On February 27, 2016, longstanding boundary 2 board member Arif Dirlik gave his final lecture at the University of British Columbia. The talk, The Rise of China and the End of the World As We Know It, is available in full on the UBC Library’s website.
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Martin Woessner — The Sociologists and the Squirrel — Review of “Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary”
by Martin Woessner
Review of Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2017).
Georg Simmel only began to be recognized as one of the founding figures of modern sociology shortly before his death in 1918. The recognition came too late and generally amounted to the backhanded compliment in which scholars specialize: Simmel was brilliant, but. As an academic discipline in continental Europe and North America, sociology was still in the process of finding its methodological and institutional footing at the time. It had neither the heritage nor the prestige of philosophy, but modernity was on its side. It was the discipline of the future. Sociologists were rigorous, scientific, and systematic—everything that Simmel supposedly was not. Especially in comparison to Durkheim and Weber, Simmel’s work seemed dilettantish, more subjective and speculative than objective or empirical; more like poetry, in other words, than sociology. It was a strange complaint to make of somebody who wrote a tome like The Philosophy of Money, which was hundreds of pages long and chock full of concrete examples. But it stuck.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, as sociology became ever more scientific, Simmel’s fame became that of the negative example. Neither his methodological preoccupations, which were wide-ranging, nor his intellectual style, which shunned footnotes and bibliographies, fit within the narrowing confines of academic sociology. He thus had to be written into and out of the discipline simultaneously. In a 1936 survey of social thought across the Rhine, Raymond Aron conceded that “the development of sociology as an autonomous discipline can, in fact, scarcely be explained without taking his work into account,” but then proceeded to dispatch Simmel in just a few short pages, as if he were some kind of embarrassing distant relative who had to be acknowledged, but not necessarily celebrated.[1] Another, perhaps more poetic but no less dismissive portrait came from Jose Ortega y Gasset, who likened Simmel to a “philosophical squirrel,” more content to leap from branch to branch, indeed from tree to tree, than to harvest the insights of any one particular area of inquiry.[2]
Simmel may have ended up a squirrel by necessity rather than by choice. Unable to secure a fully funded academic post until very late in his career, and then only in out-of-the-way Strasbourg—rather than, say, Heidelberg, where, with the help of Weber, he had hoped to obtain an appointment, or Berlin, where he lived and studied and taught as an unsalaried lecturer for most of his life—Simmel never enjoyed the academic security that might have lent itself to less squirrelish, more scientific pursuits. His Berlin lectures were fabled performances—attended by everyone from Rainer Maria Rilke to George Santayana, who praised them to his Harvard colleague William James—but he nevertheless “remained,” as Elizabeth Goodstein argues in her new book, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, “at the margins of the academic establishment.”[3]
Goodstein revisits Simmel’s marginality because she thinks it is the key to understanding not just his career, which was simultaneously storied and tenuous, but also his curious absence from academic debates today. Something essential about Simmel has been lost, she argues, in the narrative that transformed Simmel into a sociological ancestor, in the “decoupling” of his more sociological work from its philosophical foundations.[4] Indeed, as David Frisby pointed out some time ago, Simmel never really thought of himself as a sociologist anyhow.[5] There was a reason he didn’t call it The Sociology of Money. Writing to a French colleague already in 1899, Simmel confessed that “it is altogether rather painful for me that abroad I am only known as a sociologist—whereas I am a philosopher, see my life’s vocation in philosophy, and only pursue sociology as a sideline.”[6]
Heeding this remark, Goodstein urges us to see Simmel more as he saw himself: a marginalized figure, caught between ascendant “social science” on the one hand and “a kind of philosophy that was passing away” on the other.[7] If we do so, we might begin to appreciate how very relevant Simmel’s work is to contemporary debates not just in sociology, but also across the humanities and social sciences more generally. In the vicissitudes of Simmel’s career and legacy, in other words, Goodstein sees a parable or two for the current intellectual epoch, in which academic disciplines seem to be in the process of reforming themselves along new and sometimes competing lines of inquiry.
