February 2015 – b2o: boundary 2 online

b2o: boundary 2 online

Abecedarium Anthology: The Cambridge Introduction to Edward W. Said

a review by Reshmi Mukherjee
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Connor McCarthy presents a crisp and detailed overview of Edward W. Said’s life, scholarship, interdisciplinary training, and critical thought processes, for the novice readers of his works. Additionally, the use of simple language and lucid sentence construction has the potential to attract audiences from non-literary backgrounds as well. These readers may be interested in knowing what Michael Sprinker called “the very ideal of the cosmopolitan intellectual that remains so central to the humanities’ self-image to this day.”¹ Therefore this book is unlike most critical enquiry of Said’s works in that it caters to readers across disciplinary boundaries.

The content of the book is not new but the form, narrative technique, is Saidian in nature. McCarthy, an ardent critic of Said, analyzes his written works in relation to “the events and circumstances entailed by and expressed in it.”² Illustrating the relationship of a critic to the text, as explained in Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic, McCarthy reads Said’s literary, political, and critical works as one continuous narrative, and in relation to the key terms of filiation and affiliation. By filiation, Said means the writer’s natural and organic connection by “inherited location.” And affiliation is a “network of relationships that human beings make consciously […] often to replace the loss of filiative relations in modern society.”³ A writer’s work, the text, therefore is a conglomeration of both filiative and affiliative connections hence, a “worldly” phenomenon. Accordingly, McCarthy situates Said’s identity as a scholar and humanist as intrinsically connected to his socio-political and cultural reality.

The book is divided into four chapters: 1) Introduction, life, work, 2) Influences, 3) Works, and 4) Reception. The introduction covers the itinerary of Said’s life including the obsequies paid after his death on 25th September 2003. In so doing McCarthy gives an insight to the complex historical, and filial conjuncture that shaped Said’s persona including his anxiety of being exiled and nation-less, a sentiment that is echoed in his literary works, critical thinking, and political engagement with the Palestinian cause. Alongside, this section pays special attention to Said’s childhood and adolescence as oscillating between different emotional conditions. Said was vexed with contrasting but demanding parents, a constant need to please them, displacement and relocation from Jerusalem to Cairo and then to the United States, and negotiating the paradoxical meaning of his name, which he called “foolishly English.” Parts of this section reiterate Said’s memoir Out of Place but all the information is relevant for readers to understand Said’s “innate sense of a divided but reflexive self.⁴

The second chapter explains the polarized opinions about Said’s academic work. In so doing, McCarthy helps the readers understand Said’s works and his thinking processes. Reviewing the sheer volume and depth of Said’s scholarship, detailing the different schools of thought like Romance philology, Marxism, phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, musicology etc. that influenced him, McCarthy notes that Said did not accept all arguments unconditionally. While Said was influenced by these discourses, he questioned their methodology and application in the real world, while resisting any easy disciplinary categorization of his works. In particular, McCarthy’s reading focuses on Said’s complex relationships with Western Marxist tradition and post-structuralism. While Said was critical of Marxism’s rigid adherence to putatively radical theoretical position and inverse conservatism, he drew inspiration from Marxists George Lukacs, Theodre Adorno, and Antonio Gramsci. Their concepts of “methodological trap,” “absolute resistance to reification and the alienation of consciousness under industrial capitalism,” and “hegemony” continued to inspire his work till the very end.⁵ His relationship with Adorno, especially towards the end of his life, became more of an aesthetic experience, while Gramsci continued to influence his theoretical acumen. This section in the book is theoretically appealing as it epitomizes one of the basic arguments in Orientalism. It explains Said’s idea of the cultural creation of hegemony via Gramsci’s sense of materiality of culture and ideas. For example, Said in Orientalism notes, “It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism… [its] durability and strength.”⁶ By “work” Said here refers to the political elite society, in the Gramscian sense of the term, which retains power by manipulating public opinion. McCarthy further exemplifies that Said was also enthused by Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual whose job it is to forge hegemony. Consequently, Said believed in his position as an organic/public intellectual and enabler of how new socio-political movements intervene in the public sphere.

Like Gramsci, French poststructuralist Michel Foucault also influenced Said’s works. In fact Said was one of the “major mediators of Foucault’s thought into the American academy.”⁷ In Orientalism, Said explains the discursive use of power that shaped knowledge about the non-west, through Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge. Said defines knowledge as part of an underlying master-code or structure, and man is constituted via these discursive practices. However, in his later works, Said challenged Foucault’s notion of power in his 1984 commemorative essay on Foucault’s death “Michel Foucault,” and McCarthy focuses on that aspect in the third chapter.

The second half of this chapter highlights two aspects of Said’s personality, those being his “dialectical and paradoxical” relationship with Joseph Conrad, and admiration and empathy for Erich Auerbach. His fascination for Conrad is so strong that he does not emphasize Conrad’s relationship with the empire; rather, he is interested in Conrad, the exiled intellectual and writer, whose life was full of unresolved tensions. The reason being, Conrad’s personal experience of exile, complex life choices, and lingering sense of alienation, echoed some of the problems that Said encountered as a writer. Said admired Auerbach for similar reasons and for writing Mimesis at the time of his exile from Europe. Auerbach’s exile, alienation, and loneliness coupled with his “profound knowledge” left a permanent impression on him. It is from Auerbach’s experience that Said negotiated his own pain of being in exile as a necessary process that enables critical thinking.

The third chapter discusses Said’s select works in detail. It gives a fresh insight into pedagogical and methodological aspects of writing a text. McCarthy carefully unfolds Said’s theorization of text, critic, writer, discourse, power, knowledge, hegemony, as critical categories for analysis. In Beginnings, McCarthy explains, Said paid particular attention to the text, writer, and intellectual’s role in the public domain. Accordingly, the intentional production of meaning in the beginning of a text is argued as the most important function of a text. At this juncture in the text, to ratify Said’s position, McCarthy reiterates his life long commitment about connecting the writing of a text, a performative action, to its reality, and the intellectual’s role as a public persona.

