, opponents of the reticular fallacy have not effectively made their case, myself included. The notion that rhizomatic structures are corrosive of power and sovereignty is still the dominant narrative today, evident across both popular and academic discourses. From talk of the “Twitter revolution” during the Arab Spring, to the ideologies of “disruption” and “flexibility” common in corporate management speak, to the putative egalitarianism of blog-based journalism, to the growing popularity of the Deleuzian and Latourian schools in philosophy and theory: all of these reveal the contemporary assumption that networks are somehow different from sovereignty, organization, and control.

    To summarize, the reticular fallacy refers to the following argument: since power and organization are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation, the elimination of such things will prompt a general mollification if not elimination of power and organization as such. Such an argument is false because it doesn’t take into account the fact that power and organization may inhabit any number of structural forms. Centralized verticality is only one form of organization. The distributed network is simply a different form of organization, one with its own special brand of management and control.

    Consider the kind of methods and concepts still popular in critical theory today: contingency, heterogeneity, anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism, anarchism, chaos, plasticity, flux, fluidity, horizontality, flexibility. Such concepts are often praised and deployed in theories of the subject, analyses of society and culture, even descriptions of ontology and metaphysics. The reticular fallacy does not invalidate such concepts. But it does put them in question. We can not assume that such concepts are merely descriptive or neutrally empirical. Given the way in which horizontality, flexibility, and contingency are sewn into the mode of production, such “descriptive” claims are at best mirrors of the economic infrastructure and at worse ideologically suspect. At the same time, we can not simply assume that such concepts are, by nature, politically or ethically desirable in themselves. Rather, we ought to reverse the line of inquiry. The many qualities of rhizomatic systems should be understood not as the pure and innocent laws of a newer and more just society, but as the basic tendencies and conventional rules of protocological control.


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    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer 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 earlier 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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  • Teacher Wars and Teaching Machines

    Teacher Wars and Teaching Machines

    teacher warsa review of Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (Doubleday, 2014)
    by Audrey Watters
    ~

    Teaching is, according to the subtitle of education journalist Dana Goldstein’s new book, “America’s Most Embattled Profession.” “No other profession,” she argues, ”operates under this level of political scrutiny, not even those, like policing or social work, that are also tasked with public welfare and are paid for with public funds.”

    That political scrutiny is not new. Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars chronicles the history of teaching at (what has become) the K–12 level, from the early nineteenth century and “common schools” — that is, before before compulsory education and public school as we know it today — through the latest Obama Administration education policies. It’s an incredibly well-researched book that moves from the feminization of the teaching profession to the recent push for more data-driven teacher evaluation, observing how all along the way, teachers have been deemed ineffectual in some way or another — failing to fulfill whatever (political) goals the public education system has demanded be met, be those goals be economic, civic, or academic.

    As Goldstein describes it, public education is a labor issue; and it has been, it’s important to note, since well before the advent of teacher unions.

    The Teacher Wars and Teaching Machines

    To frame education this way — around teachers and by extension, around labor — has important implications for ed-tech. What happens if we examine the history of teaching alongside the history of teaching machines? As I’ve argued before, the history of public education in the US, particularly in the 20th century, is deeply intertwined with various education technologies – film, TV, radio, computers, the Internet – devices that are often promoted as improving access or as making an outmoded system more “modern.” But ed-tech is frequently touted too as “labor-saving” and as a corrective to teachers’ inadequacies and inefficiencies.

    It’s hardly surprising, in this light, that teachers have long looked with suspicion at new education technologies. With their profession constantly under attack, many teacher are worried no doubt that new tools are poised to replace them. Much is said to quiet these fears, with education reformers and technologists insisting again and again that replacing teachers with tech is not the intention.

    And yet the sentiment of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke probably does resonate with a lot of people, as a line from his 1980 Omni Magazine article on computer-assisted instruction is echoed by all sorts of pundits and politicians: “Any teacher who can be replaced by a machine should be.”

    Of course, you do find people like former Washington DC mayor Adrian Fenty – best known arguably via his school chancellor Michelle Rhee – who’ll come right out and say to a crowd of entrepreneurs and investors, “If we fire more teachers, we can use that money for more technology.”

    So it’s hard to ignore the role that technology increasingly plays in contemporary education (labor) policies – as Goldstein describes them, the weakening of teachers’ tenure protections alongside an expansion of standardized testing to measure “student learning,” all in the service finding and firing “bad teachers.” The growing data collection and analysis enabled by schools’ adoption of ed-tech feeds into the politics and practices of employee surveillance.

    Just as Goldstein discovered in the course of writing her book that the current “teacher wars” have a lengthy history, so too does ed-tech’s role in the fight.

    As Sidney Pressey, the man often credited with developing the first teaching machine, wrote in 1933 (from a period Goldstein links to “patriotic moral panics” and concerns about teachers’ political leanings),

    There must be an “industrial revolution” in education, in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education. Work in the schools of the school will be marvelously though simply organized, so as to adjust almost automatically to individual differences and the characteristics of the learning process. There will be many labor-saving schemes and devices, and even machines — not at all for the mechanizing of education but for the freeing of teacher and pupil from the educational drudgery and incompetence.

    Or as B. F. Skinner, the man most associated with the development of teaching machines, wrote in 1953 (one year before the landmark Brown v Board of Education),

    Will machines replace teachers? On the contrary, they are capital equipment to be used by teachers to save time and labor. In assigning certain mechanizable functions to machines, the teacher emerges in his proper role as an indispensable human being. He may teach more students than heretofore — this is probably inevitable if the world-wide demand for education is to be satisfied — but he will do so in fewer hours and with fewer burdensome chores.

    These quotations highlight the longstanding hopes and fears about teaching labor and teaching machines; they hint too at some of the ways in which the work of Pressey and Skinner and others coincides with what Goldstein’s book describes: the ongoing concerns about teachers’ politics and competencies.

    The Drudgery of School

    One of the things that’s striking about Skinner and Pressey’s remarks on teaching machines, I think, is that they recognize the “drudgery” of much of teachers’ work. But rather than fundamentally change school – rather than ask why so much of the job of teaching entails “burdensome chores” – education technology seems more likely to offload that drudgery to machines. (One of the best contemporary examples of this perhaps: automated essay grading.)

    This has powerful implications for students, who – let’s be honest – suffer through this drudgery as well.

    Goldstein’s book doesn’t really address students’ experiences. Her history of public education is focused on teacher labor more than on student learning. As a result, student labor is missing from her analysis. This isn’t a criticism of the book; and it’s not just Goldstein that does this. Student labor in the history of public education remains largely under-theorized and certainly underrepresented. Cue AFT president Al Shanker’s famous statement: “Listen, I don’t represent children. I represent the teachers.”