Instead of presenting us with Simmel as squirrel, then, Goodstein offers us a portrait of Simmel as conflicted interdisciplinarian. It is reassuring, I suppose, to think that what our academic colleagues dismiss as our most evident weaknesses might one day be viewed as our greatest strengths, that what seems scatterbrained now may be heralded as innovative in the future. For those of us who work in the amorphous field of interdisciplinary studies, Goodstein’s book might serve as both legitimation and justification—a defense of our squirreliness to our colleagues over in the harder sciences maybe. Still, it is difficult to shake the idea that interdisciplinarity is, like disciplinarity was a century ago, just another fad, another way to demonstrate to society that what we academics do behind closed doors is valuable and worthy of recognition, if not also funding.
As Louis Menand and others have argued, talk of interdisciplinarity is, at root, an expression of anxiety.[8] In the academy today there is certainly plenty to be anxious about, but, like Menand, I’m not sure that the discourse of interdisciplinarity adequately addresses any of it. Interdisciplinarity does not address budget crises, crumbling infrastructure, or the increasingly contingent nature of academic labor. In fact, it may even exacerbate these problems, insofar as it questions the rationale for having distinct disciplinary departments in the first place: why not collapse two or three different programs in the humanities into one, cut half their staff, and run a leaner, cheaper interdisciplinary program instead? If we are all doing “theory” anyways, what difference does it make if we are attached to a literature department, a philosophy department, or a sociology department?
That sounds paranoid, I know. Interdisciplinarity is not an evil conspiracy concocted by greedy administrators. It is simply the academic buzzword of our times. But like all buzzwords, it says a lot without saying anything of substance, really. It repackages what we already do and sells it back to us. Like any fashion or fad, it is unique enough to seem innovative, but not so unique as to be truly independent. Well over a century ago Simmel suggested that fashion trends were reflections of our competing desires for both “imitation” and “differentiation.”[9] Interdisciplinarity’s fashionable status in the contemporary academy suggests that these desires have found a home in higher education. In an effort to differentiate ourselves from our colleagues, we try to imitate the innovators. We buy into the trend. Interdisciplinary programs, built around interdisciplinary pedagogy, now produce and promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship, the end results of which are interdisciplinary curricula, conferences, journals, and textbooks. All of them come at a price. None of them, it seems to me, are worth it.
When viewed from this perspective at least, Goodstein’s book isn’t about Simmel at all. It is about what has been done to Simmel by the changing tides of academic fashion. The reception of his work becomes, in Goodstein’s hands, a cautionary tale about the plight of disciplinary thinking in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. The first section of the book, which investigates the way in which Simmel became a “(mostly) forgotten founding father” of modern sociology, shows how “Simmel’s oeuvre came to be understood as simultaneously foundational for and marginal to the modern social sciences.”[10] Insofar as he made social types (including “the stranger” and “the adventurer”) and forms of social interaction (such as “exchange” and “conflict,” but also including “sociability” itself) topics worthy of academic scrutiny Simmel proved indispensible; insofar as he did so in an impressionistic as opposed to empirical or quantitative style he was expendable. He was both imitated and ignored. Simmel helped make the discipline of sociology possible, but he would remain forever a stranger to it—“a philosophical Monet,” as his student György Lukács described him, surrounded by conventional realists.[11]
Goodstein uses the Simmel case to warn against the dangers of what now gets called, in those overpriced textbooks, “disciplinary reductionism.” She doesn’t use that term, but she is not immune to similar sounding jargon, which is part and parcel of interdisciplinary branding. “In exploring the history of Simmel’s representation as (proto)sociologist,” she writes, “I render more visible the highly tendentious background narratives on which the plausibility of that metadisciplinary (imagined, lived) order as a whole depends—and call into question the (largely tacit) equation of the differentiation and specialization knowledge practices with intellectual progress.”[12] An explanatory footnote tacked on to this sentence doesn’t clarify things all that much: “My purpose is not to argue against the value disciplines or to discount the modes of knowing they embody and perpetuate, but to emphasize that meta-, inter-, pre-, trans-, and even anti-disciplinary approaches are not just supplements or correctives to disciplinary knowledge practices but are themselves valuable constitutive features of a vibrant intellectual culture.”[13] Sounds squirrely to me, and not necessarily in a good way.