In discussing Orientalism McCarthy elaborates Said’s analysis of western representation of the non-west via a hierarchical power structure that led to knowledge production about the other. However, the most essential aspect of McCarthy’s analysis here is his emphasis on Orientalism, not as a text on the Middle East but, as a discursive practice that, even if Said refused such compartmentalization while assessing the relevance of this book, changed the direction of postcolonial studies. The Question of Palestine is examined in continuation with Orientalism while the meaning of “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims” is discussed in great depth. McCarthy sheds light on the fact that Said is writing back to offer “an analysis of Zionism from a position” that was long silenced in accounts of “Whig history.” ⁸ This chapter explains the socio-political, historical, and economic reasons that led to the formation of Israel and explains Said’s statement “benefits for Jews and none for non-Jews in Palestine.” Despite Said’s scathing critique of Zionism, McCarthy directs the readers’ attention to the fact that The Question of Palestine does not delegitimize the Jews historical claim to Palestine. Rather, Said is opposed to the conditions for the fulfillment of this claim i.e. the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Therefore, he writes to remind the Zionists that their claim is intertwined with Palestinians and Palestinian history. McCarthy’s particular emphasis on this section from the book is relevant because it positions Said as an academic intellectual and human rights activist connecting the events with historical data, and not a “professor of terror” (as he was accused by Commentary magazine journalist Edward Alexander). The discussion on The World, the Text, and the Critic ends with Said’s criticism of Foucault’s theorization of power and discourse. In this segment, McCarthy mentions Said’s criticism of Foucault’s passive onto-phenomenological (how and why) questions about power, his ethnocentrism, and inability to explain why “the abrupt change [in power] occurs between one episteme and the next.”⁹

The book’s final chapter notes the reception of Said’s text, Orientalism, among the Anglo-American academic scholars of postcolonial and culture studies. Even though this section begins with anthropologist James Clifford’s complex reading of Said’s use of “Foucauldian ideas in the service of his humanist, cosmopolitan project,” critical commentaries by doyens in these fields namely Paul Bové, Robert Young, and Aijaz Ahmed are the main focus.¹⁰ McCarthy notes both Bové’s and Young’s criticism is geared towards Said’s failure to effectively employ poststructuralist ideas and “carry them to their logical conclusion.”¹¹ Bové’s critique of Orientalism is concerned with Said’s use of Foucault’s theory of power and not extending its use in the production of knowledge system. While he credits Said with a detailed picture of the voluntary and involuntary complicity of orientalism vis-à-vis imperialist power, Bové faults Said for failing to situate power within the “entire economy [where] both Orientalist and Saidian ‘oppositional’ work is produced.”¹² In so doing, Bové sides with Foucault who argued against the intellectual’s role in revolutionary change. According to Foucault, institutions discursively shape intellectuals who are “already always hemmed in by and even complicit with power.”¹³ Said, however, believed in the intellectual’s social role and, while agreeing with Foucault’s theory of power, downplayed its relationship with knowledge that shaped prominent and institutionally powerful intellectuals. Therefore, Bové’s main critique of Orientalism is that, it is critical of power “but not critical enough.”¹⁴

Robert Young’s criticism of Orientalism is based on Said’s theory against orientalist discourse and for an “alternative knowledge of the Orient.”¹⁵ Young argues, if the success of Orientalism lay in its strict “monopolization of linguistic codes to represent the Orient,” is it possible or desirable to have another form of knowledge system?¹⁶ If all knowledge is mitigated via a stringent power structure, will anti-Orientalist discourse not repeat the same mistake it wishes to castigate? By contrast, Marxist economist Aijjaz Ahmad takes a different position in his criticism of Orientalism. He has accused Said of first rethinking of history and second, using poststructuralism as a way to escape Marxist tradition. He compares poststructuralist anti-realism to fascist thinking and concludes that Said represents anti-humanist American scholarship that dominates the world today. It is connected and aids in the smooth functioning of “unprecedented imperialist consolidations of the present decade.”¹⁷ Therefore, Said, for Ahmad, is a native informant and Orientalism is a “crucial ideological wedge into [the Anglo-American academy] for Asian immigrant intellectuals.”¹⁸ McCarthy however, towards the end of this section, points out Young’s and Ahmad’s purposeful misreading of Orientalism. He reminds the readers about Said’s response to critics such as Young and stresses the fact that Orientalism is about “fragmenting, dissociating, dislocating, and decentering of the experiential terrain covered at present by universalizing historicism.”¹⁹ Said never intended it to be a book about the Orient or to construe an alternative history. In response to Ahmad, McCarthy faults Ahmad’s “polemical aggression” for clouding his argument, as McCarthy notes there is no historical evidence or sociological data to identify North American audience and readership of Orientalism.

As mentioned earlier, McCarthy has painstakingly traced Edward Said’s life and intellectual journey. However, the only flaw in this book is the lack of literature on Said’s political engagement as part of the public intellectual’s ethical responsibility. Said’s scholarly contributions and academic position were closely related to his roles as a practicing member of multiple literary, critical, and political constituencies. Indeed, without mentioning this side of Said, his contribution to the world will remain half known. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, in an interview, has said that Edward Said was a Kantian Enlightened subject/scholar “who writes for all time and all people.”²⁰ This is true because later in his life, and he has written about it in After the Last Sky, Said became deeply concerned with the Palestinian subaltern. He attempted to “change and form public opinion with well-researched commentary on political moves by involving highest level of political intervention and talented musicians in international collaboration.”²¹ Especially after the failure of the OSLO peace Said believed in other avenues to harbor a non-violent yet beneficial dialogue between Palestine and Israel. In 1997 he collaborated with Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli musician, and organized a musical concert in West Jerusalem. Said’s use of music to enable peace process between Palestine and Israel is worthy of mention because he believed that he real contribution of artists and philosophers is that they can change minds. Mentioning these aspects of Said’s public intellectual persona would have added to the richness of the book and provided a much wider spectrum of Said’s life.

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Reshmi Mukherjee (PhD. University of Illinois) is visiting assistant professor of English and interim-Director of Gender Studies at Boise State University. Her research and teaching interests include transnational feminisms, Anglophone literatures, Anglophone Arab fiction, Literature in translation [especially francophone literature], diasporic and exilic literatures, and subaltern theory. Her most recent publication is titled: “Living in Subalternity: The Becoming of the Subaltern in Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone, A Gesture of Belonging, and When Rain Clouds Gather.” It was published in the Journal of the African Literature Association, (JALA) Vol 7. No. 2, Spring 2014.

