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  • David Thomas — The End of History, In Memoriam

    David Thomas — The End of History, In Memoriam

    by David Thomas

    The West welcomed East Germany to the end-of-history by flying in David Hasselhoff for Berlin’s New Year celebrations. From the top of the fallen wall, clad in a pulsing light-spangled jacket, Hasselhoff regaled half a million people with the period’s unofficial anthem, “Looking for Freedom.” It is still, to date, one of Germany’s bestselling songs.

    Two years earlier, as Margaret Thatcher closed in on her second re-election, Hot Chocolate’s former front man, Errol Brown, had also lent his weight to the liberal cause. During the 1987 Conservative Party Conference, the disco hitmaker stepped up to the podium and led the entire caucus in a rousing rendition of John Lennon’s pop-socialist anthem “Imagine” (Wilson 2013: 41):

       Imagine no possessions

    I wonder if you can

    No need for greed or hunger

    A brotherhood of man

    Imagine all the people

    Sharing all the world

    You, you may say I’m a dreamer,

    But I’m not the only one

    I hope some day you’ll join us

    And the world will live as one           

    Little wonder that irony was the order of the day. Confident in their unassailable position, and wryly indulgent of the counterculture’s crabby idealism, the architects of globalization rested content on their laurels. There was much to celebrate. Liberal democracy had vaulted over the last great hurdle on its pathway to perpetual peace. Francis Fukuyama captured the mood as he sketched out the lineaments of his wildly popular end-of-history thesis:

    What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (Fukuyama 1989: 4)

    The course of world events allowed Fukuyama to stand by this claim for almost thirty years. Writing in 2007, on the very cusp of the 2008 financial crisis, he offered a confident and largely unqualified reassertion of his fundamental argument:

    I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a ‘post-historical’ world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military. (Fukuyama 2007)

    Yet ten years on – as Fukuyama himself has conceded – the same claim has begun to leave behind a bad taste in the mouth. Walls are in vogue again. And as a fragile European Union teeters on the brink of fragmentation, the new political trajectory of the United States seems the more reliable harbinger of the political futures that await us, futures overshadowed by a resurgence of rightwing authoritarianism and a reactive cascade of unpredictable international statecraft. Indeed, as Trump has ridden a wave of anti-establishment discontent into the White House, “Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military” now looms large over the old effort to “transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law.”

    Even prior to Brexit and Trump’s election, the new tenor of the times was starting to emerge. As armed guards rolled out the checkpoints and the razor wire, as miles of ad hoc barrier unwound across Europe, it became apparent that the open borders of globalization belonged to another era. The Schengen Agreement was a thing of the past, a bitterly regretted utopian folly. And as the specter of Trump’s “great, great wall” hovered at the outer edge of possibility, it was becoming clearer that other dreams were dying too: You could keep your hungry, your poor, your tired, there was no room for them here.

    The truth was, however, these high-walled fever dreams had been under construction for some time. The work had never really stopped. Long before the “great wall” was rumored, and even as the old Iron Curtain came crashing down, the world’s wealthy had peered out from behind their battlements in the sky. This is Mike Davis writing in the mid-1980s:

    According to its advance publicity, Trump Castle will be a medievalized Bonaventure, with six coned and crenellated cylinders, plated in gold leaf, and surrounded by a real moat with drawbridges. These current designs for fortified skyscrapers indicate a vogue for battlements not seen since the great armoury boom that followed the Labour Rebellion of 1877. In so doing, they also signal the coercive intent of postmodernist architecture in its ambition, not to hegemonize the city in the fashion of the great modernist buildings, but rather to polarize it into radically antagonistic spaces. (Davis 1985: 112-3)

    When Davis wrote, he would probably have been surprised to learn that the proposed owner-occupant of this “medievalised Bonaventure” would one day descend in his golden elevator to lead a populist insurgency against “out-of-touch elites.” He would probably have been less surprised to hear that when he came, he came promising the Rust Belt’s dispossessed fortifications and battlements of their own.

    To understand the success of the strategy, and to understand the strange mismatch of class interests that defines the Trump mandate, one has to dig beneath the concrete partitions of the “postmodern” city and search within the rusting husk of the American factory system to grasp the hidden economic imperatives and political contingencies that produced deindustrialization and financialization as coeval phenomenon. Here – as many of us are belatedly beginning to realize – Robert Brenner’s history of postwar economic development proves an indispensable resource.

    Much of Brenner’s later work has focused on the turbulent transition from the global economy’s belle époque – the period of unprecedented economic dynamism the lasted from the close of the war to the early 1970s – to the “long downturn” that has followed in its wake. His work has drawn attention to a progressive reallocation of capital investments away from industrial manufacturing and into the so-called FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sector. In Brenner’s account of the history, as emerging industrial economies began contesting American manufacturing market dominance struggle for market share reached such a pitch of intensity that companies became accustomed to operating with radically reduced profit margins.

    In response to a corresponding decline in rates of return, investors became shyer of the manufacturing sector and sought to diversify their portfolios. And as fallow capital sought new routes to profit the structural import of the FIRE sector intensified. From the late 1970s through to the first decade of the new millennium the finance industry’s signature methods and investment strategies became more and more computationally sophisticated and systemically pervasive. Among the symptoms of the FIRE sector’s new significance was the rapid reconstitution of urban space that Davis describes. And it was, of course, in the context of the FIRE sector’s expansion that Trump emerged as the popular face of the resurgent real estate industry, whose towering skylines – so adored by Hollywood – became totemic of American greatness in its autumnal phase.

    For the better part of three decades, this increasingly baroque financial system succeeded in restoring dynamism to the world economy, propelling the US beyond a sputtering Soviet regime into the position of uncontested global hegemon. And as the oil and stagflation crises retreated from view, it is perhaps not that surprising that faith in the FIRE sector’s new methods became so strong that creditors began to think themselves so cybernetically insured against loss that they lent in increasingly blithe and unstinting fashion.

    It was in this climate of technocratic hubris that Fukuyama sketched out his thesis, one that expressed the dominant structure of feeling then prevailing in elite circles: The common sense of the period all but dictated that a universal “evolutionary pattern” was just then culminating in the globalization of liberal democracy, as “technologically driven capitalism … free[ed itself] of internal contradictions” (Fukuyama 1993: 91; xi).

    These dreams seem all the more ironic now that one of the FIRE sector’s most notorious figures has begun to wreak havoc with the signal institutions of liberal democracy, questioning the accuracy of the ballot, wielding executive orders in madcap and draconian fashion, intimidating the judiciary, and attempting to bludgeon the free press into abject submission. The ironies deepen when we recall that it was the increasingly risky expansion of the FIRE sector that triggered the 2008 financial crisis, as the securitization of subprime mortgages opened the door to that last round of dispossession that underlies so much of today’s anti-establishment discontent.

    The ramifying consequences of the 2008 financial crisis were evident in this electoral cycle as we saw the two candidates periodically breaking away from the familiar battery of appeals to the middle-class homeowner, to take time to address a dispossessed and precariously employed “working class” who had swelled to such an extent that their political significance could no longer be ignored.

    Yet in its resurrection the figure of the worker seemed to have undergone a subtle transformation. In its return to the mainstage of electoral politics, talk of the worker functioned less as a metonym for the workers movement, and more as a shorthand for the plight of the downwardly mobile “worker-citizen,” one who could no longer count on social state protections, whose stake in the real estate market was gone or imperiled, but who was still the bearer of the full legal rights and privileges of the citizen.

    To understand the increasingly reactionary disposition of this citizen-worker we have to grasp the long downturn’s ongoing effects on the technical and demographic composition of the real economy. This effort again finds us tacking back to the 1970s, to the last great crisis in the capitalist world system, when attempts to restore dynamism to the global economy saw industrial capital fighting to break free of the constraints that social democracy had placed on its agency, unleashing a two-pronged assault on labor. Capital flight saw manufacturing plants flee the blue-collar heartlands, as industry reconstituted its industrial base in the emerging economies where it could exploit a labor force that enjoyed far fewer legal protections. And at one and the same time as the Thatcher and Reagan administrations drove through the legislation that facilitated and policed this new round of capital flight – a series of legislative actions that also undergirded the FIRE sector’s emergence as the new motor of economic dynamism – manufacturers also fended off the labor movement from within, introducing a new round of automation that saw labor’s relative share in the productive process decline, further securing factories against sabotage and slowdown.

    Research collective Endnotes sums up the prevailing political fallout of this double-fronted assault:

    Industrial output continues to swell, but is no longer associated with rapid increases in industrial employment … In this context, masses of proletarians, particularly in countries with young workforces, are not finding steady work; many of them have been shunted from the labour market, surviving only by means of informal economic activity (Endnotes 2015)

    The use of the term “shunted” here evokes the language of Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis. And in tracking the early effects of this “shunting from the labour market” Hall identified that the policing of deindustrialization’s dispossessed broke differentially along racial lines. As the economy contracted, white Britons closed ranks, consigning immigrant communities to a greater share of the joblessness that capital flight was leaving behind it. Writing that race was “one of the main mechanisms, by which, inside and outside the work-place itself, th[e] reproduction of an internally divided labour force [was] accomplished” (Hall et al. 1982 [1978]: 346), Hall detailed the advantages that the dominant classes gleaned from these divisions:

    The ‘benefits’ … must therefore be reckoned to include not only the direct and indirect exploitation of the colonial economies overseas, and the vital supplement which this colonial work-force made to the indigenous labour force in the period of economic expansion, but also the internal divisions and conflicts which have kept that labour force segregated along racial lines in a period of economic recession and decline – at a time when the unity of the class as a whole, alone, could have pushed the country into an economic ‘solution’ other than that of unemployment, short-time, cuts in the wage packet and the social wage. (Hall et al. 1982: 346)

    Having identified these developing tendencies – and their role in keeping the “unity of the class as a whole” at bay – Hall went on to explore how black Britons had begun to adapt to their entrapment in the grey and black economies. Explaining the concept of hustling for the benefit of a predominantly white readership, he wrote:

    The hustle is as common, necessary and familiar a survival strategy for ‘colony’ dweller’s as it is alien and strange to those who know nothing of it … Hustlers live by their wits. So they are obliged to move around from one terrain to another, to desert old hustles and set up new ones in order to stay in the game. From time to time, ‘the game’ may involve rackets, pimping, or petty theft. But hustlers are also the people who sustain the connections and keep the infrastructure of ‘colony’ life intact. They are people who always know somebody, who can get things done, have access to scarce goods, who can ‘deal’ and service the less-respectable ‘needs’ of the respectable end of ‘colony’ society. They hang out around the clubs, organise the blues parties, set the domino game up, know what day the illegal white rum distilleries produce. They work the system; they also make it work … When the going is good, hustlers are men about the street with style, visibly displaying their temporary good fortune: ‘cool cats.’ (Hall et al. 1982: 351-2)

    Of course in the days since he offered this account, hip hop’s rise to pop cultural dominance has made the swaggering resourcefulness of the hustler part of the cultural fabric of millennial experience. Few under the age of forty are not intimately familiar with hip hop’s virtuosic chronicling of Black America’s experience of the racialized policing of the long downturn. Part of the enduring value of Hall’s work lies in its ability to tie hip hop’s signature tropes and stances to the determinations against which they emerged, as the policing of capital’s real movement subjected the black proletariat to the worst effects of this new round of capital flight and automation.