    But this question of student labor seems to be incredibly important to consider, particularly with the growing adoption of education technologies. Students’ labor – students’ test results, students’ content, students’ data – feeds the measurements used to reward or punish teachers. Students’ labor feeds the algorithms – algorithms that further this larger narrative about teacher inadequacies, sure, and that serve to financially benefit technology, testing, and textbook companies, the makers of today’s “teaching machines.”

    Teaching Machines and the Future of Collective Action

    The promise of teaching machines has long been to allow students to move “at their own pace” through the curriculum. “Personalized learning,” it’s often called today (although the phrase often refers only to “personalization” in terms of the pace, not in terms of the topics of inquiry). This means, supposedly, that instead of whole class instruction, the “work” of teaching changes: in the words of one education reformer, “with the software taking up chores like grading math quizzes and flagging bad grammar, teachers are freed to do what they do best: guide, engage, and inspire.”

    Again, it’s not clear how this changes the work of students.

    So what are the implications – not just pedagogically but politically – of students, their headphones on staring at their individual computer screens working alone through various exercises? Because let’s remember: teaching machines and all education technologies are ideological. What are the implications – not just pedagogically but politically – of these technologies’ emphasis on individualism, self-management, personal responsibility, and autonomy?

    What happens to discussion and debate, for example, in a classroom of teaching machines and “personalized learning”? What happens, in a world of schools catered to individual student achievement, to the community development that schools (at their best, at least) are also tasked to support?

    What happens to organizing? What happens to collective action? And by collectivity here, let’s be clear, I don’t mean simply “what happens to teachers’ unions”? If we think about The Teacher Wars and teaching machines side-by-side, we should recognize our analysis of (our actions surrounding) the labor issues of school need to go much deeper and more farther than that.

    _____

    Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology – the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. Her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED’s education technology blog MindShift, in the data section of O’Reilly Radar, on Inside Higher Ed, in The School Library Journal, in The Atlantic, on ReadWriteWeb, and Edutopia. She is the author of the recent book The Monsters of Education Technology (Smashwords, 2014) and working on a book called Teaching Machines. She maintains the widely-read Hack Education blog, on which an earlier version of this review first appeared.

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  • "Internet Freedom": Digital Empire?

    "Internet Freedom": Digital Empire?

    Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisisa review of Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis  (University of Illinois Press, 2014)
    by Richard Hill
    ~
    Disclosure: the author of this review is mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the reviewed book.

     

     

     

     

     

    Computers and telecommunications have revolutionized and disrupted all aspects of human activity, and even behavior. The impacts are broad and profound, with important consequences for governments, businesses, non-profit activities, and individuals. Networks of interconnected computer systems are driving many disruptive changes in business practices, information flows, and financial flows. Foremost amongst those networks is the Internet, much of which is global, or at least trans-national.

    According to some, the current governance arrangement for the Internet is nearly ideal. In particular, its global multi-stakeholder model of governance has resulted in a free and open Internet, which has enabled innovation and driven economic growth and well-being around the world. Others are of the view that things have not worked out that well. In particular, the Internet has resulted in mass surveillance by governments and by private companies, in monopolization, commodification and monetization of information and knowledge, in inequitable flows of finances between poor and rich countries, and in erosion of cultural diversity; further, those with central positions of influence have used it to consolidate power and to establish a new global regime of control and exploitation, under the guise of favoring liberalization, while in reality reinforcing the dominance and profitability of major corporations at the expense of the public interest, and the overarching position of certain national interests at the expense of global interests and well being.  [1]

    Dan Schiller’s book helps us to understand how rational and well-informed people can hold such diametrically opposing views. Schiller dissects the history of the growth of recent telecommunications networks and shows how they have significantly (indeed, dramatically) affected economic and political power relations around the world. And how, at the same time, US policies have consistently favored capital over labor, and have resulted in transfers of vast sums from developing countries to developed countries (in particular through interest on loans).

    2013 Berlin PRISM Demonstrations
    Participants wearing Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning masks at 2013 Berlin protests against NSA PRISM program (image source: Wikipedia)

    Schiller documents in some detail how US policies that ostensibly promote the free flow of information around the world, the right of all people to connect to the Internet, and free speech, are in reality policies that have, by design, furthered the geo-economic and geo-political goals of the US, including its military goals, its imperialist tendencies, and the interests of large private companies based (if not always headquartered, at least for tax purposes) in the US. For example, strict copyright protection is held to be consistent with the free flow of information, as is mass surveillance. Cookies and exploitation of users’ personal data by Internet companies are held to be consistent with privacy rights (indeed, as Schiller shows, the US essentially denies the existence of the right to personal privacy for anything related to the Internet). There should be no requirements that data be stored locally, lest it escape the jurisdiction of the US surveillance apparatus. And very high profits and dominant positions in key Internet markets do not spark anti-trust or competition law investigations, as they might in any other industry.

    As Schiller notes, great powers have historically used communication systems to further their economic and strategic interests, so why should the US not so use the Internet? Thus stated, the matter seems obvious. But the matter is rarely thus stated. On the contrary, the Internet is often touted as a generous gift to the world’s people, able to lift them out of poverty and oppression, and to bring them the benefits of democracy and (or) free markets. Schiller’s carefully researched analysis is thus an important contribution.

    Schiller provides context by tracing the origins of the current financial and economic crises, pointing out that it is paradoxical that growing investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and the supposed resultant productivity gains, did not prevent a major global economic crisis. Schiller explains how transnational corporations demanded liberalization of the terms on which they could use their private networks, and received then, resulting in profound changes in commodity chains, that is, the flow of production of goods and services. In particular, there has been an increase in transnational production, and this has reinforced the importance of transnational corporations. Further, ICTs have changed the nature of labor’s contribution to production, enabling many tasks to be shifted to unskilled workers (or even to consumers themselves: automatic teller machines (ATMs), for example, turn each of us into a bank clerk). However, the growth of the Internet did not transcend the regular economy: on the contrary, it was wrapped into the economy’s crisis tendencies and even exacerbated them.

    Schiller gives detailed accounts of these transformations in the automotive and financial industries, and in the military. The study of the effect of ICTs on the military is of particular interest considering that the Internet was originally developed as a military project, and that it is currently used by US intelligence agencies as a prime medium for the collection of information.

    Schiller then turns to telecommunications, explaining the very significant changes that took place in the USA starting in the late 1970s. Those changes resulted in a major restructuring of the dominant telecommunications playing field in the US and ultimately led to the growth of the Internet, a development which had world-wide effects. Schiller carefully describes the various US government actions that initiated and nurtured those changes, and that were instrumental in exporting similar changes to the rest of the world.

    Next, he analyzes how those changes affected and enabled the production of the networks themselves, the hardware used to build the networks and to use them (e.g. smartphones), and the software and applications that we all use today.

    Moving further up the value chain, Schiller explains how data-mining, coupled with advertising, fuels the growth of the dominant Internet companies, and how this data-mining is made possible only by denying data privacy, and how states use the very same techniques to implement mass surveillance.