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Notes:

1. Michael, Sprinker, “Introduction,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker (Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publisher, 1992), 1. Back to the essay

2. Conor, McCarthy, The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 97. Back to the essay

3. Ibid. 100. Back to the essay

4. Ibid. 9. Back to the essay

5. Ibid. 33, 34, 35. Back to the essay

6. Ibid. 37. Back to the essay

7. Ibid. 48. Back to the essay

8. Ibid. 85, 86. Back to the essay

9. Ibid. 105. Back to the essay

10. Ibid. 126. Back to the essay

11. Ibid. 132. Back to the essay

12. Ibid. Back to the essay

13. Ibid. 129. Back to the essay

14. Ibid. 129. Back to the essay

15. Ibid. 130. Back to the essay

16. Ibid. Back to the essay

17. Ibid. 134. Back to the essay

18. Ibid. 135. Back to the essay

19. Ibid. 137. Back to the essay

20. Ben Conisbee Baer, “Edward Said Remembered on September 11, 2004. A Conversation with Gayatri Spivak,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2010), 57. Back to the essay

21. Ibid. Back to the essay

February 25, 2015
Hijacking Translation

an abstract by Lawrence Venuti
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Despite the increased attention that translation has received in conjunction with the newly revived topic of “world literature,” translation research and practice remain marginal in Comparative Literature as the field has developed in the United States. The evidence takes various forms, institutional and intellectual, including reports on the state of the field, the curricula of departments and programs, anthologies adopted as textbooks, and recent research that promulgates a discourse of “untranslatability.” Even though Comparative Literature could not exist without the extensive use of translations, relatively few curricula require or even offer courses in translation theory, history, or practice. A key factor in this situation is an instrumental model that treats translation as the (usually inadequate) reproduction of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, meaning, or effect. Instrumentalism preempts a more productive understanding of translation as an interpretive act that inevitably varies the source text according to intelligibilities and interests in the receiving culture.

This essay examines several publications to consider the continuing suppression of translated texts by comparatists. Haun Saussy’s 2004 report to the American Comparative Literature Association, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, reflects an uncertainty about what translation is and does: he argues that “A translation always brings across most successfully aspects of a work for which its audience is already prepared” but then asserts the implicitly contradictory view that “A translator always perturbs the settled economy of two linguistic systems.” The Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004), under the general editorship of David Damrosch, contains mostly English translations of foreign-language texts. Yet not until the second edition (2009) did the translations receive any editorial commentary which, however, adopts an instrumentalist rhetoric of loss.

Barbara Cassin’s influential “dictionary of untranslatables” searches for “mistranslations” to chart the history of philosophy. But any charge of mistranslation assumes that translation can and should reproduce a semantic invariant, an essential, unchanging meaning believed to be inherent in the source text but actually inscribed by the analyst—in other words, a rival interpretation. The elision of this inscription in the French edition (2004) privileges Cassin’s and her contributors’ poststructuralist, posthumanist discourse; in the English edition (2014), it validates the editors’ assimilation of the French text to the current critical orthodoxy in Comparative Literature. Both cases exemplify a narcissistic approach to linguistic and cultural difference that stops short of interrogating receiving institutions. Michael Wood deploys the “untranslatable” to consider “Translating Rilke” (2014) with the caution, “Let’s not reach for the ineffable, the notion of something mystically secreted in Rilke’s language.” Yet Wood explains the English translations as “searching not for a final or better version but something else, something closer to a sharing of what can’t be shared”—i.e., the ineffable. The impact of Cassin’s dictionary is most egregious in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature (2013), where the “untranslatable” is defined as “an incorruptible or intransigent nub of meaning,” not a variable interpretation, but a semantic invariant that enables judgments of mistranslation which favor her own interpretations.

February 19, 2015
Cultivating Reform and Revolution

a review of William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke University Press, 2013)
by Zachary Loeb
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Mountains and rivers, skyscrapers and dams – the world is filled with objects and structures that appear sturdy. Glancing upwards at a skyscraper, or mountain, a person may know that these obelisks will not remain eternally unchanged, but in the moment of the glance we maintain a certain casual confidence that they are not about to crumble suddenly. Yet skyscrapers collapse, mountains erode, rivers run dry or change course, and dams crack under the pressure of the waters they hold. Even equipped with this knowledge it is still tempting to view such structures as enduringly solid. Perhaps the residents of Lisbon, in November of 1755, had a similar faith in the sturdiness of the city they had built, a faith that was shattered in an earthquake – and aftershocks – that demonstrated all too terribly the fragility at the core of all physical things.

The Lisbon earthquake, along with its cultural reverberations, provides the point of entry for William E. Connolly’s discussion of neoliberalism, ecology, activism, and the deceptive solidness of the world in his book The Fragility of Things. Beyond its relevance as an example of the natural tremors that can reduce the built world into rubble, the Lisbon earthquake provides Connolly (the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University), a vantage point from which to mark out and critique a Panglossian worldview he sees as prominent in contemporary society. No doubt, were Voltaire’s Pangloss alive today, he could find ready employment as an apologist for neoliberalism (perhaps as one of Silicon Valley’s evangelists). Like Panglossian philosophy, neoliberalism “acknowledges many evils and treats them as necessary effects” (6).

Though the world has changed significantly since the mid-18^th century during which Voltaire wrote, humanity remains assaulted by events that demonstrate the world’s fragility. Connolly councils against the withdrawal to which the protagonists of Candide finally consign themselves while taking up the famous trope Voltaire develops for that withdrawal; today we “cultivate our gardens” in a world in which the future of all gardens is uncertain. Under the specter of climate catastrophe, “to cultivate our gardens today means to engage the multiform relations late capitalism bears to the entire planet” (6). Connolly argues for an “ethic of cultivation” that can show “both how fragile the ethical life is and how important it is to cultivate it” (17). “Cultivation,” as developed in The Fragility of Things, stands in opposition to withdrawal. Instead it entails serious, ethically guided, activist engagement with the world – for us to recognize the fragility of natural, and human-made, systems (Connolly uses the term “force-fields”) and to act to protect this “fragility” instead of celebrating neoliberal risks that render the already precarious all the more tenuous.

Connolly argues that when natural disasters strike, and often in their wake set off rippling cascades of additional catastrophes, they exemplify the “spontaneous order” so beloved by neoliberal economics. Under neoliberalism, the market is treated as though it embodies a uniquely omniscient, self-organizing and self-guiding principle. Yet the economic system is not the only one that can be described this way: “open systems periodically interact in ways that support, amplify, or destabilize one another” (25). Even in the so-called Anthropocene era the ecosystem, much to humanity’s chagrin, can still demonstrate creative and unpredictable potentialities. Nevertheless, the ideological core of neoliberalism relies upon celebrating the market’s self-organizing capabilities whilst ignoring the similar capabilities of governments, the public sphere, or the natural world. The ascendancy of neoliberalism runs parallel with an increase in fragility as economic inequality widens and as neoliberalism treats the ecosystem as just another profit source. Fragility is everywhere today, and though the cracks are becoming increasingly visible, it is still given – in Connolly’s estimation – less attention than is its due, even in “radical theory.” On this issue Connolly wonders if perhaps “radical theorists,” and conceivably radical activists, “fear that coming to terms with fragility would undercut the political militancy needed to respond to it?” (32). Yet Connolly sees no choice but to “respond,” envisioning a revitalized Left that can take action with a mixture of advocacy for immediate reforms while simultaneously building towards systemic solutions.