    Indeed, in retrospect, it seems that NWA, rather than Hasselhoff, would have been a fitter avatar of the inequities that globalization scattered in its wake as it ground the labor movement beneath its heel. For while Hasselhoff’s words at the Berlin Wall implied that freedom had descended on the former Soviet bloc in a moment of decisive apotheosis, in NWA’s language freedom was difficult to attain; indeed, it was wrestled from the system in the context of an unremitting struggle with occupying powers determined to maintain existing inequities:

    Fucking with me cause I’m a teenager

    With a little bit of gold and a pager

    Searching my car, looking for the product

    Thinking every nigga is selling narcotics

    You’d rather see me in the pen

    Than me and Lorenzo rolling in a Benz-o

    In the crosshairs of the carceral state it was more than evident that history and the struggle for emancipation was far from over.

    Still, when Hall sketched out his typology of the hustler he, like Davis, would probably have been surprised by the uncanniness of subsequent developments. For at one and the same time as policing practices trended along the lines he identified – with a massively disproportionate number of black Americans subject to incarceration and unemployment – we also saw hip hop’s hustler swagger its way deep into the heart of the American culture industry. So deep was the penetration that one of hip hop’s most celebrated dons would one day take to the stage of Carnegie Hall, backed by a 36-piece orchestra, in a full tuxedo and tie, to make a boast of a rags-to-riches tale that dwarfed anything that Dickens ever conceived:

    Momma ain’t raised no fool

    Put me anywhere on God’s green earth,

    I’ll triple my worth

    Motherfucker, I, will, not, lose

    I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell

    I am a hustler baby, I’ll sell water to a well

    I was born to get cake, move on and switch states

    Cop the coupe with the roof, gone and switch plates

    The epic scale of Jay Z’s biography – from resourceful street kid slinging rocks on the corner, to owner of music streaming service valued at $600 million – charts one self-defined hustler’s traversal of the vast wealth disparities that have characterized the global economy in the wake of the belle époque.

    We might pause for a moment here to consider the sociological significance of hip hop’s massive contemporary appeal. Indeed, it might not be too much of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that part of what has driven these accounts of life in the game to the top of the Hot 100 is precisely the more widespread generalization of the conditions of precarity and disenfranchisement that this genre has spent the bulk of its existence recounting and resisting. As the state continues to scale back on the welfarist commitments of the postwar order, and as yet another wave of automation sees the world system further unable to absorb labour into the productive process, a life in the black or grey economy is a very real prospect for increasing numbers of the world’s people. Endnotes write at another juncture:

    The social links that hold people together in the modern world, even if in positions of subjugation, are fraying, and in some places, have broken entirely. All of this is taking place on a planet that is heating up, with concentrations of greenhouse gases rising rapidly since 1950. The connection between global warming and swelling industrial output is clear. The factory system is not the kernel of a future society, but a machine producing no-future. (Endnotes 2015)

    A poignant statement in light of the last electoral cycle, as the Trump campaign implicitly configured the 1950s “factory system” as the locus of America’s lost greatness, promising to “return” the US to a weird Disneyland recapitulation of its Fordist heyday. And as Trump’s executive actions against environmental and energy agencies have demonstrated in the weeks since his inauguration, this back-to-the-future ride will not tolerate any slowdown or inhibition of its propulsive thrust toward “no-future.”

    Endnotes write that today’s left is prone to approach the worker’s movement with the “latecomers’ melancholy reverence” (Endnotes 2015) – a striking phrase that eerily anticipates Trump’s appeal to America’s erstwhile greatness. And these affinities seem capable of identifying a key problematic that has handed the Rust Belt over to Trump, and the British postindustrial zones to the Leave Campaign. For while the architects of globalization succeeded in decimating the worker’s movement, they were markedly less successful in their efforts to subordinate the sovereignty of the nation state to the rigors of transnational law. And thus as citizen-workers look for protection against immiseration, many seem increasingly willing to approve statist measures to both expel noncitizens who “unfairly compete” for scarce jobs, and introduce protectionist regimes designed to shield the nativist worker from the threat of international competition. Unable to organize themselves in a united internationalist front against exploitation, it is hardly surprising that the downwardly mobile worker-citizens of today are instead willing to fall back on the state’s promises to negotiate favorable “deals” on their behalf.

    The background to these tendencies seems to be the declining viability of the global development narrative that has attended postwar international policymaking since the Bretton Woods Agreement. In the context of secular stagnation and economic contraction, advanced economies have been forced to rely on our era’s signature admixture of debt and austerity, scaling back on welfarist provisions even as the nation state continues to function as a macroeconomic stimulator and a guarantor of private property. And increasingly, as development of the world system’s “peripheral” regions also stalls (Barone 2015), the core economies appear to be bracing themselves to resist a rising tide of economic and climate migration. It seems that population growth, economic growth, and industrial productivity have fallen out of sync to such a profound extent that we are increasingly “experiencing modernization of industry without modernity’s attendant social forms: without, that is, the institutional, social, cultural features associated with development, such as universal public education, democratic state institutions” and the humanitarian defense of human rights (Brouillette and Thomas 2016: 511).

    Yet rather than identify the newness of this geopolitical situation, political discourse on these matters more often coalesces around an introverted and melancholic nationalism that understands the immiseration of the worker-citizen in relation to vague but impassioned narratives of national decline. It is telling that Trump’s notorious baseball cap evokes the popular affluence of the belle époque through the allusive figure of “greatness,” a sleight of hand that evades the tricky question of how exactly one goes about turning back the clock on the technological development of the forces of production. For even if Trump’s protectionist policies do manage to lure back some manufacturing plants, the fixed to variable capital ratio will not be as favorable as it was back in the days when America was “great,” which is to say, when it was Fordist.

    Appeals to the figure of the precarious citizen-worker – more often figured in the guise of Thatcher’s “individual, and his family” – thus became a common feature of both campaigns. Yet in Clinton’s case we witnessed the strange spectacle of an establishment standard-bearer attempting to patch together, ad hoc, a fuzzily defined platform that alternately gestured toward the maintenance of the status quo, and toward the construction of a newly “social democratic” pluralism. Trump, meanwhile, staked out a clearly defined appeal to white nativist protectionism, one that was capable of uniting a large cross section of white America around the prospect of a Fordist “restoration,” one that sought to assert the rights and security of the white worker-citizen in the face of intensifying global economic malaise.

    In so doing, the Trump campaign amplified a strategy that has been a mainstay of advanced economies in times of crisis throughout the postwar period. Hall describes this strategy in relation to the structural function that migrant workers performed for British industry from the early-1950s to the mid-1970s:

    In the early 1950s, when British industry was expanding and undermanned, labour was sucked in from the surplus labour of the Caribbean and Asian subcontinent. The correlation in this period between numbers of immigrant workers and employment vacancies is uncannily close. In periods of recession, and especially in the present phase, the numbers of immigrants have fallen; fewer are coming in, and a higher proportion of those already here are shunted into unemployment. In short, the ‘supply’ of black labour in employment has risen and fallen in direct relation to the needs of British capital. (Hall et al. 1982: 343)

    On the one hand, Trump’s wall, Brexit, and the broader European resistance to the Schengen Agreement, faithfully reproduce the pattern that Hall identified, as global conditions of economic contraction have triggered a rising tide of anti-immigration policies.

    Yet what separates the dynamics that Hall describes from those that are unfolding around us now, is the extent to which Trump’s anti-immigration policies are also a feature of a larger enthnonationalist projectionist program, one that signals a full-blooded return to the so-called “beggar-thy-neighbor” economic strategies that last openly prevailed prior to the advent of the Bretton Woods Agreement.

    Writing in 1937, British economist Joan Robinson argued that “in times of worldwide unemployment, it is indeed possible for one country to increase its employment and total output by increasing its trade balance at the expense of other countries. She coined the phrase ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ to describe such policies” (Pasinetti 2008 [1987]). Robinson itemized four beggar-thy-neighbor economic weapons: wage reductions, officially induced exchange depreciation, export subsidies, and import restrictions. In the last month the US government has publicly evoked most, if not all, of these weapons, either accusing other governments of using them against the US, or signaling its intention to use them itself.[i] It is worth stressing that this is more of an escalation of already-existing dynamics than a complete bolt out of the blue – i.e. beggar-thy-neighbor strategies have been quietly on the rise for a decade or more (Barone 2015) – but the additional level of unvarnished aggression that Trump has introduced into the picture cannot but result in further escalations. The underlying dynamic is one in which – under the prevailing conditions of secular stagnation – economic growth risks becoming a zero-sum game, such that the growth of one nation is always talking place at the expense of another.

    Here Robinson’s explanation of the likely geopolitical fallout of beggar-thy-neighbor economics is worth remembering. Robinson wrote that “as soon as one country succeeds in increasing its trade balance at the expense of the rest, others retaliate” and among the economic effects of this cycle of retaliation is a reduced volume of international trade (Robinson 1947, 156).  There are affective consequences to these cycles of retaliation and these increasingly isolationist tendencies. Indeed, Robinson cautions that such policies can “add fuel to the fire” of economic nationalism, as trade wars push nations to the brink of open hostilities (Robinson 1947: 157).

    It should be noted that the intellectual circles that fostered this new ethnonationalism are not averse to an escalation of international armed conflict. Indeed, Steve Bannon is on record as thinking a war with China “inevitable” within the next ten years (Hass 2017). Much like Russia’s Alexander Dugin, Bannon subscribes to a world-historical vision that anticipates the onset of another great war, one that will serve as the crucible from which a revived Judeo-Christian culture will emerge victorious:

    But I strongly believe that whatever the causes of the current drive to the caliphate was — and we can debate them, and people can try to deconstruct them — we have to face a very unpleasant fact. And that unpleasant fact is that there is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act (qtd. Feder 2016)

    We are, at this juncture, a long way from the condition of universal post-historical secularism that Fukuyama anticipated. Indeed, the surprisingly pervasive appeal of Dugin and Bannon’s millennial creeds seems to have done much to consolidate Trump’s white American base, where a paranoiac strain of conservative religiosity has gained a powerful foothold. In a widely circulated address to a Vatican conference, Bannon appealed to the old counter-reformation concept of the “Church Militant” in an effort to recruit foot soldiers for an apocalyptic culture war, one that was to unfold, simultaneously, on domestic and geopolitical fronts:

    And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years. (qtd. Feder 2016)

    On the international stage, the prime bête noire was the “new barbarity” of “jihadist Islamic fascism” (qtd. Feder 2016). Yet in the same speech in which he made use of this profoundly ironic terminology, Bannon also trained his ire on the architects of globalization, producing a strange taxonomy of “capitalisms” that distinguished between the “enlightened capitalism” of the “Judeo-Christian West,” and the new “crony capitalism” of Davos, one that a “younger generation” had “gravitate[d] to under this kind of rubric of personal freedom” (qtd. Feder 2016).