    Having described the situation, Schiller proceeds to analyze it from economic and political perspectives. Given that the US was an early adopter of the Internet, it is not surprising that, because of economies of scale and network effects, US companies dominate the field (except in China, as Schiller explains in detail). Schiller describes how, given the influence of US companies on US politics, US policies, both domestic and foreign, are geared to allowing, or in fact favoring, ever-increasing concentration in key Internet markets, which is to the advantage of the US and its private companies–and despite the easy cant about decentralization and democratization.

    The book describes how the US views the Internet as an extraterritorial domain, subject to no authority except that of the US government and that of the dominant US companies. Each dictates its own law in specific spheres (for example, the US government has supervised, up to now, the management of Internet domain names and addresses; while US companies dictate unilateral terms and conditions to their users, terms and conditions that imply that users give up essentially all rights to their private data).

    Schiller describes how this state of affairs has become a foreign policy objective, with the US being willing to incur significant criticism and to pay a significant political price in order to maintain the status quo. That status quo is referred to as “the multi-stakeholder model”, in which private companies are essentially given veto power over government decisions (or at least over the decisions of any government other than the US government), a system that can be referred to as “corporatism”. Not only does the US staunchly defend that model for the Internet, it even tries to export it to other fields of human activity. And this despite, or perhaps because, that system allows companies to make profits when possible (in particular by exploiting state-built infrastructure or guarantees), and to transfer losses to states when necessary (as for example happened with the banking crisis).

    Schiller carefully documents how code words such as “freedom of access” and “freedom of speech” are used to justify and promote policies that in fact merely serve the interests of major US companies and, at the same time, the interests of the US surveillance apparatus, which morphed from a cottage industry into a major component of the military-industrial complex thanks to the Internet. He shows how the supposed open participation in key bodies (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force) is actually a screen to mask the fact that decisions are heavily influenced by insiders affiliated with US companies and/or the US government, and by agencies bound to the US as a state.

    As Schiller explains, this increasing dominance of US business and US political imperialism have not gone unchallenged, even if the challenges to date have mostly been rhetorical (again, except for China). Conflicts over Internet governance are related to rivalries between competing geo-political and geo-economic blocks, rivalries which will likely increase if economic growth continues to be weak. The rivalries are both between nations and within nations, and some are only emerging right now (for example, how to tax the digital economy, or the apparent emerging divergence of views between key US companies and the US government regarding mass surveillance).

    Indeed, the book explains how the challenges to US dominance have become more serious in the wake of the Snowden revelations, which have resulted in a significant loss of market share for some of the key US players, in particular with respect to cloud computing services. Those losses may have begun to drive the tip of a wedge between the so-far congruent goals of US companies and the US government

    In a nutshell, one can sum up what Schiller describes by paraphrasing Marx: “Capitalists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of government regulation.” But, as Schiller hints in his closing chapter, the story is still unfolding, and just as things did not work out as Marx thought they would, so things may not work out as the forces that currently dominate the Internet wish they will. So the slogan for the future might well be “Internet users of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of exploitation of your personal data.”

    This book, and its extensive references, will be a valuable reference work for all future research in this area. And surely there will be much future research, and many more historical analyses of what may well be some of the key turning points in the history of mankind: the transition from the industrial era to the information era and the disruptions induced by that transition.

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    Richard Hill, an independent consultant based in Geneva, Switzerland, 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). An earlier version of this review first appeared on Newsclick.

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    1. From item 11 of document WSIS+10/4/6 of the preparatory process for the WSIS+10 High Level Event, which provided “a special platform for high-ranking officials of WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) stakeholders, government, private sector, civil society and international organizations to express their views on the achievements, challenges and recommendations on the implementation” of various earlier internet governance initiatives backed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communications technologies, and other participants in the global internet governance sphere.

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  • Loas, Histoire et Esthetique de L'Art Populaire

    an essay by Anthony Bogues

    Bogues 1

  • Twin Offspring of Empire, Neoliberalism and Neotraditionalism: Thoughts on Susan Buck-Morss, “Democracy: An Unfinished Project” (excerpts)

    Democracy: An Unfinished Project

    a response by Arif Dirlik
    ~
    Susan Buck-Morss’ essay, “Democracy: An Unfinished Project,”1 provides occasion for reflecting on a challenge that faces contemporary radical criticism in North America and Europe: how to reconcile the universalist goals that are the legacies of Euromodernity to radical thinking with the demands of cultural voices emanating from newly-empowered societies that make their own claims on modernity, especially when contradictions between the two seem irreconcilable? Buck-Morss’ discussion navigates through questions thrown up by this dilemma with finesse, engaging critiques of Euromodernity without relinquishing its promises, which demand recognition even by those who would reject it. The title would have reflected the content of the essay more fully had it been elongated to: “Democracy: An Unfinished Project: A Critique of Davut Ahmutoglu’s Project of Islamic Modernity.” Ahmet Davutoglu, Minister of Foreign Affairs when the article was written, just recently has been elevated to the post of Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey. He is a politician with academic credentials. Author of studies on Islamic politics, international strategy and modernity, he displays a strong philosophical bent in his writings which is important for understanding his policies as well….He believes that “ontological differences” between “Islam” and “the West” call for an “alternative modernity” based on Islamic principles. Like the AKP(Justice and Development Party) and others in the Islamic movement, he seeks to roll back the secularist policies instituted by the Republic after 1923, and to restore to Turkey the glory and power of the Ottoman Empire….

    Buck-Morss offers telling critiques of these claims ….Given the venue (a conference in Istanbul) where the article was first presented as a paper, it may be understandable that the author would go about some of her arguments in a roundabout way, skirting issues that might be too venturesome into sensitive territory of national sentiment. While Buck-Morss offers a political reading of claims to an Islamic modernity, what is missing from the discussion is the actual practice of politics. In her addendum she takes note of the Gezi protests of June 2013 that intervened between the initial presentation and the final publication of the paper. She apparently did not think these events and their outcomes to be sufficiently important to introduce them into a more directly political reading of the claims made for Islamic modernity by the likes of Davutoglu who, as a leading member and brain-trust of his party, had no qualms about the suppression of that broad-based democratic movement, instigated by government disregard for public sentiment in its promotion of neo-liberal economic agenda….

    Buck-Morss is primarily interested in Davutoglu’s “reliance on certain Western methodologies, specifically twentieth-century German phenomenology.” This may unduly credit with philosophical intent a political operator whose “political analysis,” according to Turkish scholar Behlul Ozkan, “remains on the level of prophecy rather than prognosis,” and whose “pseudoscientific” ideas are “based on inspiration related to historical destiny rather than rational thought.” Ozkan writes that “Davutoglu’s writings reveal his central concern to be not values but power politics.” The most visible imprint of Western sources on his thinking is geopolitical.