Critically engaging with the thought of core neoliberal thinker and “spontaneous order” advocate Friedrich Hayek, Connolly demonstrates the way in which neoliberal ideology has been inculcated throughout society, even and especially amongst those whose lives have been made more fragile by neoliberalism: “a neoliberal economy cannot sustain itself unless it is supported by a self-conscious ideology internalized by most participants that celebrates the virtues of market individualism, market autonomy and a minimal state” (58). An army of Panglossian commentators must be deployed to remind the wary watchers that everything is for the best. That a high level of state intervention may be required to bolster and disseminate this ideology, and prop up neoliberalism, is wholly justified in a system that recognizes only neoliberalism as a source for creative self-organizing processes, indeed “sometimes you get the impression that ‘entrepreneurs’ are the sole paradigms of creativity in the Hayekian world” (66). Resisting neoliberalism, for Connolly, requires remembering the sources of creativity that occur outside of a market context and seeing how these other systems demonstrate self-organizing capacities.

Within neoliberalism the market is treated as the ethical good, but Connolly works to counter this with “an ethic of cultivation” which works not only against neoliberalism but against certain elements of Kant’s philosophy. In Connolly’s estimation Kantian ethics provide some of the ideological shoring up for neoliberalism, as at times “Kant both prefigures some existential demands unconsciously folded into contemporary neoliberalism and reveals how precarious they in fact are. For he makes them postulates” (117). Connolly sees a certain similarity between the social conditioning that Kant saw as necessary for preparing the young to “obey moral law” and the ideological conditioning that trains people for life under neoliberalism – what is shared is a process by which a self-organizing system must counter people’s own self-organizing potential by organizing their reactions. Furthermore “the intensity of cultural desires to invest hopes in the images of self-regulating interest within markets and/or divine providence wards off acknowledgment of the fragility of things” (118). Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” appears as a corrective to this ethic of inculcation – it features “an element of tragic possibility within it” (133) which is the essential confrontation with the “fragility” that may act as a catalyst for a new radical activism.

In the face of impending doom neoliberalism will once more have an opportunity to demonstrate its creativity even as this very creativity will have reverberations that will potentially unleash further disasters. Facing the possible catastrophe means that “we may need to recraft the long debate between secular, linear, and deterministic images of the world on the one hand and divinely touched, voluntarist, providential, and/or punitive images on the other” (149). Creativity, and the potential for creativity, is once more essential – as it is the creativity in multiple self-organizing systems that has created the world, for better or worse, around us today. Bringing his earlier discussions of Kant into conversation with the thought of Whitehead and Nietzsche, Connolly further considers the place of creative processes in shaping and reshaping the world. Nietzsche, in particular, provides Connolly with a way to emphasize the dispersion of creativity by removing the province of creativity from the control of God to treat it as something naturally recurring across various “force-fields.” A different demand thus takes shape wherein “we need to slow down and divert human intrusions into various planetary force fields, even as we speed up efforts to reconstitute the identities, spiritualities, consumption practices, market faiths, and state policies entangled with them” (172) though neoliberalism knows but one speed: faster.

An odd dissonance occurs at present wherein people are confronted with the seeming triumph of neoliberal capitalism (one can hear the echoes of “there is no alternative”) and the warnings pointing to the fragility of things. In this context, for Connolly, withdrawal is irresponsible, it would be to “cultivate a garden” when what is needed is an “ethic of cultivation.” Neoliberal capitalism has trained people to accept the strictures of its ideology, but now is a time when different roles are needed; it is a time to become “role experimentalists” (187). Such experiments may take a variety of forms that run the gamut from “reformist” to “revolutionary” and back again, but the process of such experimentation can break the training of neoliberalism and demonstrate other ways of living, interacting, being and having. Connolly does not put forth a simple solution for the challenges facing humanity, instead he emphasizes how recognizing the “fragility of things” allows for people to come to terms with these challenges. After all, it may be that neoliberalism only appears so solid because we have forgotten that it is not actually a naturally occurring mountain but a human built pyramid – and our backs are its foundation.

* * *

In the “First Interlude,” on page 45, Connolly poses a question that haunts the remainder of The Fragility of Things, the question – asked in the midst of a brief discussion of the 2011 Lars von Trier film Melancholia – is, “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” It is the sort of disarming and discomforting question that in its cold honesty forces readers to face a conclusion they may not want to consider. It is a question that evokes the deceptively simple acronym FRED (Facing the Reality of Extinction and Doom). And yet there is something refreshing in the question – many have heard the recommendations about what must be done to halt climate catastrophe, but how many believe these steps will be taken? Indeed, even though Connolly claims “we need to slow down” there are also those who, to the contrary, insist that what is needed is even greater acceleration. Granted, Connolly does not pose this question on the first page of his book, and had he done so The Fragility of Things could have easily appeared as a dismissible dirge. Wisely, Connolly recognizes that “a therapist, a priest, or a philosopher might stutter over such questions. Even Pangloss might hesitate” (45); one of the core strengths of The Fragility of Things is that it does not “stutter over such questions” but realizes that such questions require an honest reckoning. Which includes being willing to ask “How do you prepare for the end of the world?”

William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things is both ethically and intellectually rigorous, demanding readers perceive the “fragility” of the world around them even as it lays out the ways in which the world around them derives its stability from making that very fragility invisible. Though it may seem that there are relatively simple concerns at the core of The Fragility of Things Connolly never succumbs to simplistic argumentation – preferring the fine-toothed complexity that allows moments of fragility to be fully understood. The tone and style of The Fragility of Things feels as though it assumes its readership will consist primarily of academics, activists, and those who see themselves as both. It is a book that wastes no time trying to convince its reader that “climate change is real” or “neoliberalism is making things worse,” and the book is more easily understood if a reader begins with at least a basic acquaintance with the thought of Hayek, Kant, Whitehead, and Nietzsche. Even if not every reader of The Fragility of Things has dwelled for hours upon the question of “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” the book seems to expect that this question lurks somewhere in the subconscious of the reader.