    As Bannon’s remarks make plain, conservative America’s Christianity and its post-Fordist nostalgia are now all tangled up in each other in ways that speak both to the impact that automation and deindustrialization have had on traditional gender norms, and to the much more widely pervasive and ambient sense of melancholy that results from living under the setting sun of a declining hegemon. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the extinction of the blue-collar “oedipal wage,” and the corresponding structural obsolescence of the “traditional” nuclear family, have been key catalysts of the US’s culture wars. For while conservatives have targeted changing gender norms as “dangerous” symptom of liberalism’s lapsarian hubris, what is actually taking place is arguably much better understood as another case of all that was solid melting into air. Sarah Brouillette puts the matter this way:

    In our current situation of economic turmoil and stagnation, the reproduction of productive labor in couple-based households is no longer a necessity everywhere –indeed, in some countries, the difficulty of keeping people working and keeping the unemployed engaged in work-like activities worries governments greatly, hence conversations about the possibility of a Universal Basic Income. At the same time, an expanding service sector handles some of what used to keep people too busy to develop multiple relationships: housekeeping, childrearing, and elder care, for example. Under these circumstances, it is more possible than ever for ‘alternative’ ways of being to come to the fore, with some even achieving mainstream respectability: think gay marriage, affective disinvestment in parenting, non-couple coparenting, moving back in with your parents, and ‘conscious uncoupling.’ Flip the coin, and the dwindling of the blue-collar industrial workforce, the expansion of domestic and affective caring work in the service sector, and the creeping obsolescence of the traditional nuclear family, have been crucial drivers of the hyper-conservative Men’s Rights Activist or ‘alt-right’ masculinist backlash against changing norms. (Brouillette 2017)

    This is not, however, how this would-be Church Militant understands the situation. And under the leadership of figures like Bannon it has taken up the project of trying to discipline gender norms back into alignment with its particular hierarchy of values and prohibitions, a project that reveals a latently theocratic dimension to the American and Russian branches of ethnonationalism.

    Indeed, insofar as the Trump administration continues to signal its commitment to a new counter-reformation – via the metonyms of its opposition to abortion, trans rights, and gay marriage, and its virulent hostility to Islam – it can count on a large base of support among white American Christians, many of whom seem willing to overlook the refugee camps, the prisons, and the ecocide, just so long as gender norms and national holidays are better aligned with the niceties of canon law. The Trump era thus seems set to catalyze a struggle for the soul of Christianity, as clericalist traditionalists – ever vulnerable to allure of state power – do battle with a charismatic and decidedly anti-clericalist, anti-capitalist Pope:

    In one of the cardinal’s antechambers, amid religious statues and book-lined walls, Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon – who is now President Trump’s anti-establishment eminence – bonded over their shared worldview. They saw Islam as threatening to overrun a prostrate West weakened by the erosion of traditional Christian values, and viewed themselves as unjustly ostracized by out-of-touch political elites. ‘When you recognize someone who has sacrificed in order to remain true to his principles and who is fighting the same kind of battles in the cultural arena, in a different section of the battlefield, I’m not surprised there is a meeting of hearts,’ said Benjamin Harnwell, a confidant of Cardinal Burke who arranged the 2014 meeting. (Pierce 2017)

    And thus as the Trump admiration attempts to consolidates its base, it seems set to lean hard on the far right flank of conservative Christianity, as it positions its reactionary, xenophobic, and ecocidal mandate as a noble crusade to save “the West” from external and internal enemies. Early signs suggest that attacks on the press and the liberal academy will intensify in the coming days, as Bannon and company turn their attention to the “enemies within.” The structural position of the press and the academy thus seems set to undergo a seismic shift. Accustomed to offering ambivalent but compliant critiques of neoliberal globalism, the principle organs of the bourgeois sociolect now find themselves thrust into a battle that they had thought consigned to the annals of history, undertaking harried resistance on terrain that is not of their own choosing. The radicalization of the press is already underway as we pass through the looking glass into a world where Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan join The Guardian in drumming up support for a general strike. And as the Trump administration’s cuts to the NEA and NEH budget take hold, it appears that the liberal humanist academy will have little choice but to join the fray, drawing its post-critical turn to a panicked conclusion.

    It seems that for those who have been shielded from the harsher effects of globalization, it is hard not to feel nostalgic for the days when it was possible to indulge – however ambivalently – in Fukuyama’s dream. Where we go from here is extremely unclear, and one obviously feels dwarfed by the massive scale of these developments. But I suspect we should not spend too long grieving the loss of Fukuyama’s political horizon, for it helped to bring us to the place where we now stand, occluding the intensifying inequities that have resulted from the long downturn, developments that have opened the door to this new round of ethnonationalist insurgency. The Trump administration’s erratic brand of nascent fascism is a very real and present danger, one that we would be naive not to resist by whatever means we are able, but we also have to keep firmly in mind that this administration is not the sole source of our problems. We are in the grip of another of the violent and eruptive crises that capitalism has, throughout its long history, repeatedly thrust upon us.

    And if we find ourselves still burning a candle for some vestige of that dream of unity that Lennon cribbed from the chauvinistic language of the postwar reconstruction, then that may entail putting ourselves on the line in ways that we have been little accustomed to do in recent years. The fight is coming to us whether we like it or not. And in fighting back we will need to rediscover political horizons that extend far beyond the concerns of the individual and his family.

    The value of an individual life a credo they taught us

    to instill fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’

    a fog in our eyes, we are

    endless as the sea, not separate, we die

    a million times a day, we are born

    a million times, each breath life and death:

    get up, put on your shoes, get

    started, someone will finish     (di Prima 2007 [1971]: 8)

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

    References

    Barone, Barbara. “Protectionism in the G20.” Policy Department, Directorate-General for External Policies. European Union, Belgium: 2015 https://www.academia.edu/12266435/ Protectionism_in_G20_2015_

    Brenner, Robert. Economics of Global Turbulence. London: Verso, 2006.

    Brouillette, Sarah. “A feminist communist killjoy reads Future Sex,” Public Books. Forthcoming 6 March 2017.

    Brouillette, Sarah, and David Thomas. “Forum: Combined and Uneven Development,” Comparative Literature Studies, No 53, 3, 2016.

    Carter, Shawn. You Don’t Know. New York: Roc-A-Fella Records, 2001.

    Carter, Shawn. “You Don’t Know Lyrics,” Genius, 24 Feb 2017: https://genius.com/Jay-z-u-  dont-know-lyrics

    Davis, Mike. “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism,” New Left Review, No. 151, May – June 1985: https://newleftreview.org/I/151/mike-davis-urban-renaissance-and-the-spirit-of-postmodernism

    Di Prima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2007.

    Endnotes. “A History of Separation,” Endnotes 4, October 2015: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-preface

    Feder, J. Lester. “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World,” Buzzfeed, 16 Nov 2016: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world?utm_term=.yxR8RK2gV#.sh1Q6P02E

    Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, No. 16, 1989: 3-18.

    Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and The Last Man. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

    Fukuyama, Francis. “The History at the End of History,” Guardian, 3 April 2007: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/apr/03/thehistoryattheendofhist

    Haas, Benjamin. “Steve Bannon: We’re going to war in the South China Sea … no doubt,” Guardian, 02 Feb 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/02/steve-bannon-donald-trump-war-south-china-sea-no-doubt

    Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Hong Kong: MacMillan Press, 1982.

    Jackson, O’Shea, Andre Romell Young, Lorenzo Jerald Patterson, Harry Lamar III Whitaker.

    Fuck Tha Police. Los Angeles: Priority Records, 1988.

    Jackson, O’Shea, Andre Romell Young, Lorenzo Jerald Patterson, Harry Lamar III Whitaker.

    “Fuck Tha Police Lyrics,” Genius, 24 Feb 2017:https://genius.com/Nwa-fuck-tha-police-lyrics

    Lennon, John, and Barrie Carson Turner. Imagine. EMI, 1971.

    Pasinetti, Luigi L. “Robinson, Joan Violet (1903–1983).” The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Second Edition. Eds. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online. Palgrave Macmillan. 14 February 2017:  http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/article?id= pde2008_R000166> doi:10.1057/9780230226203.1450

    Robinson, Joan. “Beggar-My-Neighbor Remedies for Unemployment,” Essays in the Theory of Employment. Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, 1947: 156-172.

    Pierce, Charles C. “For His Next Trick, Steve Bannon Will Undermine the Pope.” Esquire. 07 Feb 2017: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a52901/bannon-pope-francis/

    Wilson, Scot. “Violence and Love (in Which Yoko Ono Encourages Slavoj Zizek to give Peace a Chance).” Violence and the Limits of Representation. Matthews, Graham, and Sam Goodman, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013: 28-48.

    Notes

    [i] For examples of the Trump administration’s remarks on currency devaluation see:

    http://asia.nikkei.com/Markets/Currencies/Trump-singles-out-Japan-China-Germany-for-currency-attack; and for their current approach to export subsidies, and import restrictions consult: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/02/economist-explains-9 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38764079

     

  • Conference Announcement — Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski

    Conference Announcement — Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski

    LIVESTREAMING NOW: WATCH HERE

    boundary 2 is pleased to announce Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, a conference at the University of Pittsburgh. All talks will appear on boundary 2’s YouTube channel after the conference.

    Schedule

    Friday, March 17, 2017

    1:30pm EST – Panel: Bruce Robbins and Chris Connery

    Liberal Elites – Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

    China: Neoliberal Constellations and the Left – Chris Connery, Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz

    3:00pm EST – Rethinking the Knowledge Problem: Preserving Professional Judgment in an Era of Metric Power – Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, Francis King Carey School of Law, University of Maryland

    4:30pm EST – Keynote: Hell is Truth Seen Too Late – Philip Mirowski, Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History of the Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame

    Saturday, March 18, 2017

    9:00am EST – Panel: Leah Feldman and Christian Thorne

    Post-Soviet, Neoliberal, New Right Formations – Leah Feldman, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

    The Paleo-Neo and the New New: Periodizing Liberalism – Christian Thorne, Professor of English, Williams College

    10:45am EST – Mirowski as Critic of the Digital – David Golumbia, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University

    1:30pm EST – The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism – Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College

    3:00pm EST – Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject – Annie McClanahan, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Irvine

    4:30pm EST – Fuck Work – James Livingston, Professor of History, Rutgers

     

  • March 2: Brian T. Edwards — Trump, Twitter, Circulation

    March 2: Brian T. Edwards — Trump, Twitter, Circulation

    On March 2, Professor Brian T. Edwards of Northwestern University will give a talk titled Trump, Twitter, Circulation: American Politics as Global Entertainment.