    The discussion only indirectly hints at the alliance between neoliberal global capitalism and claims to unchanging religious or more broadly “cultural” identities that characterizes the ideology of the Islamic leadership in Turkey—as of all the societies that have found new economic and political opportunities within the context of global capitalism and the seeming decline in Euro/American hegemony, most importantly, the People’s Republic of China…. In those societies descended from empires that for long ruled large parts of the world earning them the title of “civilizations,” newfound power and influence have triggered what may best be described as nostalgia for future reproduction of past glories…. Ethical values claimed for various civilizations may serve as a cover for but barely disguise the privatization of public resources, creation of new class divisions, the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, and the sacrifice of public interest and rights to the interests of ruling elites in the name of development that is characteristic of global capitalism in general….The point here is not whether these cultural traditions deserve respect, or have anything to contribute to global futures. The point is rather that what they have to contribute is to be judged not by the texts they claim for their origins or abstract claims about civilizations detached from history, but by the historical outcomes of activity conducted in their name. And the outlook presently is not all that promising.

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    notes:
    1. boundary 2, 41.2 (Summer 2014): 71-98. In-text references are from this text.
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    Read the original essay here.

    Summer 2014

    Summer 2014

  • Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism by Stefan Jonsson

    Reichstag

    a review by Peter Gengler
    ~
    The failure of interwar Central Europe’s democracies remains fertile ground for scholars in the 21st century. In particular, the Weimar Republic’s promises and failures, its vibrant intellectual and artistic communities, and its ultimate collapse in 1933 continue to fascinate and haunt academics and lay audiences alike. Weimar Germany remains the object of intense interest given the barbarity that followed its demise, yet it also serves as a compelling warning about the fragility of democracy.

    Stefan Jonsson’s Crowds and Democracy examines the tumultuous years between 1918 and 1933 in an original and bold manner, contributing fresh insights to what could otherwise prove a hackneyed subject. In particular, the study’s creative approach and analysis of “the masses” contributes to the literature on Germany’s and Austria’s interwar politics and culture, and more generally raises provocative questions about the challenges of participatory politics, democratic representation, and the individual’s relationship to these processes. Indeed, as Jonsson points out, Europe’s austerity programs and the public outrage, manifested in the recent resurgence of nationalist right-wing parties and fascist movements in the European Union, demand a renewed focus on interwar social movements.

    Stefan Jonsson’s background, training, and research interests suit him well for the type of multidisciplinary investigation that he attempts here. He received his Ph.D. in literature from Duke University, and currently is a professor of ethnic studies at Linköping University in Sweden. The subject of Crowds and Democracy continues Jonsson’s previous work, in which he charted the European understanding of the masses from 1789 to 1989. 1 The monograph under review explores 1920s Austrian and German mass psychology, crowd theory, and the idea of “the masses” not simply as intriguing phenomena, but rather as problems in their own right caused and produced by mass mobilization, the social sciences and arts, and the ambivalences of democracy. Given the author’s expertise and familiarity with different disciplines, Crowds and Democracy combines and commands the literature and theories of literary criticism, philosophy, and intellectual and cultural history in an impressive and authoritative way.

    Jonsson traces the trajectory of the discourse and idea of “the masses,” concentrating on the years between 1918 and 1933. Each chapter represents a sort of case study as he analyzes the works of intellectuals or artists who are symbolic of a particular school of thought or new direction in scholarship. Jonsson thus shows how the meaning of “the mass” became a subject of investigation after the 1890s by mass psychology and mass sociology. This widely accepted notion held that the mass represented the opposite of bourgeois individuality, organization, education, masculinity, and positive qualities in general—the crowd was defined through negation. This assumption nevertheless gave way to a variety of views that attributed rationality to the crowds and sought to understand their internal dynamics, seeing “the masses” as a social formation in their own right.

    Jonsson shows how, despite their increased scrutiny of the masses, German and Austrian intellectuals by the 1920s were no clearer on comprehending the phenomenon and coming up with a suitable theory for understanding it and that by this time no consensus on who constituted the mass and why they were so prevalent in interwar politics existed, though the dominant opinion among sociologists was that they were a symptom of crisis and instability—the “alarm bells of history” (84). These social movements were an “allegory,” Jonsson contends, “evoked by the need to mark powers of change that appeared to govern the world of modernity…the masses connoted a dimension of social existence that caused fear and anxiety precisely because it disrupted the horizon of values and meanings through which class and gender identities had until then been affirmed, cultural hierarchies secured, and social order constituted” (112).

    Though they aroused great trepidation, during the 1920s the idea of “the masses” saw greater contestation as well. Indeed, Jonsson concludes that “[t]o enter the cultural landscape of interwar Germany and Austria is to encounter competing views, theories, and images of crowds” (179), each with varying agendas and presumptions that constructed an image of them reflecting socialist egalitarianism and promises of a democratic society to cultural pessimism and fears of bedlam and anarchy. In short, Jonsson’s study seeks to trace the epistemological foundations of “the mass” in European thought.

    Complicating this study further, Jonsson argues that the discourses on the masses in interwar Europe actually revolved around the problem of democracy. The period saw a proliferation of contesting ideologies, each with a different view of how to constitute society and the polity. Between the poles of revolution and fascism, thinkers articulated various visions of the crowds that reflected the fractured political landscape. “The masses,” therefore, could be constructed in an exclusionary way or in such a manner that they heralded promises of a better future; the throngs of people heightened fears of proletarian revolution or inspired political action. “The masses” therefore touched on the fundamental problem of democracy: how to embody and speak for the people, how to organize them, and how to represent society as a whole. As Jonsson concludes, these social movements “were never anything more, and at the same time never anything less, than the signs and symptoms of unresolved problems concerning the adequate political, cultural, and aesthetic representations of socially significant passions and political desires” (253).

    There are a great many achievements that Jonsson can lay claim to. First and foremost, one cannot help but admire the wealth of material that Jonsson mines. Delving into novels, art, philosophy, historiography, and sociology, the author authoritatively marshals a wide range of sources and subjects them to astute analysis. A number of scholars ranging from the fields of literature, cultural studies, history, the social sciences, film, and art will find intriguing insights and benefit from the lens through which Jonsson reads this vast collection of materials.

    Historians of Germany will also be pleased that Jonsson’s treatment of the Weimar period was nuanced and avoided notions of an inevitable collapse into dictatorship. Moreover, Crowds and Democracy is not encumbered by the fascist specter. Jonsson quite rightly asserts that democracy in the interwar period—though crisis-ridden—cannot be reduced to Hitler’s rise to power. Thus, it is refreshing that Nazism is not the predominant focus. Though it may seem obvious for specialists, Weimar was not defined by fascism and the republic should be treated in its own right. Jonsson’s interpretation takes into account the crises and dangers facing the fledgling democracies, but he also is careful to differentiate his account by judiciously discussing the emancipatory ambitions within Germany’s and Austria’s first republics.