If Simmel’s reception in academic sociology serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of disciplinary knowledge for Goodstein, his writings represent something else entirely: a light of inspiration at the end of the disciplinary tunnel. They offer “an alternative vision of inquiry into human cultural or social life as a whole,” one that rejects the narrow tunnel-vision of specialized, compartmentalized, disciplinary frameworks.[14] It is a vision that might also help us to think critically about interdisciplinarity as well, for as Goodstein points out later in the book, in a more critical voice, “the contemporary turn to interdisciplinarity remains situated in a discursive space shaped and reinforced by disciplinary divisions.”[15]
The middle section of Goodstein’s book is devoted to a close reading of The Philosophy of Money. Its three chapters argue, each from a slightly different angle, that Simmel’s magnum opus substantiates just such an “alternative vision.” Here Simmel is presented not as the academic as which sociologists came to portray him, but as what he so desperately wanted to be seen, namely a philosopher. Goodstein argues that Simmel should be understood as a “modernist philosopher,” a kind of missing link, as it were, between Nietzsche on the one side and Husserl and Heidegger on the other. Simmel takes from Nietzsche the importance of post-Cartesian perspectivism, and, in applying it to social and cultural life, anticipates not just the phenomenology of Husserl and the existential philosophy of Heidegger, but also the critical theory of Lukács, and, later, the Frankfurt School. This is the theory you have been waiting for, the one that brings it all together.
In Goodstein’s view, The Philosophy of Money attempts nothing less than an inquiry into all social and cultural life through the subject of money relations. As such, it is neither “inter- or transdisciplinary.” “It is,” she writes, “metadisciplinary.”[16] It operates at a level all its own. It uses the phenomena associated with money—abstraction, valuation, and signification, for example—to explore larger questions associated with epistemology, ethics, and even metaphysics more generally. It shuttles back and forth between the most concrete and immediate observations to the most far-reaching speculations. It helps us understand how calculation, objectivity, and relativity, for example, become the defining features of modernity. It shows us how seemingly objective social and cultural forms—from artistic styles to legal and political norms—emerge out of intimate, subjective experience. But it also shows how these forms come to reify the forms of life out of which they initially sprang.[17]
In Simmel’s hands, money becomes a synecdoche—the “synecdoche of synecdoche” Goodstein repeats, one too many times—for social and cultural life as a whole.[18] What Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit did for history, The Philosophy of Money does for cold, hard cash. In this regard, at least, Goodstein’s efforts to re-categorize Simmel as a “modernist philosopher”—to put the philosophy back into the book, as it were—are insightful. Still, as I read Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, I couldn’t help but wonder if it might not be more valuable these days to put some of the money back into it instead. Given all the ways in which interdisciplinarity has been sold to us, and given the neoliberal reforms that are sweeping through the academy, now might be the time to focus on money as money, and not merely as synecdoche.
The problems we face today, both within and beyond the academy, are tremendous. We live in an age, as Goodstein puts it, of “accelerating ecological, economic, and sociopolitical crises.”[19] No matter what its promotional materials suggest, interdisciplinarity will not rescue us from any of them. Goodstein eventually admits as much: “the proliferation of increasingly differentiated inter-, trans-, and post-disciplinary practices reinforces rather than challenges the philosophical—ethical, but also metaphysical—insufficiencies of the modern disciplinary imaginary.”[20] In the final section of her book she emphasizes not so much the disciplining of Simmel’s work by those narrow-minded sociologists as the liberating theoretical potential of his “practices of thought,” which “even today do not comfortably fit into existing institutional frameworks.”[21] After depicting Simmel as a victim of academic rationalization, Goodstein now presents him as a potential savior—a way out of the mess of disciplinarity altogether.