Amidst Connolly’s discussions of ethics, fragility and neoliberalism, he devotes much of the book to arguing for the need for a revitalized, active, and committed Left – one that would conceivably do more than hold large marches and then disappear. While Connolly cautions against “giving up” on electoral politics he does evince a distrust for US party politics; to the extent that Connolly appears to be a democrat it is a democrat with a lowercase d. Drawing inspiration from the wave of protests in and around 2011 Connolly expresses the need for a multi-issue, broadly supported, international (and internationalist) Left that can organize effectively to win small-scale local reforms while building the power to truly challenge the grip of neoliberalism. The goal, as Connolly envisions it, is to eventually “mobilize enough collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future” even as Connolly remains cognizant of threats that “the emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism” can pose (39). Connolly’s focus on the, often slow, “traditional” activist strategies of organizing should not be overlooked, as his focus on mobilizing large numbers of people acts as a retort to a utopian belief that “technology will fix everything.” The “general strike” as the democratic response once electoral democracy has gone awry is a theme that Connolly concludes with as he calls for his readership to take part in helping to bring together “a set of interacting minorities in several countries for the time when we coalesce around a general strike launched in several states simultaneously” (195). Connolly emphasizes the types of localized activism and action that are also necessary, but “the general strike” is iconic as the way to challenge neoliberalism. In emphasizing the “the general strike” Connolly stakes out a position in which people have an obligation to actively challenge existing neoliberalism, waiting for capitalism to collapse due to its own contradictions (and trying to accelerate these contradictions) does not appear as a viable tactic.

All of which raises something of prickly question for The Fragility of Things: which element of the book strikes the reader as more outlandish, the question of how to prepare for the end of the world, or the prospect of a renewed Left launching “a general strike…in the near future”? This question is not asked idly or as provocation; and the goal here is in no way to traffic in Leftist apocalyptic romanticism. Yet experience in current activism and organizing does not necessarily imbue one with great confidence in the prospect of a city-wide general strike (in the US) to say nothing of an international one. Activists may be acutely aware of the creative potentials and challenges faced by repressed communities, precarious labor, the ecosystem, and so forth – but these same activists are aware of the solidity of militarized police forces, a reactionary culture industry, and neoliberal dominance. Current, committed, activists’ awareness of the challenges they face makes it seem rather odd that Connolly suggests that radical theorists have ignored “fragility.” Indeed many radical thinkers, or at least some (Grace Lee Boggs and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, to name just two) seem to have warned consistently of “fragility” – even if they do not always use that exact term. Nevertheless, here the challenge may not be the Sisyphean work of activism but the rather cynical answer many, non-activists, give to the question of “How does one prepare for the end of the world?” That answer? Download some new apps, binge watch a few shows, enjoy the sci-fi cool of the latest gadget, and otherwise eat, drink and be merry because we’ll invent something to solve tomorrow’s problems next week. Neoliberalism has trained people well.

That answer, however, is the type that Connolly seems to find untenable, and his apparent hope in The Fragility of Things is that most readers will also find this answer unacceptable. Thus Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” returns and shows its value again. “Our lives are messages” (185) Connolly writes and thus the actions that an individual takes to defend “fragility” and oppose neoliberalism act as a demonstration to others that different ways of being are possible.

What The Fragility of Things makes clear is that an “ethic of cultivation” is not a one-off event but an ongoing process – cultivating a garden, after all, is something that takes time. Some gardens require years of cultivation before they start to bear fruit.

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Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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February 18, 2015
Trickster Makes This Web: The Ambiguous Politics of Anonymous

a review of Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014)
by Gavin Mueller
~

Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (HHWS) tackles a difficult and pressing subject: the amorphous hacker organization Anonymous. The book is not a strictly academic work. Rather, it unfolds as a rather lively history of a subculture of geeks, peppered with snippets of cultural theory and autobiographical portions. As someone interested in a more sustained theoretical exposition of Anonymous’s organizing and politics, I was a bit disappointed, though Coleman has opted for a more readable style. In fact, this is the book’s best asset. However, while containing a number of insights of interest to the general reader, the book ultimately falters as an assessment of Anonymous’s political orientation, or the state of hacker politics in general.

Coleman begins with a discussion of online trolling, a common antagonistic online cultural practice; many Anons cut their troll teeth at the notorious 4chan message board. Trolling aims to create “lulz,” a kind of digital schadenfreude produced by pranks, insults and misrepresentations. According to Coleman, the lulz are “a form of cultural differentiation and a tool or weapon used to attack, humiliate, and defame” rooted in the use of “inside jokes” of those steeped in the codes of Internet culture (32). Coleman argues that the lulz has a deeper significance: they “puncture the consensus around our politics and ethics, our social lives and our aesthetic sensibilities.” But trolling can be better understood through an offline frame of reference: hazing. Trolling is a means by which geeks have historically policed the boundaries of the subcultural corners of the Internet. If you can survive the epithets and obscene pictures, you might be able to hang. That trolling often takes the form of misogynist, racist and homophobic language is unsurprising: early Net culture was predominantly white and male, a demographic fact which overdetermines the shape of resentment towards “newbies” (or in 4chan’s unapologetically offensive argot, “newfags”). The lulz is joy that builds community, but almost always at someone else’s expense.

Coleman, drawing upon her background as an anthropologist, conceptualizes the troll as an instantiation of the trickster archetype which recurs throughout mythology and folklore. Tricksters, she argues, like trolls and Anonymous, are liminal figures who defy norms and revel in causing chaos. This kind of application of theory is a common technique in cultural studies, where seemingly apolitical or even anti-social transgressions, like punk rock or skateboarding, can be politicized with a dash of Bakhtin or de Certeau. Here it creates difficulties. There is one major difference between the spider spirit Anansi and Coleman’s main informant on trolling, the white supremacist hacker weev: Anansi is fictional, while weev is a real person who writes op-eds for neo-Nazi websites. The trickster archetype, a concept crafted for comparative structural analysis of mythology, does little to explain the actually existing social practice of trolling. Instead it renders it more complicated, ambiguous, and uncertain. These difficulties are compounded as the analysis moves to Anonymous. Anonymous doesn’t merely enact a submerged politics via style or symbols. It engages in explicitly political projects, complete with manifestos, though Coleman continues to return to transgression as one of its salient features.

The trolls of 4chan, from which Anonymous emerged, developed a culture of compulsory anonymity. In part, this was technological: unlike other message boards and social media, posting on 4chan requires no lasting profile, no consistent presence. But there was also a cultural element to this. Identifying oneself is strongly discouraged in the community. Fittingly, its major trolling weapon is doxing: revealing personal information to facilitate further harassment offline (prank calls, death threats, embarrassment in front of employers). As Whitney Phillips argues, online trolling often acts as a kind of media critique: by enforcing anonymity and rejecting fame or notoriety, Anons oppose the now-dominant dynamics of social media and personal branding which have colonized much of the web, and threaten their cherished subcultural practices, which are more adequately enshrined in formats such as image boards and IRC. In this way, Anonymous deploys technological means to thwart the dominant social practices of technology, a kind of wired Luddism. Such practices proliferate in the communities of the computer underground, which is steeped in an omnipresent prelapsarian nostalgia since at least the “eternal September” of the early 1990s.