    Jonsson’s erudite treatment of the sociological profession in the interwar period is another remarkable feature of this study. Readers will be charmed with the ease and clarity with which Jonsson disseminates the writings of scholars such as Georg Simmel, Theodor Geiger, or Leopold von Wiese. The sections of the book concentrating on intellectual history convincingly demonstrate how the idea of “the masses” developed and how sociologists and thinkers contended with what was considered the core issue of the day. Moreover, Jonsson differentiates between the actual phenomenon of mass politics and the “idea” that was constructed by these intellectuals, with all of their presumptions and biases. The result is stimulating, as Jonsson places theorists in dialogue with one another and shows how European intellectual thought, psychoanalysis, and philosophy developed between 1918 and 1933.

    Despite these achievements, Crowds and Democracies also suffers from some deficiencies. To begin with, one wonders what audience Jonsson attempted to reach. The book’s intellectual density means that few beyond academia will find it accessible. Simply put: this is not an easy read. The long and meticulous analyses and focus on theory require an engaged and informed reader, especially since some of the historical context—while generally correct—is nevertheless cursory and assumes a reader well versed in Central European history.

    The organization, structure, and style of the book are also somewhat distracting. Generally, Jonsson’s study follows the trajectory of the discourse on “the masses” chronologically, but often subchapters elucidate a particular theme that requires back-tracking. The book essentially is a collection of essays, with the result that taken together, the book meanders and contains redundancies. Sprawling chapters ranging between 50 to over 70 pages could have been broken up more effectively. The argumentative thread is also not always clear; 47 pages in, the author is still explaining what his book will do and how it will be structured. The unclear organizing principle and diffused arguments and objectives detract from the overall work. The lack of a bibliography is also disconcerting. Crowds and Democracy would have benefited from greater organizational clarity and a sustained and coherent argument, thereby guiding readers through an already challenging intellectual terrain more carefully.

    These criticisms of style aside, there are also some shortcomings with Jonsson’s argument. His claim that “few authors have connected the theme of the masses to Weimar history in any deeper sense” (xv) implies that this book seeks to remedy this gap in the literature. Yet while Jonsson succeeds in his discussion of how “the masses” were viewed, he does not fully accomplish his goal of unifying the discourse on mass movements and the actual phenomenon itself. What we are left with is a study of how intellectual and cultural elites contended with “the mass” theoretically and aesthetically. This does not reveal, however, what goals mass politics had and what ideologies drove them. We have little sense of the dynamics of the social movements, what strategies they pursued, or the self-perception of these entities. Jonsson’s argument assumes that the perceptions of Weimar luminaries—as astute or revealing as they may be—had a profound influence on the construction and instrumentalization of the concept of “the masses.” But this phenomenon was not a mere academic or cultural construction. As the author himself points out numerous times, mass politics were a real and defining feature of the interwar period.

    A greater attention on what animated and inspired the crowd would have been of great relevance for the central issue at hand: how “the masses” were imagined and perceived. For instance, taking into account the role of the 1917 Russian Revolution as inspiration for some and specter for others would have both explained the aspirations and fears that Bolshevism unleashed in Germany and which informed how elites viewed mass politics. Not only was the prospect of a proletarian revolution the source for socialist ambitions, it also fueled the animosities of reactionaries who dreaded such an uprising. The intellectual content of the various völkisch movements, the desires for a Volksgemeinschaft, and the inspiration of Mussolini not only motivated rightwing factions, they also had a profound effect on how contemporaries viewed the crowds in the streets. Yet all of this is muted in Jonsson’s study, so that his connection of “the masses” to Weimar history is limited. As intriguing as the observations of sociologists and artists may be, it nevertheless fails to give the crowd agency and in any case is a very narrow focus. In short: a greater attention to the actual crowds and not just how they were perceived could have fleshed out the concept “the masses” more thoroughly. A firmer historical grounding would have only added to this study. 2 As it stands, from a historian’s perspective this book suffers from a lack of tangibility and empiricism, and offers only limited insight into the phenomenon of mass politics and Weimar political and cultural history.

    A second shortcoming with Jonsson’s argument concerns his methodology. The claim that discussion of mass politics was ubiquitous and seen as a bellwether for the modern age would have found greater resonance by broadening the analysis beyond cultural elites. It is questionable how central the thinkers chronicled in this study were to the public discourse of the era. Jonsson admirably outlines the contours of the theoretical construction of “the masses” and meticulously documents how they were viewed. Yet missing is a whole other discourse beyond the ivory towers of academia and the artistic community which contemplated the political stakes. How much of this debate depended on Freud, Musil, Adorno, or any number of other notable thinkers, some of whom wrote in exile or never even finished their analyses? Sources such as newspapers or materials of politicians engaged in mass mobilization would have enriched Jonsson’s study of how contemporaries viewed this phenomenon and capitalized on it or struggled against it. He does analyze socialist publications such as the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, but a greater use of similar source types would have bolstered his argument. What about the NSDAP publication, The Völkischer Beobachter? Jonsson focuses on rightwing thinkers such as Ernst and Friedrich Gerhard Jünger for another viewpoint on mass politics, but surely other, more widely disseminated sources could have benefitted Jonsson’s study.

    Overall, Jonsson has approached the interwar period in a fresh and creative way, demonstrating that the struggle to represent and understand the masses reflected the instability of democracy and the perplexity of the modern individuality. Whether seeing masses as signals of cultural decline or promises of a new, egalitarian society, Jonsson admirably shows how the sweeping political and social changes after 1918 shook European thought to its core. It is not just a unique history of Weimar, but also an understudied aspect of the ambivalence of democracy and the problems of democratic representation. Intellectual historians, sociologists, and scholars of art and cinema will find Crowds and Democracy a rewarding read. Nevertheless, beyond specialists, this book will not find a wide readership, and those seeking to better understand Central European political or cultural history would be better served by starting with more empirical studies.
    _____

    Peter Gengler is a Ph.D. candidate studying modern German history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation is on expellee interest group politics and the construction and instrumentalization of expulsion narratives in public discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1944 and 1970. From 2014 to 2016, Peter will be conducting dissertation research in Germany with support of the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) and the Berlin Program.
    _____

    notes:

    1. Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Back to the essay

    2. For excellent historical studies of Weimar, consult Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar, 1918-1933: die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich: Beck, 1993); Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton, 2001); and Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Back to the essay

  • Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Editor’s Note
    from Paul Bové
    _

    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

  • The Mouse That Roared: The Democratic Movement in Hong Kong

    656px-Victims_of_Communism_Memorial_-_Washington,_D.C.

    an essay by Arif Dirlik
    ~
    In 1997, the British government handed Hong Kong over to the People’s Republic of China(PRC) after 150 years of colonial rule. Some observers at the time could not but wonder if Hong Kong would be absorbed and remade by the behemoth to the north, or transform with its proverbial dynamism “the motherland” that already was undergoing radical change. The popular uprising under way in Hong Kong is the most recent indication that the question was not an idle one. The answer is yet to come.