    The global circulation of Donald Trump’s political rhetoric ruptured the divide between American popular culture and US politics. This marks the postscript to the “American century,” during which the attractiveness of American culture had positive political benefits for the US. In the age of Trump, the US political system itself became a horrible form of global entertainment.

    Professor Edwards will speak at the University of Pittsburgh at 5pm on March 2, 2017 in the Humanities Center (Cathedral of Learning 602). boundary 2 will also livestream the talk here.

  • Christian Thorne — A South Wind Blowing from the East

    Christian Thorne — A South Wind Blowing from the East

    by Christian Thorne

    This paper was written for “The South and the South,” a conference hosted by Vanderbilt University in May 2016. Its opening questions were generated by Hortense Spillers and other members of the boundary 2 collective.

    This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal. 

    What comes to mind when a writer says that he means to comment upon “the South”? Anyone sitting in North America is likely to hear that term, if not further specified, as referring to the southern United States, what we might for now call “Alabama etcetera,” though this is hardly the phrase’s only possible designatum. The other region now routinely denominated “the South”—the other region, I mean, that routinely earns that otherwise ungrammatical capital S—isn’t actually a region at all, but a name for what used to be called “the Third World” or “the developing countries” or “the colonies”: the Global South. The American South, the Global South—as soon as one sees those two terms in the same paragraph, questions start humming. Why does the former Third World bear the same name as Georgia and the Carolinas? Do these have anything to do with one another, conceptually or concretely? Do our perceptions of one bleed into our perceptions of the other? In what sense are they all southern? What are we attributing to a region when we call it southern? Is there such a thing as southness?

    With these questions in front of us, I’d like to state a few propositions forthrightly—propositions, in the first instance, about the US South, which might or might not open up to include the global South, too. There are two propositions that I suspect I can get a person to agree with directly, without coaxing, and then a third that will in all likelihood require further elaboration and reflection. I’m going to share a few observations about “the South,” but with the proviso that I mean the phrase and not the place. What I’m wondering is what it means to call some expanse of territory “the South.”

    What I need us to see first is that the word “South” is, in the US context and probably most others besides, entirely optional. You might imagine yourself reading these words in Tennessee somewhere, west of the Appalachians. We often refer to that patch of the planet as “the South,” but we could and do call it other things. A person might for instance, feel a certain attachment to the region marked out in burnt orange here:

    —or to the dusty pink region here:

    Such a person would have a few different choices about what to call either of those contiguities. One of them he could call the slave states; the other he could call the Confederacy or the former Confederacy; or Dixie or Dixieland or maybe the Southeast.

    So again, the word South is optional. Second example, in one sentence:

    Have you ever noticed that Biafra is only ever referred to as eastern Nigeria?

    Third example. Anyone interested in the American South would still do well to read that group of writers variously referred to as the Vanderbilt Agrarians and the Nashville Agrarians and the Tennessee Agrarians and the Southern Agrarians.[1] A small admission: Only Edmund Wilson seems to have called them the Tennessee Agrarians, though that is what he called them.[2] Vanderbilt, Nashville, Tennessee, Southern. The nested redundancy of that list makes especially plain, I think, the elective quality of the word “southern.” Other designations are always available. Nor are these words plain synonyms—not at all. The word “Southern” is doing something slightly different in this formulation than would the words “Vanderbilt” or “Nashville”—it has different effects—and it falls to us to say what these are.

    The point that jumps out, of course, is that the South stands here at the end of a spectrum of widening scope, from the pinpoint of Vanderbilt to the eleven-state sectional vastness of the South. But let’s whittle the list back to Nashville vs. Southern, since these are the two main rivals when it comes to placing the Agrarians. We’ll want to register the localizing specificity of the one vs. the relative under-determination of the other. It becomes important here that we not overlook an important point, which is that option #4 does not merely name the widest among the four spaces—from campus to city to state to region. It’s that the word “Southern” doesn’t actually name a place in the same way that these others do.

    All I mean is that the South is a non-specific term—the only word on that list that is not a proper name. I would readily grant that even proper names aren’t as specifying as we usually take them to be, but the word “Southern” doesn’t even make a pretense of particularity, or whatever pretense it makes is easily dissipated. The word can’t help but refer beyond itself. A group of scholars, gathered at Vanderbilt in the spring of 2016 to talk about the American South and the global South, called their meeting “The South and the South.” Not all terms repeat so consequentially. There is a Nashville in Michigan, population 1600, but I doubt that a dozen professors have ever gathered to talk about “Nashville and Nashville.” What would it get you? The South and the South, however, gets you Alabama and Ghana. Or Ghana and Alabama. Of course, there’s no way to confirm the sequence. Which, after all, is the base South and which the South prime? The US South and the global South—when we hear the phrase “the South and the South,” do you and I mentally put them in the same order? And couldn’t there be other Souths beyond two? Southern Italy used to be organized into large estates worked by subjugated labor and regarded by Northern reformers as both immoral and an obstacle to national unity. So why not organize a conference on “The South and the South and the South?” Couldn’t il Mezzogiorno be our South double prime? But then where would that leave Okinawa or le Midi or the Saharan Maghreb?

    So I’m wondering what happens when we conceptualize a region as “the South.” What happens for that matter when we conceptualize it as “a region”? What I think I can show you is that these terms are both commonplace and problem-laden.

    The core claim in all Southern regionalist thinking is that the US South is a distinctive place. This sometimes goes hand in hand with the idea that the North has become a non-place, featureless, generic, that the North is ambient and all-purpose America. And if you believe this last, then the opposition North-versus-South is not exactly a battle between two places, because the South has a special claim on place-ness as such.

    What I want to show you is that this last claim is completely untenable, and I want to demonstrate this on something other than empirical grounds, though I’m sure there are ways of making the argument empirically, as well. But my claim is not a factual one—to the effect that Southern distinctiveness has eroded before mass media and the Internet and the strip-mall monoculture. That’s probably true, but it’s a truth you don’t need, because even before you get to the statistics and the comparative sociology, a case is there to be made on conceptual and discursive grounds.

    Here, then, is my non-empirical point: When Southern regionalists rise to talk about the South, they inevitably find themselves talking about something else, somewhere else, other places. The South won’t stay fixed. I’m not just saying that it’s hard to tell which states are and aren’t the South, though I’m sure that’s true. Nor am I saying that the South is internally differentiated, such that there are many Souths: the Piedmont, the Black Belt, the Appalachians, the Chesapeake. I’m saying that the South won’t stay still, that the South has a way of leaving the South or of sliding all over the map.

    When you go to talk about a region, anything other than a proper name will introduce into your discussion a degree of abstraction, inserting the region into a set, an overlay of universalizing claims, and these will erode the very particularism that you have undertaken to defend. And the South, we know, is not a proper name. Let’s just take a sentence like this one: “The Southern Agrarians were regionalists.” It’s an unexceptional, declarative sort of thing—very much the kind of sentence you could find in an undergraduate essay or in Paul Conkin’s book on the Vanderbilt gang or in Dorman’s Revolt of the Provinces.[3] Again: “The Southern Agrarians were regionalists.” Now that sentence is both descriptively true and a total mess. It contains three semiotically robust terms—regionalist, agrarian, and southern—and if you fix your gaze successively upon each one, it will crumble before you.

    The trouble with the word “agrarian” is easily explained. It is both a universal and in its own way a qualifier, referring indiscriminately to any society in which peasants or small farmers predominate, including the great many such societies that have existed outside of Virginia and Louisiana. Just as important, within the immensity of the US South, it refers only to such formations. It doesn’t matter what any given writer thinks he is doing, the drift of the word “agrarian” has always been to link certain subregions of the South to a great many regions outside the South. To any attempt to promote the South qua South, it thus introduces non-identity on two fronts. The word will always point beyond the South, putting pressure on the Vanderbilt poet to prefer Wisconsin (with its 76,000 farms) over North Carolina (with its 48,000). Already springloaded into the word “agrarian,” then, is Donald Davidson’s shock upon realizing that he preferred Vermont to a great many places in the old Confederacy. It harbors the joy of countrysides not your own.

    The word “regionalist,” meanwhile, introduces non-identity in even more arid a form. There are two different routes by which the concept of regionalism can betray itself. If I take as my project the defense of some region—the South—then I am declaring myself indifferent to the vast and open-ended list of other localities that could hypothetically command my regard: the Southwest, the Mountain West, the Plains. Each region will negate all other regions, striving to constitute itself as a set of one, hence to cast off the concept that is its double and its defeat. The South exists as a distinct “region” only until you name it as such, at which point it gets crammed into the lumpy sack of places radically unlike itself. Any one region comes at the expense of countless other provinces and districts, and so, too, does the word “region.” Alternately, then, I can vow to defend regionalism as such, any regionalism, just by virtue of its being regional, in which case, of course, I have ensured that I will never, in fact, defend any particular region at all—that’s the second betrayal: regionalism with all its options open. The Southern partisan who calls himself a regionalist has resolved in advance to make common cause with Massachusetts.

    Nor does the word “Southern” fare any better. Here are three arguments made on behalf of Southern distinctiveness, trying above all to account for the divergence between North and South.

    1) One hears that the South is—or that it was at one point—the only North American instance of a traditional society, the continent’s only guardian of the non-bourgeois virtues. We can sharpen this: Below the Potomac, American society was once dominated by non-commercial and semi-commercial agriculture, and because of this, it incubated a set of priorities that by the standards of Boston or New York seemed downright anti-bourgeois: a society that preferred leisure to work; that preferred aesthetics to efficiency; a society united by myth or religion or shared belief, and not by the contract; a society premised on care and mutuality and not on competition; a society that promoted humility rather than striving and conversation rather than consumption.[4]

    2) That’s one argument. Here’s a second. One also hears that the South diverged from the North early on because most of its white immigrants came not from England, but from England’s Celtic periphery. The core of white Southern culture, to which other groups have largely assimilated, has always been Irish and Scottish and Scots-Irish. Even English migrants to the South were more likely to come from the English borderlands and hill country—they were honorary Celts, easily absorbed by a Scottish majority. The task, then, is to give up on our sense of the white South as WASP—to learn to tell the difference between white people, and indeed, the difference between Anglos, whereupon we will be in a position to see that a great many of these latter weren’t actually Anglos at all.[5]

    I want to say a few words about why this argument matters, if right. People often wonder why the American myth of national origins gets routed exclusively through New England and the Pilgrims, when the Jamestown settlers beat the godly Northerners to the East Coast by a full decade. And the answer to that question has been easy to find—which is that early Virginia was a kakocracy of all-male, corporate-military misrule, wholly devoid of any principle or mission that didn’t include subordinating the Indians and hoping for gold.[6] If you want the US to have a purpose or program, you have to go through Plymouth Plantation. The usual line is that the first Southerners were just the rapacious side of the English establishment.