Attractive as that sounds, I’m not sure that Simmel’s “modernist philosophy” will rescue us, either. In fact, I’m not sure that any philosophical or theoretical framework will, by itself, give us what we need to confront the challenges we face. Worrying about finding the right intellectual perspective may not be as important as worrying about where, in our society, the money comes from and where—and to whom—it goes at the end of the day. We need some advocacy to go along with our philosophy, and fretting over the merits of inter-, trans-, post-, meta-, anti-disciplinarity may just get in the way of it.
Simmel predicted that he would “die without spiritual heirs,” which was, in his opinion, “a good thing.” In a revealing quotation that serves as the guiding leitmotif of Goodstein’s book, he likened his intellectual legacy to “cold cash divided among many heirs, and each converts his portion into an enterprise of some sort that corresponds to his nature; whose provenance in that inheritance is not visible.”[22] Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imagination goes a long way towards reestablishing that provenance. Maybe it’s about time we start calling for an inheritance tax to be imposed upon the current practitioners and proponents of interdisciplinarity, who have turned that cold cash into gold.
Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History & Society at The City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education. He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge UP, 2011).
Notes
[1] Raymond Aron, German Sociology, trans. Mary and Thomas Bottomore (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 5 n.1. Aron’s text was first published in French in 1936.
[2] Quoted in Lewis Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, Second Edition (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1997), 199.
[3] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 15.
[4] Ibid., 112.
[5] David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986), 64.
[6] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 41.
[7] Ibid., 29.
[8] Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010), 97.
[9] Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 296.
[10] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 106.
[11] “Introduction to the Translation,” in Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 29.
[12] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 33.
[13] Ibid., note 43.
[14] Ibid., 67.
[15] Ibid., 131.
[16] Ibid., 155.
[17] This point is emphasized in Simmel’s final work, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, trans. John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine, with an introduction by Donald N. Levine and Daniel Silver, and an appendix, “Journal Aphorisms, with an Introduction” edited, translated, and with an introduction by John A.Y. Andrews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 351-352.
[18] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 171.
[19] Ibid., 329.
[20] Ibid., 258.
[21] Ibid., 254.
[22] Ibid., 1.
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Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
a review of Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press Forerunners Series, 2016)
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All existence is Beta, basically. A ceaseless codependent improvement unto death, but then death is not even the end. Nothing will be finalized. There is no end, no closure. The search will outlive us forever
— Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers
Being a (in)human is to be a beta tester
— Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
Too many people have access to your state of mind
— Renata Adler, Speedboat
Whenever I read through Vilém Flusser’s vast body of work and encounter, in print no less, one of the core concepts of his thought—which is that “human communication is unnatural” (2002, 5)––I find it nearly impossible to shake the feeling that the late Czech-Brazilian thinker must have derived some kind of preternatural pleasure from insisting on the ironic gesture’s repetition. Flusser’s rather grim view that “there is no possible form of communication that can communicate concrete experience to others” (2016, 23) leads him to declare that the intersubjective dimension of communication implies inevitably the existence of a society which is, in his eyes, itself an unnatural institution. One can find all over in Flusser’s work traces of his life-long attempt to think through the full philosophical implications of European nihilism, and evidence of this intellectual engagement can be readily found in his theories of communication.
One of Flusser’s key ideas that draws me in is his notion that human communication affords us the ability to “forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of ‘nature’” (2002, 4). In order to help stave off the inexorable tide of nature’s muted nothingness, Flusser suggests that humans communicate by storing memories, externalized thoughts whose eventual transmission binds two or more people into a system of meaning. Only when an intersubjective system of communication like writing or speech is established between people does the purpose of our enduring commitment to communication become clear: we communicate in order “to become immortal within others” (2016, 31). Flusser’s playful positing of the ironic paradox inherent in the improbability of communication—that communication is unnatural to the human but it is also “so incredibly rich despite its limitations” (26)––enacts its own impossibility. In a representatively ironic sense, Flusser’s point is that all we are able to fully understand is our inability to understand fully.