    Hong Kong investments and technology played an important part in the 1980s in laying the ground for the PRC’s economic take-off. The “special economic zones” that were set up in Guangdong province at the beginning of “reform and opening” as gateways to global capitalism (while keeping the rest of the country immune to its effects) were intended to take advantage of the dynamic capitalism of neighboring Hong Kong. And they did. To this day, Guangdong leads the rest of the country in industrial production and wealth. It also heavily resembles Hong Kong with which it shares a common language and, despite three decades of separation after 1949, common cultural characteristics. Hong Kong has continued to play a crucial part in the country’s development.

    It has been a different matter politically. Since the take-over in 1997 the leadership in Beijing has left no doubt of its enthusiasm for the oligarchic political structure that was already in place before the end of colonial rule. The many freedoms and rule of law Hong Kong people enjoyed were less appealing to a regime that preferred a population obedient to its strictures and a legal system more pliable at the service of Communist Party power. Already in the 1980s, Hong Kong people’s doubts about unification with the “motherland” were obvious in the exodus of those who could afford to leave to places like the United States, Canada and Australia. The exodus speeded up following the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989 which put to rest any hopes that reforms might open up a greater space for political freedoms. The colony practically disqualified itself as any kind of political inspiration for the Mainland with the enthusiastic participation of Hong Kongers in the Tiananmen movement leading up to the June Fourth massacre, and annual commemorations thereafter of the suppression of the student movement. In the early 1990s the Party under Deng Xiaoping settled on the example of Singapore as a model more attuned to its own authoritarian practices.

    The same reasons that made the regime suspicious of Hong Kong people for their “lack of patriotism” due to the legacies of colonialism have made Hong Kong into an inspiration as well as a base for radical critics of the regime struggling for greater freedom and democracy on the Mainland. The take-over of 1997 was under the shadow of Tinanmen, but even so few would have imagined at the time that within two decades of the celebrations of the end of colonialism and “return” to the motherland, protestors against Beijing “despotism” would be waving British flags. Once the initial enthusiasm for “liberation” was over, Hong Kongers rediscovered as the source of their “difference” the colonial history which in nationalist historiography appeared as a lapse in the nation’s historical, a period of humiliation remembered most importantly to foster nationalist sentiment. PRC democracy activists such as the jailed Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have drawn the ire of the regime for suggesting that Hong Kong’s freedoms and democratic sentiments were legacies of colonial acculturation that Mainlanders had missed out on.

    Current protests have their origins in a consciousness born of the anxieties provoked by the prospect of unification in the 1980s and 1990s, and even though both the Mainland and Hong Kong have changed radically in the intervening period, the Hong Kong identity that assumed recognizable contours at the time is a fundamental driving force of the protests. The immediate issue that has provoked the protests—call for universal suffrage in the selection of the chief executive and legislative council of the Special Administrative Region—harks back to the Basic Law of 1984 agreed upon by the British and the PRC as a condition of unification. The Basic Law stipulated that Hong Kong would be subject internally to its own laws for fifty years after the take-over under a system of “one country, two systems,” with its own chief executive and a legislature elected by an election committee representing various functional constituencies in a corporatist arrangement. The arrangement openly favored the corporate and financial ruling class in Hong Kong which in turn was prepared to align its interests with those of the Communist regime in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) was something of a political counterpart to the “special economic zones”—an exception that was granted not to compromise national sovereignty but as an act of sovereign power. In all matters pertaining to governance and the law, the SAR would be accountable to the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing. Hong Kong was granted representation in the NPC which, like all representation in that body, has served more to consolidate central control than to allow for the democratic airing of public opinion and grievances.

    “One country, two systems” was an unstable structure. It was important to the PRC for patriotic reasons to put an end to the colonialism at its doorstep and retrieve territory lost a century and a half ago. But some compromise with the departing British was unavoidable given the strategic importance to the new project of development of the global corporate and financial hub that was Hong Kong. The autonomy granted to Hong Kong was subject to the good faith of the Beijing government. What might happen if the PRC no longer needed this hub seemed like a remote contingency in the 1980s, but already by the 1990s there was talk of the rise of Shanghai as a competitor. It is not out of the question that the present unrest which may undermine faith in Hong Kong as a corporate and financial center is not entirely undesirable to the regime now that preparations have been completed to launch a new financial center in Shanghai.

    A similar uncertainty attended the issue of governance under the system. The Basic Law held out the possibility of democratic government and universal suffrage in Hong Kong subject to circumstances to be determined by the NPC. It nourished hopes in democracy, but reserved for Beijing final say on when and how democracy was to be exercised. There were no guarantees that full democracy would be granted if Hong Kongers invited the displeasure of the government in Beijing—or circumstances within the country made it undesirable. This is the immediate issue in the current protests (along with public dissatisfaction with the current chief executive, Leung Chun Ying who, like his two predecessors since 1997, is widely viewed as a Beijing puppet). To Hong Kong democracy advocates, the offer of universal suffrage is a mockery of the promise of full democracy when the choices are limited to candidates carefully selected by an electoral commission packed with Beijing loyalists.

    The take-over in 1997, and the circumstances of its negotiation, had one very significant consequence that in likelihood was unanticipated: the politicization of Hong Kong society. Hong Kong long had a reputation as a cultural and political “desert.” The British colonial regime was successful in diverting popular energies to the struggle for everyday existence, and for those who could, the pursuit of wealth. At the height of the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland in 1967, labor disputes erupted into riots against the colonial government led by pro-Beijing leftists. But sustained political activity dates back to the negotiations surrounding the take-over, especially the mobilization instigated by the Tiananmen movement in Beijing. Politics over the last twenty-five years has revolved around the assertion of a Hong Kong identity against dissolution into the PRC. As a new political consciousness has found expression in the efflorescence of a Hong Kong culture in film and literature, the latter has played no little part in stimulating political activity. Ironically, while the goal of “one country, two systems” was to ease Hong Kong into the PRC, the very recognition of the differences of Hong Kong from the rest of the country would seem to have underlined the existence of a Hong Kong identity that differentiated the former colony from the rest of PRC society.

    Current protests have focused attention on issues of governance. Far more important are the social tensions and the economic transformations that lend urgency to protestors’ demand for political recognition and rights. One important indication is the part young people—teenagers—have played in the protests. Joshua Wong, who has emerged as a leader, is seventeen years old, which means that he was born in 1997, the year of the take-over.