    But the Celtic thesis modifies this view in a big way. If this line were ever to gain general acceptance, which seems unlikely, then there is much in our histories of colonial North America that would have to change. The claim here is that Southern society hosted an alternate separatism—the separatism of the Celtic diaspora, in a period when the English were stepping up the colonization of their own periphery. It’s not just about Ulster, which is the place around which this argument sometimes gets truncated. The claim, rather, is that pre-enclosure Scotland and un-improved Ireland enjoyed an afterlife in the Southern backcountry—that the older Celtic formations survived longer in the US than they did in Britain or much of Ireland. That idea will then turn some of the major regional conflicts in early US history into a battle of competing British minorities, with neither section forced to play the role of the Anglo-mainstream.

    There’s also a whisper of political economy to the Celtic thesis, which begins not by emphasizing culture or folkways, but by emphasizing the unusual features of the backcountry’s pastoralist economy. Settlers in the upland South farmed like the Scots or the Irish or the northwest English, which is to say that they hardly farmed at all, keeping herds on open ranges, resigned in advance to some going missing and others dying, not bothering with barns or winter fodder or market crops or even gardens of any ambition. One could find that claim deeply challenging, since it blows apart generations of talk about Jeffersonian yeomen and the commitments of American republicanism. If this account accurately describes the small farmers of the Southern hill country, then the crackers weren’t yeomen. They were barely even farmers.

    3) A third argument holds that the South is different from the North because for much of its history the latter has been an economic dependency of the former.  The South was an internal colony, its fortunes largely dictated by Northern capital, hence underdeveloped in the familiar colonial manner: handed over to extractive industries and monocrop exports, its economy staffed by hyper-exploited labor, its railroads and forests and mines largely owned by outsiders who systematically diverted profits out of the region.[7]

    Those, then, are three common accounts of what has made the American South distinctive: The South is or was a traditional society, the South is or was Celtic, the South is or was an internal colony.

    Let’s go back to the first argument and ask: What happens when you claim that the South was different because it housed a “traditional society”? What does that claim do to the South as a concept? We can answer that question by looking at the footnote that Allen Tate inserted at the very beginning of his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand:

    The writer is constrained to point out (with the permission of the other contributors) that in his opinion the general title of this book is not quite true to its aims. It emphasizes the fact of exclusiveness rather than its benefits; it points to a particular home of a spirit that may also have lived elsewhere and that this mansion, in short, was incidentally made with hands.[8]

    These two sentences deserve to be restated. Tate is determined to explain right up front that he doesn’t think that he and his fellows should really be focusing on the South. That approach, he says, is too “exclusive,” too tied to a “particular home”; it won’t recruit a general readership. The whole point is that what Tate has consented to misdescribe as the Southern way “may also have lived elsewhere.”

    Tate’s words allow us to say something important. Even in the core texts of Southern regionalist thinking, the South is shadowed by an elsewhere, and it is this elsewhere that grows up in the gap between the concept of “the South,” understood as the old Confederacy, and the concept of “traditional society,” which isn’t bound to any region. So this argument, too, hands the Southern intellectual over to a non-regional regionalism. Even in the founding documents of Southern regionalism, its partisans were not, in fact, defending the South. But we can get more specific about this. For intellectuals like Tate, the “elsewhere” has a name.

    Tate: “We must be the last Europeans—there being no Europeans in Europe at present.”

    Ransom: “The South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture.”

    Davidson: “The cause of the South was and is the cause of Western civilization itself.”[9]

    The pattern is hard to miss: the last Europeans, European principles, Western civilization. Europe, Europe, the West. Richard Weaver was arguing in the 1950s that the Nashville Agrarians were in large part the product of the Rhodes Scholarship. In England, he said, a “suspicion began to dawn that the society they had grown up with in the South was in the main tradition of Western European civilization.”[10] Agrarianism, in other words, was interested in Virginia and Kentucky, true enough, but it was interested in those places as mediated through England. The Vanderbilt Twelve weren’t just Southern, they were Oxbridge Southern.

    Let’s not worry too much about the group biography of the Agrarians, though, because conceptually the point is even more compelling, since what we see here is that the South has begun sliding around the compass; it is refusing to stay anchored at 6:00. This entire discourse is what we can call the South as West, and it yields what I would like us to consider a general point: That Southern regionalism typically works by way of geographical conflations of this kind. The non-identity of the South is plainest when it borrows the names of other headings or when one cardinal point reinvents itself as a second. In the Dixie Theogony, the south wind can blow from any direction.

    The reader might need more convincing on that last point, so I’ll bring forward another instance. What is the geographical unconscious of the Celtic thesis? It will be enough to scan a passage from the standard citation on that topic:

    To understand regional differences in the US, one has to grasp that…

     …by virtue of historical accident, the American colonies south and west of Pennsylvania were peopled during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly by immigrants from the ‘Celtic fringe’ of the British archipelago—the western and northern uplands of England, Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Borders, the Hebrides, and Ireland—and that the culture these people brought with them and to a large extent retained in the New World accounts in considerable measure for the differences between them and the Yankees of New England, most of whom originated in the lowland southeastern half of the island of Britain.[11]

    You can see the transposition there. From north to south and south to north. The south was peopled by immigrants from the northern uplands. The Yankees originated in the southern half. What the Celtic thesis celebrates in the South is its Northernness, and this, of course, yields the most complete of the regionalist flippings—a proper dialectical Umschlag, in fact: The South as North. From a certain neo-Confederate perspective, the problem with New England is that it is insufficiently northern. One defends the South in order to safeguard the old boreal ways.

    The South as North—of course, that idea is available in a second version, as well. Before the Civil War, the South sent out freelance imperialists in all directions. The planter leadership was not just promoting westward expansion along the lines set down by the Missouri compromise. Many in the South embraced a more general program of Southern, slave-power expansion. Southerners operating independently of the US government tried repeatedly to invade Cuba. A native of Nashville conquered Nicaragua and appointed himself president of that country. Militant planter-politicians had thoughts of uniting with Brazil or perhaps of seizing large sections of the Amazon. A native of Tennessee led the US occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916. The Secretary of the Navy who presided over the invasion of Haiti in 1915 was from North Carolina. All I mean to say is that the South is a relational term, and that once you pass Key West, the South transposes in one to the north, an imperial north in which there are only Yankees. Any Southerners reading these sentences will have to face up to this. Proud not to be Yankees, they are Yanquis all the same.

    So what, then, of the claim that the South has been colonized, that it is the proximate victim of New England imperialism? First, we’ll want to take stock of a sentence that John Crowe Ransom wrote when he was in his 40s: “By poets, religionists, Orientals, and sensitive people, nature is feared and loved.”[12] That sentence appeared in 1929; I’ll Take My Stand was published the following year, and read side by side, it is easy to see that the achievement of that second volume was to add Southerners to the list of nature’s adorers—or indeed, to let the white Southerner absorb those other four positions into himself: the poetic Southerner, the sensitive Southerner, the religious Southerner, the Oriental Southerner. I’ll Take My Stand gives us the Virginian as Chinese aesthete and anchorite or the Tarheel as mandala-painting monk. Just as curious, this appetite for self-Orientalizing is what the new Southern studies most inherits from the Agrarians, precisely when it takes itself to be critical.

    There is more than a passing resemblance between some writers of the Southern Renaissance and the characters of novelist Chinua Achebe, who are caught up in the cultural conflict triggered by the growing Westernization of African life.[13]

    We’ll want to note: That last sentence was written by James Cobb, a historian at the University of Georgia and one-time president of the Southern Historical Association. Cobb uses the word “Westernization,” from which we need merely work backwards. Faulkner is the writer of the Westernization of the South, which makes of the South a colonized East or generic Orient. Or there’s this, by the Duke historian John Cell:

    By the mid-1870s, however, it was clear that the strategy of direct rule [by the North in the defeated South] had failed. But as other imperialists [other than the Yankees]—notably the British in the Indian princely states, Malaya, Nigeria, and elsewhere—have also discovered, the goal of economic hegemony could be achieved as well, and with much less trouble and expense, through subtler forms of indirect political domination.[14]

    Or there’s this, by a senior historian at Clemson:

    In the following passages by Said, I have substituted the words northern or Yankee for Said’s European, West, and the like, and the words South or southern for Orient, Arab, (Mid)East, and so on.[15]

    This last is especially telling, since it entirely candid about the search-and-replace quality of the entire endeavor. Regionalism as a master discourse will attach its claims indiscriminately to any compass point. The arguments remain the same; you just swap in fresh coordinates.

    The South as West, the South as North, the South as East. Traveling the rim of the compass, we end up back at South as South, but now this last formulation appears us in changed form, internally riven, no longer simply itself. To wit:

    Woodward: “Like republics below the Rio Grande the South was limited largely to the role of a producer of raw materials, a tributary of industrial powers, an economy dominated by absentee owners.”

    McWhiney: “John Morgan Dederer claims that ‘the tribal Celtic-Southerner’s culture and folk traits were so compatible with those of the Africans that it took little adaptation for slaves to fit Celtic characteristics around their African practices.’ Many of the Indians of the Old South practiced lifestyles quite similar to those of their Celtic neighbors.”[16]

    This is, of course, a second version of the South as colony, but now without the language of the East or the Orient. In this variant, the South gets to keep its name, but is nonetheless doubled by other Souths. In a fit of tribalism and primitivism, the old Confederacy enlists in the ranks of the darker nations. This last should help us see what is most distinctive about Southernism as a discourse, that it produces a contradiction or particular intertwining, enrolling itself simultaneously in the West and the non-West, naming itself the South while also claiming to run true north. The South positions itself as the repository of all Western values, as civilization’s last American garrison, while also embracing an unlikely anti-colonialism. It is in the discourse of the twofold South that the colonizers learn to wrap themselves in the pathos of the colonized. We can spot this most efficiently in the words of Thomas Fleming, a classicist trained at UNC:

     The original Klan was a national liberation army made up of [those] who refused to accept their status as a subjugated people.[17]

    That is the idiom of white-supremacist Third Worldism, which is the position made possible by the indistinct and never-regional word “South.” The South and the South: Or, the masters enroll themselves in the coalition.

    Notes

    [1] See I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930. The title page attributes the book to “Twelve Southerners.” For background, see Paul Conkin’s Southern Agrarians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).

    [2] Edmund Wilson, “Tennessee Agrarians.” New Republic. 29 July, 1931.

    [3] In addition to Conkin, see Dorman’s Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

    [4] See, for instance, Allen Tate’s “Remarks on the Southern Religion” in I’ll Take My Stand, pp. 155 – 175.

    [5] Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988).