HHWS’s overarching narrative is the emergence of Anonymous out of the cesspits of 4chan and into political consciousness: trolling for justice instead of lulz. The compulsory anonymity of 4chan, in part, determined Anonymous’s organizational form: Anonymous lacks formal membership, instead formed from entirely ad hoc affiliations. The brand itself can be selectively deployed or disavowed, leading to much argumentation and confusion. Coleman provides an insider perspective on how actions are launched: there is debate, occasionally a rough consensus, and then activity, though several times individuals opt to begin an action, dragging along a number of other participants of varying degrees of reluctance. Tactics are formalized in an experimental, impromptu way. In this, I recognized the way actions formed in the Occupy encampments. Anonymous, as Coleman shows, was an early Occupy Wall Street booster, and her analysis highlights the connection between the Occupy form and the networked forms of sociality exemplified by Anonymous. After reading Coleman’s account, I am much more convinced of Anonymous’s importance to the movement. Likewise, many criticisms of Occupy could also be levelled at Anonymous; Coleman cites Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” as one candidate.

If Anonymous can be said to have a coherent political vision, it is one rooted in civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech and opposition censorship efforts. Indeed, Coleman earns the trust of several hackers by her affiliation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, nominally the digital equivalent to the ACLU (though some object to this parallel, due in part to EFF’s strong ties to industry). Geek politics, from Anonymous to Wikileaks to the Pirate Bay, are a weaponized form of the mantra “information wants to be free.” Anonymous’s causes seem fit these concerns perfectly: Scientology’s litigious means of protecting its secrets provoked its wrath, as did the voluntary withdrawal of services to Wikileaks by PayPal and Mastercard, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit police’s blacking out of cell phone signals to scuttle a protest.

I’ve referred to Anonymous as geeks rather than hackers deliberately. Hackers — skilled individuals who can break into protected systems — participate in Anonymous, but many of the Anons pulled from 4chan are merely pranksters with above-average knowledge of the Internet and computing. This gets the organization in quite a bit of trouble when it engages in the political tactic of most interest to Coleman, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS floods a website with requests, overwhelming its servers. This technique has captured the imaginations of a number of scholars, including Coleman, with its resemblance to offline direct action like pickets and occupations. However, the AnonOps organizers falsely claimed that their DDoS app, the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon, ensured user anonymity, leading to a number of Anons facing serious criminal charges. Coleman curiously places the blame for this startling breach of operational security on journalists writing about AnonOps, rather on the organizers themselves. Furthermore, many DDoS attacks, including those launched by Anonymous, have relied on botnets, which draw power from hundreds of hijacked computers, bears little resemblance to any kind of democratic initiative. Of course, this isn’t to say that the harsh punishments meted out to Anons under the auspices of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are warranted, but that political tactics must be subjected to scrutiny.

Coleman argues that Anonymous outgrew its narrow civil libertarian agenda with its involvement in the Arab Spring: “No longer was the group bound to Internet-y issues like censorship and file-sharing” (148). However, by her own account, it is opposition to censorship which truly animates the group. The #OpTunisia manifesto (Anonymous names its actions with the prefix “Op,” for operations, along with the ubiquitous Twitter-based hashtag) states plainly, “Any organization involved in censorship will be targeted” (ibid). Anons were especially animated by the complete shut-off of the Internet in Tunisia and Egypt, actions which shattered the notion of the Internet as a space controlled by geeks, not governments. Anonymous operations launched against corporations did not oppose capitalist exploitation but fought corporate restrictions on online conduct. These are laudable goals, but also limited ones, and are often compatible with Silicon Valley companies, as illustrated by the Google-friendly anti-SOPA/PIPA protests.

Coleman is eager to distance Anonymous from the libertarian philosophies rife in geek and hacker circles, but its politics are rarely incompatible with such a perspective. The most recent Guy Fawkes Day protest I witnessed in Washington, D.C., full of mask-wearing Anons, displayed a number of slogans emerging from the Ron Paul camp, “End the Fed” prominent among them. There is no accounting for this in HHWS. It is clear that political differences among Anons exists, and that any analysis must be nuanced. But Coleman’s description of this nuance ultimately doesn’t delineate the political positions within the group and how they coalesce, opting to elide these differences in favor of a more protean focus on “transgression.” In this way, she is able to provide a conceptual coherence for Anonymous, albeit at the expense of a detailed examination of the actual politics of its members. In the final analysis, “Anonymous became a generalized symbol for dissent, a medium to channel deep disenchantment… basically, with anything” (399).

As political concerns overtake the lulz, Anonymous wavers as smaller militant hacker crews LulzSec and AntiSec take the fore, doxing white hat security executives, leaking documents, and defacing websites. This frustrates Coleman: “Anonymous had been exciting to me for a specific reason: it was the largest and most populist disruptive grassroots movement the Internet had, up to that time, fomented. But it felt, suddenly like AnonOps/Anonymous was slipping into a more familiar state of hacker-vanguardism” (302). Yet it is at this moment that Coleman offers a revealing account of hacker ideology: its alignment with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. From 4chan’s trolls scoffing at morality and decency, to hackers disregarding technical and legal restraints to accessing information, to the collective’s general rejection any standard form of accountability, Anonymous truly seems to posit itself as beyond good and evil. Coleman herself confesses to being “overtly romantic” as she supplies alibis for the group’s moral and strategic failures (it is, after all, incredibly difficult for an ethnographer to criticize her informants). But Nietzsche was a profoundly undemocratic thinker, whose avowed elitism should cast more of a disturbing shadow over the progressive potentials behind hacker groups than it does for Coleman, who embraces the ability of hackers to “cast off — at least momentarily — the shackles of normativity and attain greatness” (275). Coleman’s previous work on free software programmers convincingly makes the case for a Nietzschean current running through hacker culture; I am considerably more skeptical than she is about the liberal democratic viewpoint this engenders.