    The generation Wong represents has come of age in a society subject to deepening social and economic problems. The wealth gap in Hong Kong is nothing new, but as elsewhere in the world, inequality has assumed critical proportions with increased concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite allied with Beijing. Since 1997, the experience of marginalization has been intensified with the inundation of the city by Mainlanders with their newfound wealth which has increased prices of commodities, put pressures on public services––including housing, health and education––and introduced new cultural fissures. Some Hong Kong businesses prefer Mainland customers on whose business they have come to be dependent. In the 1990s, Mainlanders living in Hong Kong used to complain about the prejudice they suffered from Hong Kongers with their pretensions to superior cultural sophistication. That has been reversed. Even the most uncouth Mainlanders are likely to look down on Hong Kongers for not being authentically Chinese, which typifies PRC attitudes toward Chinese populations elsewhere. While Hong Kongers complain about “locusts” from the North, a very-unConfucian Beijing University professor descended from Confucius refers to Hong Kongers as “bastards” contaminated by their colonial past. The central government in Beijing, sharing the suspicious of southerners of its imperial predecessors, is engaged in efforts to discourage the use of Cantonese while instilling in the local population its version of what it means to be “Chinese.” We may recall that the present protests were preceded two years ago by successful protests against Beijing-backed efforts to introduce “patriotic” education to Hong Kong schools. It is not that Hong Kong people are not patriotic. They are very patriotic indeed. But their patriotism is mediated by their Hong Kong identity, a very product of the take-over that Beijing would like to erase.

    The upheaval in Hong bears similarities to “Occupy” movements elsewhere in the economic issues that inform it. It also has its roots in the special circumstances of Hong Kong society, and its relationship to Beijing. The movement may be viewed as the latest chapter in a narrative that goes back to the 1980s, the emergence of a neoliberal global capitalism of which the PRC has been an integral component, and the Tiananmen movement which was one of the earliest expressions of the social and political strains created by shifts in the global economy. The demands for democracy in the protests are clearly not merely “political.” Democracy is important to the protestors not only as a means to retrieving some control over their lives, but also to overcome inequality. The authorities in Beijing are quite aware of this link. A Law professor from Tsinghua University in Beijing who also serves as an advisor on Hong Kong affairs just recently announced that democracy would jeopardize the wealthy who are crucial to the welfare of Hong Kong’s capitalist economy. It may seem ironic that a Communist Party should be devoted to the protection of wealthy capitalists, but that is the reality of contemporary PRC society that the protestors are struggling against.

    The protests are also the latest chapter in the formation of a Hong Kong identity which assumed urgency with the prospect of return to the “motherland” in the 1980s. This, too, is a threat to a regime in flux that finds itself threatened by identity claims among the populations it rules over. It seems superfluous to say that allowing the people of Hong Kong the self-rule they demand would have adverse consequences in encouraging separatism among the various ethnic groups already in rebellion against the regime, and further stimulate democracy activists among the Han population. Hitherto pro-Beijing Guomindang leader in Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, has recently voiced his opposition to unification under the “one country, two-systems” formula.

    It would probably take something of a miracle for the protest movement in Hong Kong to achieve its stated goals. Rather than risk a Tiananmen style confrontation, the authorities have taken a wait-and-see attitude, waiting for the movement to spend its force, or opponents to force it to retreat. There are signs already that the movement has run its course in clashes between the protestors and members of the general public weary of the disruption of life and business. It is suspected that the attackers included members of Triad gangs. Whom they might be serving is, for the moment, anybody’s guess.

    What the next chapter might bring is uncertain, to say the least. It is unlikely that a movement that has been in the making for two decades will simply fade away into oblivion. The problems it set out to resolve are very real, and offer little sign of resolution, and the movement has proven its resilience through the years. The distinguished scholar of Hong Kong-Mainland relations at the City University of Hong Kong, Joseph Cheng Yu-shek,who is also an advocate of democracy, stated in a recent interview that, “All the protesters here and Hong Kong people know it is extremely unlikely the Chinese leaders will respond to our demands…. We are here to say we are not going to give up, we will continue to fight on. We are here because as long as we fight on, at least we haven’t lost.”

  • "Malaysia's Dog Issue" by b2 writer Masturah Alatas

    B0TXIUlCcAI4ddQ.jpg-large

    Masturah Alatas, a boundary 2 contributor, has written about the ‘I want to touch a dog’ event in Malaysia for CounterPunch. You can read “Malaysia’s Dog Issue” here.

  • The Man Who Loved His Laptop

    The Man Who Loved His Laptop

    Her (2013)a review of Spike Jonze (dir.), Her (2013)
    by Mike Bulajewski
    ~
    I’m told by my sister, who is married to a French man, that the French don’t say “I love you”—or at least they don’t say it often. Perhaps they think the words are superfluous and it’s the behavior of the person you are in a relationship with tells you everything. Americans, on the other hand, say it to everyone—lovers, spouses, friends, parents, grandparents, children, pets—and as often as possible, as if quantity matters most. The declaration is also an event. For two people beginning a relationship, it marks a turning point and a new stage in the relationship.

    If you aren’t American, you may not have realized that relationships have stages. In America, they do. It’s complicated. First there are the three main thresholds of commitment: Dating, Exclusive Dating, then of course Marriage. There are three lesser pre-Dating stages: Just Talking, Hooking Up and Friends with Benefits; and one minor stage between Dating and Exclusive called Pretty Much Exclusive. Within Dating, there are several minor substages: number of dates (often counted up to the third date) and increments of physical intimacy denoted according to the well-known baseball metaphor of first, second, third and home base.

    There are also a number of rituals that indicate progress: updating of Facebook relationship statuses; leaving a toothbrush at each other’s houses; the aforementioned exchange of I-love-you’s; taking a vacation together; meeting the parents; exchange of house keys; and so on. When people, especially unmarried people talk about relationships, often the first questions are about these stages and rituals. In France the system is apparently much less codified. One convention not present in the United States is that romantic interest is signaled when a man invites a woman to go for a walk with him.

    The point is two-fold: first, although Americans admire and often think of French culture as holding up a standard for what romance ought to be, Americans act nothing like the French in relationships and in fact know very little about how they work in France. Second and more importantly, in American culture love is widely understood as spontaneous and unpredictable, and yet there is also an opposite and often unacknowledged expectation that relationships follow well-defined rules and rituals.

    This contradiction might explain the great public clamor over romance apps like Romantimatic and BroApp that automatically send your significant other romantic messages, either predefined or your own creation, at regular intervals—what philosopher of technology Evan Selinger calls (and not without justification) apps that outsource our humanity.

    Reviewers of these apps were unanimous in their disapproval, disagreeing only on where to locate them on a spectrum between pretty bad and sociopathic. Among all the labor-saving apps and devices, why should this one in particular be singled out for opprobrium?

    Perhaps one reason for the outcry is that they expose an uncomfortable truth about how easily romance can be automated. Something we believe is so intimate is revealed as routine and predictable. What does it say about our relationship needs that the right time to send a loving message to your significant other can be reduced to an algorithm?

    The routinization of American relationships first struck me in the context of this little-known fact about how seldom French people say “I love you.” If you had to launch one of these romance apps in France, it wouldn’t be enough to just translate the prewritten phrases into French. You’d have to research French romantic relationships and discover what are the most common phrases—if there are any—and how frequently text messages are used for this purpose. It’s possible that French people are too unpredictable, or never use text messages for romantic purposes, so the app is just not feasible in France.