    [6] See Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

    [7] See, among many others, Natalie Ring’s The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880 – 1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

    [8] Tate, p. 155.

    [9] Tate’s letter to Donald Davidson is quoted in Paul Murphy’s Rebuke of History: Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 66; Ransom in I’ll Take My Stand, p. 3; Davidson, writing in Southern Writers in the Modern World, qtd in Murphy, p. 114.

    [10] Richard Weaver, “Agrarianism in Exile” in The Sewanee Review, 58.5 (1950), pp. 586 – 606, quotation p. 588.

    [11] McWhiney, p. xxi.

    [12] Ransom, God Without Thunder (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 31.

    [13] James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 139.

    [14] John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1981) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 146.

    [15] Orville Burton, “The South as ‘Other,’ the Southerner as Stranger,” Journal of Southern History, 79 (Feb. 2013), pp. 7–50, quotation p. 12.

    [16] C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877 – 1913, (No city given: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 311; McWhiney, p. 21.

    [17] Fleming qtd in Murphy, p. 241.

     

  • Quinn DuPont – Ubiquitous Computing, Intermittent Critique

    Quinn DuPont – Ubiquitous Computing, Intermittent Critique

    a review of Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Lily Díaz, Morten Søndergaard, and Maria Engberg, eds., Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture (Routledge 2016)

    by Quinn DuPont

    ~

    It is a truism today that digital technologies are ubiquitous in Western society (and increasingly so for the rest of the globe). With this ubiquity, it seems, comes complexity. This is the gambit of Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture (Routledge 2016), a new volume edited by Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Lily Díaz, Morten Søndergaard, and Maria Engberg.

    There are of course many ways to approach such a large and important topic: from the study of political economy, technology (sometimes leaning towards technological determinism or instrumentalism), discourse and rhetoric, globalization, or art and media. This collection focuses on art and media. In fact, only a small fraction of the chapters do not deal either entirely or mostly with art, art practices, and artists. Similarly, the volume includes a significant number of interviews with artists (six out of the forty-three chapters and editorial introductions). This focus on art and media is both the volume’s strength, and one of its major weaknesses.

    By focusing on art, Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture pushes the bounds of how we might commonly understand contemporary technology practice and development. For example, in their chapter, Dietmar Offenhuber and Orkan Telhan develop a framework for understanding, and potentially deploying, indexical visualizations for complex interfaces. Offenhuber and Telhan use James Turrell’s art installation Meeting as an example of the conceptual shortening of causal distance between object and representation, as a kind of Peircean index, and one such way to think about systems of representation. Another example of theirs, Natalie Jermijenko’s One Trees installation of one hundred cloned trees, strengthens and complicates the idea of the causal index, since the trees are from identical genetic stock, yet develop in natural and different ways. The uniqueness of the fully-grown trees is a literal “visualization” of their different environments, not unlike a seismograph, a characteristic indexical visualization technology. From these examples, Offenhuber and Telhan conclude that indexical visualizations may offer a fruitful “set of constraints” (300) that the information designer might draw on when developing new interfaces that deal with massive complexity. Many other examples and interrogations of art and art practices throughout the chapters offer unexpected and penetrating analysis into facets of ubiquitous and complex technologies.

    James Turrell, Meeting 2016
    MoMA PS1 | James Turrell, Meeting 2016, Photos by Pablo Enriquez

    A persistent challenge with art and media analyses of digital technology and computing, however, is that the familiar and convenient epistemological orientation, and the ready comparisons that result, are often to film, cinema, and theater. Studies reliant on this epistemology tend to make a range of interesting yet ultimately illusory observations, which fail to explain the richness and uniqueness of modern information technologies. In my opinion, there are many important ways that film, cinema, and theater are simply not like modern digital technologies. Such an epistemological orientation is, arguably, a consequence of the history of disciplinary allegiances—symptomatic of digital studies and new media studies originating from screen studies—and a proximate cause of Lev Manovich’s agenda-setting Language of New Media (2001), which relished in the mimetic connections resulting from the historical quirk that the most obvious computing technologies tend to have screens.

    Because of this orientation, some of the chapters fail to critically engage with technologies, events, and practices largely affecting lived society. A very good artwork may go a long way to exposing social and political activities that might otherwise be invisible or known only to specialists, but it is the role of the critic and the academic to concretize these activities, and draw thick connections between art and “conventional” social issues. Concrete specificity, while avoiding reductionist traps, is the key to avoiding what amounts to belated criticism.

    This specificity about social issues might come in the form of engagement with normative aspects of ubiquitous and complex digital technologies. Instead of explaining why surveillance is a feature of modern life (as several chapters do, which is, by now, well-worn academic ground), it might be more useful to ask why consumers and policy-makers alike have turned so quickly to privacy-enhancing technologies as a solution (to be sold by the high-technology industry). In a similar vein, unsexy aspects of wearable technologies (accessibility) now offer potential assistance and perceptual, physical, or cognitive enhancement (as described in Ellis and Goggin’s chapter), alongside unprecedented surveillance and monetization opportunities. Digital infrastructures—both active and failing—now drive a great deal of modern society, but despite their ubiquity, they are hard to see, and therefore, tend not to get much attention. These kinds of banal and invisible—ubiquitous—cases tend not to be captured in the boundary-pushing work of artists, and are underrepresented (though not entirely absent) in the analyses here.

    A number of chapters also trade on old canards, such as worrying about information overload, “junk” data whizzing across the Internet, time “wasted” online, online narcissism, business models based on solely on data collection, and “declining” privacy. To the extent that any of these things are empirically true—when viewed contextually and precisely—is somewhat beside the point if we are not offered new analyses or solutions. Otherwise, these kinds of criticisms run the risk of sounding like old people nostalgically complaining about an imagined world before technological or informational ubiquity and complexity. “Traditional” human values might be an important form of study, but not as the pile-on Left-leaning liberal romanticism prevalent in far too many humanistic inquiries of the digital.

    Another issue is that some of the chapters seem to be oddly antiquated for a book published in 2016. As we all know, the publication of edited collections can often take longer than anyone would like, but for several chapters, the examples, terminology, and references feel unusually dated. These dated chapters do not necessarily have the advantage of critical distance (in the way that properly historical study does), and neither do they capture the pulse of the current situation—they just feel old.

    Before turning to a sample of the truly excellent chapters in this volume, I must pause to make a comment about the book’s physical production. On the back cover, Jussi Parikka calls Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture a “massively important volume.” This assessment might have been simplified by just calling it “a massive volume.” Indeed, using some back-of-the-napkin calculations, the 406 dense pages amounts to about 330,000 words. Like cheesecake, sometimes a little bit of something is better than a lot. And, while such a large book might seem like good value, the pragmatics of putting an estimated 330,000 words into a single volume requires considerable care to typesetting and layout, which unfortunately is not the case here. At about 90 characters per line, and 46 lines per page—all set in a single column—the tiny text set on extremely long lines strains even this relatively young reviewer’s eyes and practical comprehension. When trudging through already-dense theory and the obfuscated rhetoric that typically accompanies it (common in this edited collection), the reading experience is often painful. On the positive side, in the middle of the 406 pages of text there are an additional 32 pages of full-color plates, a nice addition and an effective way to highlight the volume’s sympathies in art and media. An extensive index is also included.

    Despite my criticisms of the approach of many of the chapters, the book’s typesetting and layout, and the editors’ decision to attempt to collocate so much material in a single volume, there are a number of outstanding chapters, which more than redeem any other weaknesses.

    Elaborating on a theme from her 2011 book Programmed Visions (MIT), Wendy H.K. Chun describes why memory, and the ability to forget, is an important aspect to Mark Weiser’s original notion of ubiquitous computing (in his 1991 Scientific American article). (Chun also notes that the word “ubiquitous” comes from “Ubiquitarians,” a Lutherans sect who believed Christ was present ‘everywhere at once’ and therefore invisible.) According to Chun’s reading of Weiser, to get to a state of ubiquitous computing, machines must lose their individualized identity or importance. Therefore, unindividuated computers had to remember, by tracking users, so that users could correspondingly forget (about the technology) and “thus think and live” (161). The long history of computer memory, and its rhetorical emergence out of technical “storage” is an essential aspect to the origins of our current technological landscape. Chun notes that prior to the EDVAC machine (and its strategic alignment to cognitive models of computation), storage was a well understood word, which etymologically suggested an orientation to the future (“stores look toward a future”). Memory, on the other hand, contained within it the act of recall and repetition (recall Meno’s slave in Plato’s dialogue). So, when EDVAC embedded memory within the machine, it changed “memory by making memory storage” (162). In doing so, if we wanted to rehabilitate Weiser’s original image, of being able to “think and live,” we would need to refuse the “deadening of the world brought about by memory as storage and realize the fundamentally collective nature of memory and writing” (162).

    Sean Cubitt does an excellent job of exposing the political economy of ubiquitous technologies by focusing on the ways that enclosure and externalization occur in information environments, interrogating the term “information economy.” Cubitt traces the history of enclosures from the alienation of fifteenth-century peasants from their land, the enclosure of skills to produce dead labour in nineteenth-century factories, to the conversion of knowledge into information today, which is subsequently stored in databases and commercialized as intellectual property—alienating individuals from their own knowledge. Accompanying this process are a range of externalizations, predominantly impacting the poor and the indigenous. One of the insightful examples Cubitt offers of this process of externalization is the regulation of radio spectrum in New Zealand, and the subsequent challenge by Maori people who, under the Waitangi Treaty, are entitled to “all forms of commons that pre-existed the European arrival” (218). According to the Maori, radio spectrum is a form of commons, and therefore, the New Zealand government is not permitted to claim exclusive authority to manage the spectrum (as practically all Western governments do). Not content to simply offer critique, Cubitt concludes his chapter with a (very) brief discussion of potential solutions, focusing on the reimagining of peer-to-peer technology by Robert Verzola of the Philippines Green Party. Peer to peer technology, Cubitt tentatively suggests, may help reassert the commons as commonwealth, which might even salvage traditional knowledge from information capitalism.

    Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin discuss the mechanisms of locative technologies for differently-abled people. Ellis and Goggin conclude that devices like the later-model iPhone (not the first release), and the now-maligned Google Glass offer unique value propositions for those engaged in a spectrum of impairment and “complex disability effects” (274). For people who rely on these devices for day-to-day assistance and wayfinding, these devices are ubiquitous in the sense Weiser originally imagined—disappearing from view and becoming integrated into individual lifeworlds.