As Flusser’s theory of communication can be viewed as his response to the twentieth-century’s shifting technical-medial milieu, his ideas about communication and technics eventually led him to conclude that “the original intention of producing the apparatus, namely, to serve the interests of freedom, has turned on itself…In a way, the terms human and apparatus are reversed, and human beings operate as a function of the apparatus. A man gives an apparatus instructions that the apparatus has instructed him to give” (2011,73).[1] Flusser’s skeptical perspective toward the alleged affordances of human mastery over technology is most assuredly not the view that Apple or Google would prefer you harbor (not-so-secretly). Any cursory glance at Wired or the technology blog at Insider Higher Ed, to pick two long-hanging examples, would yield a radically different perspective than the one Flusser puts forth in his work. In fact, Flusser writes, “objects meant to be media may obstruct communication” (2016, 45). If media objects like the technical apparatuses of today actually obstruct communication, then why are we so often led to believe that they facilitate it? And to shift registers just slightly, if everything is said to be an object of some kind—even technical apparatuses––then cannot one be permitted to claim daily communion with all kinds of objects? What happens when an object—and an object as obsolete as a book, no less—speaks to us? Will we still heed its call?
***
Speaking in its expanded capacity as neither narrator nor focalized character, the book as literary object addresses us in a direct and antagonistic fashion in the opening line to Joshua Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands” (5), the book-object warns. As Cohen’s narrative tells the story of a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen (whose backstory corresponds mostly to the historical-biographical author Joshua Cohen) who is contracted to ghostwrite the memoir of another Joshua Cohen (who is the CEO of a massive Google-type company named Tetration), the novel’s middle section provides an “unedited” transcript of the conversation between the two Cohens in which the CEO recounts his upbringing and tremendous business success in and around the Bay Area from the late 1970s up to 2013 of the narrative’s present. The novel’s Silicon Valley setting, nominal and characterological doubling, and structural narrative coupling of the two Cohens’ lives makes it all but impossible to distinguish the personal histories of Cohen-the-CEO and Cohen-the-narrator from the cultural history of the development of personal computing and networked information technologies. The history of one Joshua Cohen––or all Joshua Cohens––is indistinguishable from the history of intrusive computational/digital media. “I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics,” Cohen-the-narrator laments. In other words, as Cohen-the-narrator ghostwrites another Cohen’s memoir within the context of the broad history of personal computing and the emergence of algorithmic governance and surveillance, the novel invites us to consider how the history of an individual––or every individual, it does not really matter––is also nothing more or anything less than the surveilled history of its data usage, which is always written by someone or something else, the ever-present Not-Me (who just might have the same name as me). The Self is nothing but a networked repository of information to be mined in the future.
While the novel’s opening line addresses its hypothetical reader directly, its relatively benign warning fixes reader and text in a relation of rancor. The object speaks![2] And yet tech-savvy twenty-first century readers are not the only ones who seem to be fed up with books; books too are fed up with us, and perhaps rightly so. In an age when objects are said to speak vibrantly and withdraw infinitely; processes like human cognition are considered to be operative in complex technical-computational systems; and when the only excuse to preserve the category of “subjective experience” we are able to muster is that it affords us the ability “to grasp how networks technically distribute and disperse agency,” it would seem at first glance that the second-person addressee of the novel’s opening line would intuitively have to be a reading, thinking subject.[3] Yet this is the very same reading subject who has been urged by Cohen’s novel to politely “fuck off” if he or she has chosen to read the text on a screen. And though the text does not completely dismiss its readers who still prefer “paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth” (5), a slight change of preposition in its title points exactly to what the book fears most of all: Book as Numbers. The book-object speaks, but only to offer an ominous admonition: neither the book nor its readers ought to be reducible to computable numbers.