Ultimately, Coleman concludes that Anonymous cannot work as a substitute for existing organizations, but that its tactics should be taken up by other political formations: “The urgent question is how to promote cross-pollination” between Anonymous and more formalized structures (374). This may be warranted, but there needs to be a fuller accounting of the drawbacks to Anonymous. Because anyone can fly its flag, and because its actions are guided by talented and charismatic individuals working in secret, Anonymous is ripe for infiltration. Historically, hackers have proven to be easy for law enforcement and corporations to co-opt, not the least because of the ferocious rivalries amongst hackers themselves. Tactics are also ambiguous. A DDoS can be used by anti-corporate activists, or by corporations against their rivals and enemies. Document dumps can ruin a diplomatic initiative, or a woman’s social life. Public square occupations can be used to advocate for democracy, or as a platform for anti-democratic coups. Currently, a lot of the same geek energy behind Anonymous has been devoted to the misogynist vendetta GamerGate (in a Reddit AMA, Coleman adopted a diplomatic tone, referring to GamerGate as “a damn Gordian knot”). Without a steady sense of Anonymous’s actual political commitments, outside of free speech, it is difficult to do much more than marvel at the novelty of their media presence (which wears thinner with each overwrought communique). With Hoaxer, Hacker, Whistleblower, Spy, Coleman has offered a readable account of recent hacker history, but I remain unconvinced of Anonymous’s political potential.

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Gavin Mueller (@gavinsaywhat) is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at George Mason University, and an editor at Jacobin and Viewpoint Magazine.

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February 11, 2015
"The Black Jacobins and the Long Haitian Revolution" with Anthony Bogues

The Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has uploaded a talk by b2 editor and contributor Anthony Bogues called “The Black Jacobins and the Long Haitian Revolution: Archives, Historiography, and the Writing of Revolution” and you can watch it below.

February 5, 2015
Is the Network a Brain?

a review of Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
by Jonathan Goodwin
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Evgeny Morozov’s recent New Yorker article about Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile caused some controversy when critics accused Morozov of not fully acknowledging his sources. One of those sources was sociologist of science Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain. Morozov is quoted as finding Pickering’s book “awful.” It’s unlikely that Morozov meant “awful” in the sense of “awe-inspiring,” but that was closer to my reaction after reading Pickering’s 500+ pp. work on the British tradition in cybernetics. This tradition was less militarist and more artistic, among other qualities, in Pickering’s account, than is popularly understood. I found myself greatly intrigued—if not awed—by the alternate future that his subtitle and final chapter announces. Cybernetics is now a largely forgotten dead-end in science. And the British tradition that Pickering describes had relatively little influence within cybernetics itself. So what is important about it now, and what is the nature of this other future that Pickering sketches?

The major figures of this book, which proceeds with overviews of their careers, views, and accomplishments, are Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask. Stuart Kauffman’s and Stephen Wolfram’s work on complexity theory also makes an appearance.[1] Laing and Bateson’s relevance may not be immediately clear. Pickering’s interest in them derives from their extension of cybernetic ideas to the emerging technologies of the self in the 1960s. Both Bateson and Laing approached schizophrenia as an adaptation to the increasing “double-binds” of Western culture, and both looked to Eastern spiritual traditions and chemical methods of consciousness-alteration as potential treatments. The Bateson and Laing material makes the most direct reference to the connection between the cybernetic tradition and the “Californian Ideology” that animates much Silicon Valley thinking. Stewart Brand was influenced by Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (183), for example. Pickering identifies Northern California as the site where cybernetics migrated into the counterculture. As a technology of control, it is arguable that this countercultural migration has become part of the ruling ideology of the present moment. Pickering recognizes this but seems to concede that the inherent topicality would detract from the focus of his work. It is a facet that would be of interest to the readers of this “Digital Studies” section of The b2 Review, however, and I will thus return to it at the end of this review.

Pickering’s path to Bateson and Laing originates with Grey Walter’s and Ross Ashby’s pursuit of cybernetic models of the brain. Computational models of the brain, though originally informed by cybernetic research, quickly replaced it in Pickering’s account (62). He asks why computational models of the brain quickly gathered so much cultural interest. Rodney Brooks’s robots, with their more embodied approach, Pickering argues, are in the tradition of Walter’s tortoises and outside the symbolic tradition of artificial intelligence. I find it noteworthy that the neurological underpinnings of early cybernetics were so strongly influenced by behaviorism. Computationalist approaches, associated by Pickering with the establishment or “royal” science, here, were intellectually formed by an attack on behaviorism. Pickering even addresses this point obliquely, when he wonders why literary scholars had not noticed that the octopus in Gravity’s Rainbow was apparently named “Grigori” in homage to Gregory Bateson (439n13).[2] I think one reason this hasn’t been noticed is that it’s much more likely that the name was random but for its Slavic form, which is clearly in the same pattern of references to Russian behaviorist psychology that informs Pynchon’s novel. An offshoot of behaviorism inspiring a countercultural movement devoted to freedom and experimentation seems peculiar.

One of Pickering’s key insights into this alternate tradition of cybernetics is that its science is performative. Rather than being as theory-laden as are the strictly computationalist approaches, cybernetic science often studied complex systems as assemblages whose interactions generated novel insights. Contrast this epistemology to what critics point to as the frequent invocation of the Duhem-Quine thesis by Noam Chomsky.[3] For Pickering, Ross Ashby’s version of cybernetics was a “supremely general and protean science” (147). As it developed, the brain lost its central place and cybernetics became a “freestanding general science” (147). As I mentioned, the chapter on Ashby closes with a consideration of the complexity science of Stuart Kauffman and Stephen Wolfram. That Kauffman and Wolfram largely have worked outside mainstream academic institutions is important for Pickering.[4] Christopher Alexander’s pattern language in architecture is a third example. Pickering mentions that Alexander’s concept was influential in some areas of computer science; the notion of “object-oriented programming” is sometimes considered to have been influenced by Alexander’s ideas.

I mention this connection because many of the alternate traditions in cybernetics have become mainstream influences in contemporary digital culture. It is difficult to imagine Laing and Bateson’s alternative therapeutic ideas having any resonance in that culture, however. The doctrine that “selves are endlessly complex and endlessly explorable” (211) is sometimes proposed as something the internet facilitates, but the inevitable result of anonymity and pseudonymity in internet discourse is the enframing of hierarchical relations. I realize this point may sound controversial to those with a more benign or optimistic view of digital culture. That this countercultural strand of cybernetic practice has clear parallels with much digital libertarian rhetoric is hard to dispute. Again, Pickering is not concerned in the book with tracing these contemporary parallels. I mention them because of my own interest and this venue’s presumed interest in the subject.