    Romance is culturally determined. That American romance can be so easily automated reveals how standardized and even scheduled relationships already are. Selinger’s argument that automated romance undermines our humanity has some merit, but why stop with apps? Why not address the problem at a more fundamental level and critique the standardized courtship system that regulates romance. Doesn’t this also outsource our humanity?

    The best-selling relationship advice book The 5 Love Languages claims that everyone understands one of five love “languages” and the key to a happy relationship for each partner to learn to express love in the correct language. Should we be surprised if the more technically minded among us concludes that the problem of love can be solved with technology? Why not try to determine the precise syntax and semantics of these love languages, and attempt to express them rigorously and unambiguously in the same way that computer languages and communications protocols are? Can love be reduced to grammar?

    Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) tells the story of Theodore Twombly, a soon-to-be divorced writer who falls in love with Samantha, an AI operating system who far exceeds the abilities of today’s natural language assistants like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. Samantha is not only hyper-intelligent, she’s also capable of laughter, telling jokes, picking up on subtle unspoken interpersonal cues, feeling and communicating her own emotions, and so on. Theodore falls in love with her, but there is no sense that their relationship is deficient because she’s not human. She is as emotionally expressive as any human partner, at least on film.

    Theodore works for a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com as a professional Cyrano de Bergerac (or perhaps a human Romantimatic), ghostwriting heartfelt “handwritten” letters on behalf of this clients. It’s an ironic twist: Samantha is his simulated girlfriend, a role which he himself adopts at work by simulating the feelings of his clients. The film opens with Theodore at his desk at work, narrating a letter from a wife to her husband on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. He is a master of the conventions of the love letter. Later in the film, his work is discovered by a literary agent, and he gets an offer to have book published of his best work.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxahbnUCZxY&w=560&h=315]

    But for all his (alleged) expertise as a romantic writer, Theodore is lonely, emotionally stunted, ambivalent towards the women in his life, and—at least before meeting Samantha—apparently incapable of maintaining relationships since he separated from his ex-wife Catherine. Highly sensitive, he is disturbed by encounters with women that go off the script: a phone sex encounter goes awry when the woman demands that he enact her bizarre fantasy of being choked with a dead cat; and on a date with a woman one night, she exposes a little too much vulnerability and drunkenly expresses her fear that he won’t call her. He abruptly and awkwardly ends the date.

    Theodore wanders aimlessly through the high tech city as if it is empty. With headphones always on, he’s withdrawn, cocooned in a private sonic bubble. He interacts with his device through voice, asking it to play melancholy songs and skipping angry messages from his attorney demanding that he sign the divorce papers already. At times, he daydreams of happier times when he and his ex-wife were together and tells Samantha how much he liked being married. At first it seems that Catherine left him. We wonder if he withdrew from the pain of his heartbreak. But soon a different picture emerges. When they finally meet to sign the divorce papers over lunch, Catherine accuses him of not being able to handle her emotions and reveals that he tried to get her on Prozac. She says to him “I always felt like you wished I could just be a happy, light, everything’s great, bouncy L.A. wife. But that’s not me.”

    So Theodore’s avoidance of real challenges and emotions in relationships turns out to be an ongoing problem—the cause, not the consequence, of his divorce. Starting a relationship with his operating systems Samantha is his latest retreat from reality—not from physical reality, but from the virtual reality of authentic intersubjective contact.

    Unlike his other relationships, Samantha is perfectly customized to his needs. She speaks his “love language.” Today we personalize our operating system and fill out online dating profile specifying exactly what kind of person we’re looking for. When Theodore installs Samantha on his computer for the first time, the two operations are combined with a single question. The system asks him how he would describe his relationship with his mother. He begins to reply with psychological banalities about how she is insufficiently attuned to his needs, and it quickly stops him, already knowing what he’s about. And so do we.

    That Theodore is selfish doesn’t mean that he is unfeeling, unkind, insensitive, conceited or uninterested in his new partners thoughts, feelings and goals. His selfishness is the kind that’s approved and even encouraged today, the ethically consistent selfishness that respects the right of others to be equally selfish. What he wants most of all is to be comfortable, to feel good, and that requires a partner who speaks his love language and nothing else, someone who says nothing that would veer off-script and reveal too many disturbing details. More precisely, Theodore wants someone who speaks what Lacan called empty speech: speech that obstructs the revelation of the subject’s traumatic desire.

    Objectification is a traditional problem between men and women. Men reduce women to mere bodies or body parts that exist only for sexual gratification, treating them as sex objects rather than people. The dichotomy is between the physical as the domain of materiality, animality and sex on one hand, and the spiritual realm of subjectivity, personality, agency and the soul on the other. If objectification eliminates the soul, then Theodore engages in something like the opposite, a subjectification which eradicates the body. Samantha is just a personality.

    Technology writer Nicholas Carr‘s new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (Norton, 2014) investigates the ways that automation and artificial intelligence dull our cognitive capacities. Her can be read as a speculative treatment of the same idea as it relates to emotion. What if the difficulty of relationships could be automated away? The film’s brilliant provocation is that it shows us a lonely, hollow world mediated through technology but nonetheless awash in sentimentality. It thwarts our expectations that algorithmically-generated emotion would be as stilted and artificial as today’s speech synthesizers. Samantha’s voice is warm, soulful, relatable and expressive. She’s real, and the feelings she triggers in Theodore are real.

    But real feelings with real sensations can also be shallow. As Maria Bustillo notes, Theodore is an awful writer, at least by today’s standards. Here’s the kind of prose that wins him accolades from everyone around him:

    I remember when I first started to fall in love with you like it was last night. Lying naked beside you in that tiny apartment, it suddenly hit me that I was part of this whole larger thing, just like our parents, and our parents’ parents. Before that I was just living my life like I knew everything, and suddenly this bright light hit me and woke me up. That light was you.

    In spite of this, we’re led to believe that Theodore is some kind of literary genius. Various people in his life compliment him on his skill and the editor of the publishing company who wants to publish his work emails to tell him how moved he and his wife were when they read them. What kind of society would treat such pedestrian writing as unusual, profound or impressive? And what is the average person’s writing like if Theodore’s services are worth paying for?

    Recall the cult favorite Idiocracy (2006) directed by Mike Judge, a science fiction satire set in a futuristic dystopia where anti-intellectualism is rampant and society has descended into stupidity. We can’t help but conclude that Her offers a glimpse into a society that has undergone a similar devolution into both emotional and literary idiocy.

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    Mike Bulajewski (@mrteacup) is a user experience designer with a Master’s degree from University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering program. He writes about technology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, design, ideology & Slavoj Žižek at MrTeacup.org, where an earlier version of this review first appeared.

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