The transduction of literary language into digital bits eliminates the need for a phenomenological, reading subject, and it suggests too that literature––or even just language in a general sense––and humans in particular are ontologically reducible to data objects that can be “read” and subsequently “interpreted” by computational algorithms. As Cohen’s novel collapses the distinction between author, narrator, character, and medium, its narrator observes that “the only record of my one life would be this record of another’s” (9). But in this instance, the record of one’s (or another’s) life is merely the history of how personal computational technologies have effaced the phenomenological subject. How have we arrived at the theoretically permissible premise that “People matter, but they don’t occupy a privileged subject position distinct from everything else in the world” (Huehls 20)? How might the “turn toward ontology” in theory/philosophy be viewed as contributing to our present condition?
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Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (2016) provides a brief, yet stylistically ironic and incisive interrogation into how recent iterations of post- or inhumanist theory have found a strange bedfellow in the rhetorical boosterism that accompanies the alleged affordances of digital technologies and big data. Despite the differences between these two seemingly unrelated discourses, they both share a particularly critical or diminished conception of the anthro- in “anthropocentrism” that borrows liberally from the postulates of the “ontological turn” in theory/philosophy (Rosenberg n.p.). While the parallels between these discourses are not made explicit in Jarzombek’s book, Digital Stockholm Syndrome asks us to consider how a shared commitment to an ontologically diminished view of “the human” that galvanizes both technological determinism’s anti-humanism and post- or inhumanist theory has found its common expression in recent philosophies of ontology. In other words, the problem Digital Stockholm Syndrome takes up is this: what kind of theory of ontology, Being, and to a lesser extent, subjectivity, appeals equally to contemporary philosophers and Silicon Valley tech-gurus? Jarzombek gestures toward such an inquiry early on: “What is this new ontology?” he asks, and “What were the historical situations that produced it? And how do we adjust to the realities of the new Self?” (x).
A curious set of related philosophical commitments united by their efforts to “de-center” and occasionally even eject “anthropocentrism” from the critical conversation constitute some of the realities swirling around Jarzombek’s “new Self.”[4] Digital Stockholm Syndrome provocatively locates the conceptual legibility of these philosophical realities squarely within an explicitly algorithmic-computational historical milieu. By inviting such a comparison, Jarzombek’s book encourages us to contemplate how contemporary ontological thought might mediate our understanding of the historical and philosophical parallels that bind the tradition of in humanist philosophical thinking and the rhetoric of twenty-first century digital media.[5]
In much the same way that Alexander Galloway has argued for a conceptual confluence that exceeds the contingencies of coincidence between “the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism” (347), Digital Stockholm Syndrome argues similarly that today’s world is “designed from the micro/molecular level to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological” (italics in original, x).[6] We now understand Being as the informatic/algorithmic byproduct of what ubiquitous computational technologies have gathered and subsequently fed back to us. Our personal histories––or simply the records of our data use (and its subsequent use of us)––comprise what Jarzombek calls our “ontic exhaust…or what data experts call our data exhaust…[which] is meticulously scrutinized, packaged, formatted, processed, sold, and resold to come back to us in the form of entertainment, social media, apps, health insurance, clickbait, data contracts, and the like” (x).
The empty second-person pronoun is placed on equal ontological footing with, and perhaps even defined by, its credit score, medical records, 4G data usage, Facebook likes, and threefold of its Tweets. “The purpose of these ‘devices,’” Jarzombek writes, “is to produce, magnify, and expose our ontic exhaust” (25). We give our ontic exhaust away for free every time we log into Facebook because it, in return, feeds back to us the only sense of “self” we are able to identify as “me.”[7] If “who we are cannot be traced from the human side of the equation, much less than the analytic side.‘I’ am untraceable” (31), then why do techno-determinists and contemporary oracles of ontology operate otherwise? What accounts for their shared commitment to formalizing ontology? Why must the Self be tracked and accounted for like a map or a ledger?