The progression that begins with some variety of conventional rationalism, extends through a career in cybernetics, and ends in some variety of mysticism is seen with almost all of the figures that Pickering profiles in The Cybernetic Brain. Perhaps the clearest example—and most fascinating in general—is that of Stafford Beer. Philip Mirowski’s review of Pickering’s book refers to Beer as “a slightly wackier Herbert Simon.” Pickering enjoys recounting the adventures of the wizard of Prang, a work that Beer composed after he had moved to a remote Welsh village and renounced many of the world’s pleasures. Beer’s involvement in Project Cybersyn makes him perhaps the most well-known of the figures profiled in this book.[5] What perhaps fascinate Pickering more than anything else in Beer’s work is the concept of viability. From early in his career, Beer advocated for upwardly viable management strategies. The firm would not need a brain, in his model, “it would react to changing circumstances; it would grow and evolve like an organism or species, all without any human intervention at all” (225). Mirowski’s review compares Beer to Friedrich Hayek and accuses Pickering of refusing to engage with this seemingly obvious intellectual affinity.[6] Beer’s intuitions in this area led him to experiment with biological and ecological computing; Pickering surmises that Douglas Adams’s superintelligent mice derived from Beer’s murine experiments in this area (241).

In a review of a recent translation of Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologiae, Pickering mentions that natural adaptive systems being like brains and being able to be utilized for intelligence amplification is the most “amazing idea in the history of cybernetics” (247).[7] Despite its association with the dreaded “synergy” (the original “syn” of Project Cybersyn), Beer’s viable system model never became a management fad (256). Alexander Galloway has recently written here about the “reticular fallacy,” the notion that de-centralized forms of organization are necessarily less repressive than are centralized or hierachical forms. Beer’s viable system model proposes an emergent and non-hierarchical management system that would increase the general “eudemony” (general well-being, another of Beer’s not-quite original neologisms [272]). Beer’s turn towards Tantric mysticism seems somehow inevitable in Pickering’s narrative of his career. The syntegric icosahedron, one of Beer’s late baroque flourishes, reminded me quite a bit of a Paul Laffoley painting. Syntegration as a concept takes reticularity to a level of mysticism rarely achieved by digital utopians. Pickering concludes the chapter on Beer with a discussion of his influence on Brian Eno’s ambient music.

Paul Laffoley, “The Orgone Motor” (1981). Image source: paullaffoley.net.

The discussion of Eno chides him for not reading Gordon Pask’s explicitly aesthetic cybernetics (308). Pask is the final cybernetician of Pickering’s study and perhaps the most eccentric. Pickering describes him as a model for Patrick Troughton’s Dr. Who (475n3), and his synaesthetic work in cybernetics with projects like the Musicolor are explicitly theatrical. A theatrical performance that directly incorporates audience feedback into the production, not just at the level of applause or hiss, but in audience interest in a particular character—a kind of choose-your-own adventure theater—was planned with Joan Littlewood (348-49). Pask’s work in interface design has been identified as an influence on hypertext (464n17). A great deal of the chapter on Pask involves his influence on British countercultural arts and architecture movements in the 1960s. Mirowski’s review shortly notes that even the anti-establishment Gordon Pask was funded by the Office of Naval Research for fifteen years (194). Mirowski also accuses Pickering of ignoring the computer as the emblematic cultural artifact of the cybernetic worldview (195). Pask is the strongest example offered of an alternate future of computation and social organization, but it is difficult to imagine his cybernetic present.

The final chapter of Pickering’s book is entitled “Sketches of Another Future.” What is called “maker culture” combined with the “internet of things” might lead some prognosticators to imagine an increasingly cybernetic digital future. Cybernetic, that is, not in the sense of increasing what Mirowski refers to as the neoliberal “background noise of modern culture” but as a “challenge to the hegemony of modernity” (393). Before reading Pickering’s book, I would have regarded such a prediction with skepticism. I still do, but Pickering has argued that an alternate—and more optimistic—perspective is worth taking seriously.

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Jonathan Goodwin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. He is working on a book about cultural representations of statistics and probability in the twentieth century.

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[1] Wolfram was born in England, though he has lived in the United States since the 1970s. Pickering taught at the University of Illinois while this book was being written, and he mentions having several interviews with Wolfram, whose company Wolfram Research is based in Champaign, Illinois (457n73). Pickering’s discussion of Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science is largely neutral; for a more skeptical view, see Cosma Shalizi’s review.

[2] Bateson experimented with octopuses, as Pickering describes. Whether Pynchon knew about this, however, remains doubtful. Pickering’s note may also be somewhat facetious.

[3] See the interview with George Lakoff in Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates, ed. Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 115. Lakoff’s account of Chomsky’s philosophical justification for his linguistic theories is tendentious; I mention it here because of the strong contrast, even in caricature, with the performative quality of the cybernetic research Pickering describes. (1999).

[4] Though it is difficult to think of the Santa Fe Institute this way now.

[5] For a detailed cultural history of Project Cybersyn, see Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011). Medina notes that Beer formed the word “algedonic” from two words meaning “pain” and “pleasure,” but the OED notes an example in the same sense from 1894. This citation does not rule out independent coinage, of course. Curiously enough, John Fowles uses the term in The Magus (1966), where it could have easily been derived from Beer.

[6] Hayek’s name appears neither in the index nor the reference list. It does seem a curious omission in the broader intellectual context of cybernetics.

[7] Though there is a reference to Lem’s fiction in an endnote (427n25), Summa Technologiae, a visionary exploration of cybernetic philosophy dating from the early 1960s, does not appear in Pickering’s work. A complete English translation only recently appeared, and I know of no evidence that Pickering’s principal figures were influenced by Lem at all. The book, as Pickering’s review acknowledges, is astonishingly prescient and highly recommended for anyone interested in the culture of cybernetics.

February 4, 2015
Badiou Among the Poets

This is an abstract for a review article that is forthcoming in b2 by
Tom Eyers
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The Anglophone reception of the French philosopher Alain Badiou has focused largely on his ontological and political commitments. Where Jacques Rancière is increasingly received as a philosopher of art above all else, Badiou’s own critical commitments have received less attention. In this review essay of Badiou’s recent collection The Age of the Poets, I will scrutinize Badiou’s readings of literature, and in particular his readings of Wallace Stevens, in order to pose a series of more general, interlinked questions. First, what are the strengths and limitations of recent Continental philosophical reflections on the literary, defined as they so frequently are by a small, high modernist European canon? Might Badiou provide resources for a critique of what has become known as ‘world literature’, with its assumptions about translation and the smooth transportability of literary meaning? How might the limits of current literary-critical historicisms be further brought to notice by a critical confrontation with Badiou’s ‘inaesthetics’? Finally, how might the profound weaknesses of Badiou’s own practices of reading open up alternative, materialist and formalist frameworks to account both for the productivity of literary form at the level of the line, and for the neutralization and appropriation of that productivity across circuits of commodification, translation and journalistic-scholarly ‘appreciation’?

February 2, 2015