    John Johnston ends the volume as strongly as N. Katherine Hayles’s short foreword opened it, describing the dynamics of “information events” in a world of viral media, big data, and, as he elaborates in an extended example, complex and high-speed financial instruments. Johnston describes how events like the 2010 “Flash Crash,” when the Dow fell nearly a thousand points and lost a trillion dollars and rebounded within five minutes, are essentially uncontrollable and unpredictable. This narrative, Johnston points out, has been detailed before, but Johnston twists the narrative and argues that such a financial system, in its totality, may be “fundamentally resistant to stability and controllability” (389). The reason for this fundamental instability and uncontrollability is that the financial market cannot be understood as a systematic, efficient system of exchange events, which just happens to be problematically coded by high-frequency, automated, and limit-driven technologies today. Rather, the financial market is a “series of different layers of coded flows that are differentiated according to their relative power” (390). By understanding financialization as coded flows, of both power and information, we gain new insight into critical technology that is both ubiquitous and complex.

    _____

    Quinn DuPont studies the roles of cryptography, cybersecurity, and code in society, and is an active researcher in digital studies, digital humanities, and media studies. He also writes on Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technologies, and is currently involved in Canadian SCC/ISO blockchain standardization efforts. He has nearly a decade of industry experience as a Senior Information Specialist at IBM, IT consultant, and usability and experience designer.

    Back to the essay

  • Andrew Martino – Exhuming the Text: Alice Kaplan’s “Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic”

    Andrew Martino – Exhuming the Text: Alice Kaplan’s “Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic”

    Alice Kaplan’s Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic

    Reviewed by Andrew Martino

    Albert Camus never considered himself an existentialist. In fact, Camus never exclusively believed in any school of thought. Camus was the consummate outsider, the one who stood apart from those who subscribed to views that forced those subscribers into a narrow ideology, especially when that ideology mixed with violence, something Camus steadfastly resisted. If we had to place Camus into any category it would be that of the humanist caught in the absurd. Camus believed in life over death (without believing in an afterlife), yet this belief did not keep him from contemplating the question of suicide, the only serious philosophical problem confronting us, as he writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus’ humble beginnings in extreme poverty and illiteracy in his native Algeria  testify to the power of the human spirit in the face of an indifferent world. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 he expressed reservations and claimed that the prize should have gone to André Malraux, an early influence on his writing. Camus also realized that the Nobel would bring a certain celebrity that would complicate his life, perhaps even sabotaging his art. Add to this his “silence” on the Algerian problem and his very public and acrimonious break with Sartre, and Camus becomes a figure trapped in a world where he is increasingly unable to control his own image. Camus is a problematic figure who is claimed by both the Right and the Left, leaving the man and his writing caught in a political vortex. Focusing on the postcolonial aspect of The Stranger, Edward W. Said writes that Camus “is a moral man in an immoral situation.”[i] When Camus died at the age of 46 in a car accident in 1960, he left the world with the image of the charismatic young man, Bogart-like in his coolness, and still with the promise of great things to come. But a saint he was not. His numerous affairs and constant womanizing, his reluctance to act or speak out against French imperialism in Algeria, his disillusionment with and expulsion from the Communist Party, render him more human than academics might be comfortable with. Camus’ life was full of contradictions, full of silences. Yet, it was precisely from these contradictions and silences that Camus produced one of the most important and widely read books of the twentieth century.

     Looking back over the seven decades since the publication of The Stranger, Camus’ reluctance to situate (in the Sartrean sense of the term) himself in the bubble of existentialism, a bubble in which The Stranger and his relationship with Sartre placed him, the novel blazed a path that opened up fields where the absurd might be articulated, contemplated, and confronted from the inside (the modernist bent) rather than from above and beyond, as the canonical novels of the nineteenth century may have done. In her essay “French Existentialism,” Hannah Arendt briefly examines Sartre and Camus’ influence on the “new” movement where novels carry the weight of philosophy. Throughout that essay she also comments on Camus’ reluctance to be labeled an existentialist. “Camus has probably protested against being called an Existentialist because for him the absurdity does not lie in man as such or in the world as such but only in their being thrown together.”[ii] Here we have what is perhaps the most concise and articulate formulation of absurdist philosophy to date. Camus’ definition of absurdity, painstakingly mapped out in Caligula, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus, is not quite existentialism, but does contain existentialist DNA, especially Kierkegaardian and Dostoevskian (two of Camus’ patron saints) DNA. As Camus remarks in The Myth of Sisyphus: “I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together.”[iii] Camus’ definition of the absurd is also the epistemological curve in the road separating him from Sartre’s thinking. If Sartre’s philosophy can be distilled into his phrase “Hell is other people,” then Camus’ is a philosophy of the absurd dependent upon relationships among people. On the other hand, Camus’ articulation of the absurd, as we’ve seen above, resides in the relationship of humans with their world.

    Together, Sartre and Camus blazed a path where philosophy and art, in this case literature, met, thereby ushering in a new form of the novel, one that would examine existence from a philosophical perspective while making use of a form in which to mold these philosophical perspectives. What emerges from this is a hybrid. According to Randall Collins, “What was identified was a tradition of literary-philosophical hybrids. Sartre and Camus were key formulators of the canon, and themselves archetypes of the career overlap between academic networks and the writers’ market. The phenomenon of existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s added another layer to this overlap.”[iv] But this hybridization was more than a heady cerebral new movement in fiction; this hybrid constituted a new way of thinking about the world, a world that emerged primarily from a particular network of intellectuals at a particular time in Paris. Sartre and Camus are on the crest of this wave of existentialism and their thinking would go on to change the world.

    Alice Kaplan’s extraordinary new book Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, is a careful and meticulously researched examination of Camus’ 1942 novel. Kaplan is one of the leading scholars of twentieth century French culture and history. She is currently the John M. Masser Professor of French at Yale University where she also received her Ph.D. in French in 1981. She has published seven books, including: French Lessons: A Memoir (1993), The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000), and Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (2012). In 2013 Kaplan edited and provided the introduction to The Algerian Chronicles, a collection of articles and essays Camus wrote from 1939-1958. Kaplan’s edited edition is the first time these writings have appeared in English, so she is no stranger to Camus and his place in twentieth century French culture.

    Early on Kaplan claims that Looking for the Stranger is actually a biography of Camus’ best known work, and one of the most famous and widely read texts of the twentieth-century. However, this does not mean that Kaplan foregoes a glimpse into Camus’ life, thus resurrecting the Barthesian “death of the author” debate. Instead, Kaplan goes looking for The Stranger in the author instead of the author in The Stranger; the difference is subtly stunning. In other words, her investigation is more preoccupied with the creative process and its cultural and social context than it is with getting to the author as a god-like figure. Camus always claimed that The Stranger was the second in a three part series exploring the absurd from three different perspectives: a novel (The Stranger), a dramatization (Caligula), and a philosophical work (The Myth of Sisyphus). But The Stranger is hardly a book that needs rescuing from obscurity, nor does Kaplan claim that it does. To date the novel has sold over ten million copies and is still read in over 40 languages. It is still on high school and college syllabi, thus making it required reading for young men and women. In fact, a student’s first encounter with existentialism and the absurd is likely to come from a reading of The Stranger. Instead, she offers us a more comprehensive look into the text, running down every lead, exploring every avenue that might expand our understanding of what makes The Stranger the text that it is.

    Kaplan begins by acknowledging the spectacular success of The Stranger, making it one of the most popular and important texts of the twentieth century. She quickly glosses over the critical reaction to The Stranger by pointing out that readings of the novel map some of the most important theoretical lenses that have influenced twentieth century thought. “In fact, you can construct a pretty accurate history of twentieth-century literary criticism by following the successive waves of analysis of The Stranger: existentialism, new criticism, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonial studies” (2). The Stanger, she claims, has influenced thinking of a diverse population that spans generations. Indeed, the remarkable staying power of the novel to remain relevant, perhaps even more relevant now than when it was published, is a feat that its author and its critics at the time could not have foreseen. I am not sure that students continue to read The Stranger with the commitment that they once did, but it is undeniable that the novel still matters, that it still provokes us into thinking, especially in a time when fundamentalism and terrorism are on the rise, and Europe and the United States are flirting with a new form of fascism in the guise of a renewed interest in ridged nationalism. But Kaplan is not necessarily interested in the public and academic reception of The Stranger. Instead, she claims that the novel’s readers and commentators have overlooked something from our reading of the text since its publication: that something is a biography of the novel. “Yet something essential is lacking in our understanding of the author and the book. By concentrating on themes and theories—esthetic, moral, political—critics have taken the very existence of The Stranger for granted” (2-3). She takes the unprecedented, and academically unpopular path that looks into the life of the author and the circumstances that allowed the author at a particular place and time to write one of the most powerful works of world literature. However, it is important to point out that Kaplan sets out to write a biography of the novel, and not the author. In fact, Camus’ life becomes a part of the puzzle that is The Stranger.

    Kaplan is not the first to comment on the unlikely success of The Stranger and its problematic birth. She is, however, the first to devote an entire book to an investigation, an investigation that is almost documentary-like in its approach, to the novel from conception to publication and beyond. And she accomplishes this brilliantly. Told in twenty-six short chapters, bookended by a prologue and an epilogue, Kaplan leads us into the depths of the novel in a highly engaging and thought-provoking fashion. In fact, the structure of her book presents its readers with the “life” of the novel, a life that has continued on long after the death of its creator. Drawing from a reservoir of sources, including Camus’ notebooks and her own trips to Algeria, Looking for the Stranger is a scholarly adventure story. As Kaplan claims in her acknowledgements: “I looked for The Stranger in libraries, in archives, in neighborhoods on three continents” (219). Of course, the idea of The Stranger was with her all of the time, but what makes Kaplan’s book so provocative is precisely the lengths she goes to in search of the novel. Kaplan explores The Stranger in three parts: before its publication, during its publication, and after its publication.

    In the first chapter Kaplan gives us the image of a young man in front of a bonfire burning various papers that link him to a past, a past that could be dangerous to him and those who know him. But as Kaplan tells it, the young Camus could not bring himself to burn all of his letters and writings. What he saved would act as a cache of material, both physical and remembered, from which he would extract and rework into a slim, simply told tale of a man who fails to cry at his mother’s funeral and, by a series of circumstances, ends up shooting an unnamed Arab on a beach, only to be arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Yet, the reader is never quite sure if the protagonist is convicted and sentenced to death because of the murder or his refusal to conform to the rules of a society that demands that one cry at one’s mother’s funeral. The image of the bonfire given to us by Kaplan is a powerful one. As we travel with her deeper into her investigation, we learn that the bonfire was a kind of rite Camus needed to perform in order to purge his mind and soul so that he could go on to write what he felt needed to be written—unimpeded by ghosts, but still attentive to their silences, which spoke to and through him.