As this “new Self,” which Jarzombek calls the “Being-Global” (2), travels around the world and checks its bank statement in Paris or tags a photo of a Facebook friend in Berlin while sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, it leaks ontic exhaust everywhere it goes. While the hoovering up of ontic exhaust by GPS and commercial satellites “make[s] us global,” it also inadvertently redefines Being as a question of “positioning/depositioning” (1). For Jarzombek, the question of today’s ontology is not so much a matter of asking “what exists?” but of asking “where is it and how can it be found?” Instead of the human who attempts to locate and understand Being, now Being finds us, but only as long as we allow ourselves to be located.
Today’s ontological thinking, Jarzombek points out, is not really interested in asking questions about Being––it is too “anthropocentric.”[8] Ontology in the twenty-first century attempts to locate Being by gathering data, keeping track, tracking changes, taking inventory, making lists, listing litanies, crunching the numbers, and searching the database. “Can I search for it on Google?” is now the most important question for ontological thought in the twenty-first century.
Ontological thinking––which today means ontological accounting, or finding ways to account for the ontologically actuarial––is today’s philosophical equivalent to a best practices for data management, except there is no difference between one’s data and one’s Self. Nonetheless, any ontological difference that might have once stubbornly separated you from data about you no longer applies. Digital Stockholm Syndrome identifies this shift with the formulation: “From ontology to trackology” (71).[9] The philosophical shift that has allowed data about the Self to become the ontological equivalent to the Self emerges out of what Jarzombek calls an “animated ontology.”
In this “animated ontology,” subject position and object position are indistinguishable…The entire system of humanity is microprocessed through the grid of sequestered empiricism” (31, 29). Jarzombek is careful to distinguish his “animated ontology” from the recently rebooted romanticisms which merely turn their objects into vibrant subjects. He notes that “the irony is that whereas the subject (the ‘I’) remains relatively stable in its ability to self-affirm (the lingering by-product of the psychologizing of the modern Self), objectivity (as in the social sciences) collapses into the illusions produced by the global cyclone of the informatic industry” (28).”[10] By devising tricky new ways to flatten ontology (all of which are made via po-faced linguistic fiat), “the human and its (dis/re-)embodied computational signifiers are on equal footing”(32). I do not define my data, but my data define me.
***
Digital Stockholm Syndrome asserts that what exists in today’s ontological systems––systems both philosophical and computational––is what can be tracked and stored as data. Jarzombek sums up our situation with another pithy formulation: “algorithmic modeling + global positioning + human scaling +computational speed=data geopolitics” (12). While the universalization of tracking technologies defines the “global” in Jarzombek’s Being-Global, it also provides us with another way to understand the humanities’ enthusiasm for GIS and other digital mapping platforms as institutional-disciplinary expressions of a “bio-chemo-techno-spiritual-corporate environment that feeds the Human its sense-of-Self” (5).
One wonders if the incessant cultural and political reminders regarding the humanities’ waning relevance have moved humanists to reconsider the very basic intellectual terms of their broad disciplinary pursuits. How come it is humanities scholars who are in some cases most visibly leading the charge to overturn many decades of humanist thought? Has the internalization of this depleted conception of the human reshaped the basic premises of humanities scholarship, Digital Stockholm Syndrome wonders? What would it even mean to pursue a “humanities” purged of “the human?” And is it fair to wonder if this impoverished image of humanity has trickled down into the formation of new (sub)disciplines?”[11]
In a late chapter titled “Onto-Paranoia,” Jarzombek finally arrives at a working definition of Digital Stockholm Syndrome: data visualization. For Jarzombek, data-visualization “has been devised by the architects of the digital world” to ease the existential torture—or “onto-torture”—that is produced by Security Threats (59). Security threats are threatening because they remind us that “security is there to obscure the fact that whole purpose is to produce insecurity” (59). When a system fails, or when a problem occurs, we need to be conscious of the fact that the system has not really failed; “it means that the system is working” (61).[12] The Social, the Other, the Not-Me—these are all variations of the same security threat, which is just another way of defining “indeterminacy” (66). So if everything is working the way it should, we rarely consider the full implications of indeterminacy—both technical and philosophical—because to do so might make us paranoid, or worse: we would have to recognize ourselves as (in)human subjects.