    Throughout the spring of 1940, six years after the bonfire, Camus worked furiously on The Stranger, almost in total isolation holed up in his miserable hotel room in Montmartre, interrupted only to work for five hours a day at Paris-Soir. The twenty-six year old was as cut off from the world as he had ever been. Alone in a foreign city, with German bombs exploding all over France, Camus fought his loneliness and misery by throwing himself into his writing. Not yet divorced from his first wife, Simone Hié, his fiancé Francine Faure refused to accompany him to Paris. The only thing he brought with him was the first chapter of The Stranger and a few of his press clippings. Kaplan: “His sense of separation from everyone he loved put him in a state of mind that was both painful and enabling” (71). Like Camus’ biographer Olivier Todd, Kaplan highlights the importance of Camus’ isolation when he first arrives in Paris. Camus believed that the failure of A Happy Death, his abandoned first novel, was due to his inability to write without interruption. Camus’ isolation in Paris enabled him, out of necessity, to devote all of his attention to The Stranger. Kaplan’s research offers us a marvelous glimpse into the creative process Camus used, or perhaps more accurately, was host to, during his writing of the novel. Kaplan claims that Camus wrote The Stranger almost line for line, as if he were dictating a story he was seeing play out before his eyes. Where he struggled with the writing of A Happy Death, The Stranger seems to have emerged almost fully formed, complete.

    However, his writing of The Stranger does not mean that it was without its problems. In fact, the birth of The Stranger was long and fraught with difficulties both internal and external. Until his arrival in Paris, Camus struggled with getting into the narrative, creating a new story, as well as using material from A Happy Death. Interestingly, most reviewers of Kaplan’s book, Robert Zaretsky, himself an accomplished Camus scholar, and John Williams in particular[v], have devoted a majority of their reviews to the shortage of paper in France as the novel was set to go to press. “To say that the very existence of The Stranger was threatened by the material conditions of the war is no exaggeration, since paper supplies were becoming more and more precious. It looked at one point as if Camus would have to supply his own paper stock!” (136). Camus was in Oran with his family at the time, and was happy to help Gallimard with locating paper. The novel came very close to not being published, but paper stock was found at the last minute and Camus was not obliged to supply his own.

    Once the novel was published it was met with immediate success. But perhaps its success was not so unusual after all. From the beginning Camus wanted the French publishing world, located in Paris, to represent him. In the chapter “A Jealous Teacher and a Generous Comrade,” Kaplan tells the story of Camus’ almost frantic correspondence with Jean Grenier and Pascal Pia, the teacher and the comrade, respectfully, and their influence on The Stranger in its early stages. More importantly, if Camus were to move from a provincial author to a wider audience, one that would include the whole of Europe and possibly America, he would have to seek publication outside of Algeria. As Kaplan notes: “Yet Paris was still the center of book publishing in France, and if Camus wanted to publish outside Algeria, he’d eventually have to find a way to get his manuscript to the capital” (107). This, it seems to me, provides the necessary evidence that Camus was thinking bigger than his native land. He desired a world stage, a stage that would allow his work to be read by the widest possible public and Gallimard was the publisher that could provide him with that opportunity. In his book The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual, Patrick Baert illustrates the importance of publishing, especially those publishing houses in Paris, for providing the necessary outlet for ideas. “Intellectual ideas spread mainly through publications. Whether through books, magazines, or articles, publishing is central to the rise of intellectual movements. For such movements to be successful, authors have to be well connected to the main publishers and need to have sufficient freedom and power to be able to write what they want to write.”[vi] The network Gallimard could provide Camus with would plug him into some of the most resonant writers and thinkers of the time. As mentioned above, The Stranger was not just a novel, but also an important piece of a longer meditation on the absurd. Therefore, Camus’ relationship with Gallimard, as Kaplan points out, is a key component to his rise to international prominence. Quite frankly, without Gallimard, The Stranger might not have met with its tremendous success.

    Camus’ association with Gallimard was not the only key to his success, however. Gallimard’s star and existentialism’s major voice, Jean-Paul Sartre, also had a lot to do with the success of The Stranger. In his celebrated review of The Stranger, originally published in 1943, Sartre almost single handedly anoints Camus into the French intellectual network, thus solidifying his reputation as a resonant French intellectual. Still, early on in his review Sartre points out that, like its author, The Stranger is a book from “across the sea,” highlighting Camus’ Algerian heritage. Sartre’s generous and insightful review gives a certain intellectual legitimacy to the novel. Sartre: “The Stranger is a classical work, a work of order, written about the absurd and against the absurd.”[vii] This Apollonian form, in the Nietzschean sense, of the novel further reinforces the boundary lines that mark the absurd context, a context that we might fold into the Dionysian, again in the Nietzschean sense.

    But it would be a mistake to consider The Stranger a French novel; it is, in almost every sense, an Algerian novel, a novel obsessed with the sun and the sea. What is perhaps closer to the novel’s intention is, at least in part, a Mediterranean world in a colonial context. In other words, the pied noirs who enjoy French citizenship and the protection it offers as opposed to Arab subjectivity. Arab subjectivity is one of the chief criticisms postcolonial scholars hurl at The Stranger and its author. Yet, a purely postcolonial reading of The Stranger severely limits our understanding of the novel. As David Carroll points out, “I would even say that to judge and indict Camus [as Edward Said does] for his “colonialist ideology” is not to read him; it is not to treat his literary texts in terms of the specific questions they actually raise, the contradictions they confront, and the uncertainties and dilemmas they express. It is not to read them in terms of their narrative strategies and complexity. It is to bring everything back to the same political point and ignore or underplay everything that might complicate or refute such a judgment.”[viii] The postcolonial lens that has dominated readings of The Stranger has also relegated it and its creator to a graveyard for Eurocentric authors. Kaplan’s attention to detail, however, locates the nameless murdered Arab in The Stranger in a central, one might even say, privileged, position. Almost from the beginning, Kaplan admits to being nearly obsessed with the figure of the nameless Arab. Indeed, the namelessness of this character is one of the pivotal points in her book. As Kaplan discovers, there was a nameless Arab in Camus’ life, one that would lead him straight to the central scene in The Stranger.

    In 2015 Other Press published the English translation of Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a retelling of The Stranger from the point of view of the brother of the Arab killed on the beach by Meursault. Daoud, an Algerian journalist living in Oran, writes for Quotidien d’Oran, a French language newspaper in Algeria. The Meursault Investigation is an interesting book that reads more in the style of Camus’ The Fall than The Stranger. The protagonist, speaking to us in the first person from a bar in Oran, informs us that there are other facts in the case that we did not hear, the chief among these is the name of his brother, Meursault’s victim, Musa: “Who was Musa? He was my brother. That’s what I’m getting at. I want to tell you the story Musa was never able to tell. When you opened the door of this bar, you opened a grave, my young friend” (4). Daoud’s text comes dangerously close to being fan fiction. However, there is something profoundly relevant in the novel. The Meursault Investigation demonstrates a deeper understanding of The Stranger, and Camus’ style. In order to write this book, Daoud proves that he knows The Stranger intimately, and his contribution to the story is, indeed, worthy of consideration. The Meursault Investigation demands to be read, digested, and then read again in the context to the cultural as well as the literary conditions of Algeria before, during, and after its independence.

    Kaplan devotes nearly an entire chapter (chapter 26) to Daoud’s novel and the figure of the unnamed Arab who appears in nearly spectral form in The Stranger. She tells us that she had a meeting with Daoud in 2014 in Oran, in which he claimed “we don’t read The Stranger the same way as Americans, French, Algerians” (210).  Kaplan’s reading of Daoud’s novel is a revelatory experience for her, and by association, for us. She strategically situates The Meursault Investigation both within and beyond the lens of postcolonial theory.

    Kaplan’s research into the source of the killing of the Arab scene in The Stranger is a remarkable piece of journalism. Her investigation led her through the towns and alleyways of Oran, to dusty archives, and populated streets, all despite an Algerian travel advisory for those holding a United States passport. “For two years, I had traveled to places in France and Algeria connected to The Stranger: I had walked down the former rue de Lyon in Algiers, past Camus’s childhood home. With photographer Kays Djilali, I climbed the steep Chemin Sidi Brahim, knocking on doors until we found the House Above the World, now the home of three generations of Kabyle women who speak neither French nor Arabic. With Father Guillaume Michel from Glycines Study Center in Algiers, I drove out to gold and blue vistas of Tipasa. In Paris, I stood in the dreary spot on the hill of Montmartre where Camus wrote in solitude” (211). At the end of the trail is a name: Kaddour Touil, and a story.

    Kaplan’s research demonstrates that it is not really Camus the author who haunts The Stranger, but rather it is the specter of Meursault who haunts Camus, both in life and after death. Meursault, as Olivier Todd informs us, is a combination of several people Camus knew. “The character of Meursault was inspired by Camus, Pascal Pia, Pierre Galindo, the Bensoussan brothers, Sauveur Galliero, and Yvonne herself. Marie was not Francine. Camus the writer mastered his novel in a way that Camus the man did not control in his life. Meursault never asked himself any questions, whereas Camus was always examining his actions and motivations.”[ix] Authors routinely use what and who they know for characters and their actions in books, but Camus’ relationship with Meursault seems to be as complicated as that character’s relationship with the reader. Kaplan’s book sheds a new light on the complexities of those relationships.

    The Stranger is truly a work of world literature, in the sense that David Damrosch defines the concept.[x] With The Stranger we have an Algerian author who wrote in French but was influenced by Danish, Russian, and German thinking, and was stylistically influenced by American authors like Hemingway and James M. Cain. Alice Kaplan gives us a view of The Stranger that joins a growing chorus of scholarship on the controversial book and its author. She provides keen insight that opens up other avenues of thinking about that book and its author. Camus’ influence seems to be growing, not diminishing as we move deeper into the twenty-first century, and this is needed, especially given the growing resurgence of nationalism and isolationist polices, i.e. Brexit and Trump. Perhaps it’s only literature, and international fiction in particular, that can save us from ourselves. In this age of social media epitomized by the egotistical selfie, international fiction has become more important than ever. Kaplan’s book reminds us that nothing exists in a vacuum, that great works of art come about contextually and pan-culturally. The Stranger might never have been a success without the French existentialist network of the time.

    Andrew Martino is Professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University where he also directs the University Honors Program. He has published on contemporary literature and is currently finishing a manuscript on the concept of security in the work of Paul Bowles.

    Notes

    [i] Edward W. Said. Culture and Imperialism. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 174.

    [ii] Arendt, Hannah. “French Existentialism.” Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954. (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 192.

    [iii]Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O’Brien. ) New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 30.

    [iv] Randall Collins. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 764.

    [v] See Zaretsky’s review in Los Angeles Review of Books (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/biography-zaretsky-kaplan-camus/) and Williams’ review in the New York Times (Sept. 15, 2016).

    [vi] Patrick Baert. The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual. (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2015), 138-139.

    [vii] Jean-Paul Sartre. “The Stranger Explained.” We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975. Ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van Den Hoven. (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 43.

    [viii] David Carroll. Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15.

    [ix] Todd, Olivier. Albert Camus: A Life. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1997), 107.

    [x] Here I am thinking specifically of Damrosch’s theory of circulation. See David Damrosch’s What is World Literature. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003) for a full definition of the concept.