Data-visualizations, however, provide a soothing salve which we can (self-)apply in order to ease the pain of our “onto-torture.” Visualizing data and creating maps of our data use provide us with a useful and also pleasurable tool with which we locate ourselves in the era of “post-ontology.”[13] “We experiment with and develop data visualization and collection tools that allow us to highlight urban phenomena. Our methods borrow from the traditions of science and design by using spatial analytics to expose patterns and communicating those results, through design, to new audiences,” we are told by one data-visualization project (http://civicdatadesignlab.org/). As we affirm our existence every time we travel around the globe and self-map our location, we silently make our geo-data available for those who care to sift through it and turn it into art or profit.
“It is a paradox that our self-aestheticizing performance as subjects…feeds into our ever more precise (self-)identification as knowable and predictable (in)human-digital objects,” Jarzombek writes. Yet we ought not to spend too much time contemplating the historical and philosophical complexities that have helped create this paradoxical situation. Perhaps it is best we do not reach the conclusion that mapping the Self as an object on digital platforms increases the creeping unease that arises from the realization that we are mappable, hackable, predictable, digital objects––that our data are us. We could, instead, celebrate how our data (which we are and which is us) is helping to change the world. “’Big data’ will not change the world unless it is collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit,” the same data visualization project announces on its website’s homepage.
While it is true that I may be a little paranoid, I have finally rested easy after having read Digital Stockholm Syndrome because I now know that my data/I are going to good use.[14] Like me, maybe you find comfort in knowing that your existence is nothing more than a few pixels in someone else’s data visualization.
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Michael Miller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rice University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in symplokē and the Journal of Film and Video.
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Notes
[1] I am reminded of a similar argument advanced by Tung-Hui Hu in his A Prehistory of the Cloud (2016). Encapsulating Flusser’s spirit of healthy skepticism toward technical apparatuses, the situation that both Flusser and Hu fear is one in which “the technology has produced the means of its own interpretation” (xixx).
[2] It is not my aim to wade explicitly into discussions regarding “object-oriented ontology” or other related philosophical developments. For the purposes of this essay, however, Andrew Cole’s critique of OOO as a “new occasionalism” will be useful. “’New occasionalism,’” Cole writes, “is the idea that when we speak of things, we put them into contact with one another and ourselves” (112). In other words, the speaking of objects makes them objectively real, though this is only possible when everything is considered to be an object. The question, though, is not about what is or is not an object, but is rather what it means to be. For related arguments regarding the relation between OOO/speculative realism/new materialism and mysticism, see Sheldon (2016), Altieri (2016), Wolfendale (2014), O’Gorman (2013), and to a lesser extent Colebrook (2013).
[3] For the full set of references here, see Bennett (2010), Hayles (2014 and 2016), and Hansen (2015).
[4] While I cede that no thinker of “post-humanism” worth her philosophical salt would admit the possibility or even desirability of purging the sins of “correlationism” from critical thought all together, I cannot help but view such occasional posturing with a skeptical eye. For example, I find convincing Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s recent essay “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Negotiations, Collisions,” in which she compares the drive in contemporary critical theory to displace “the human” from humanistic inquiry to the impossible and equally incomprehensible task of overcoming the “‘astro’-centrism of astronomy or the biocentrism of biology” (359).
[5] In “Modest Proposal for the Inhuman,” Julian Murphet identifies four interrelated strands of post- or inhumanist thought that combine a kind of metaphysical speculation with a full-blown demolition of traditional ontology’s conceptual foundations. They are: “(1) cosmic nihilism, (2) molecular bio-plasticity, (3) technical accelerationism, and (4) animality. These sometimes overlapping trends are severally engaged in the mortification of humankind’s stubborn pretensions to mastery over the domain of the intelligible and the knowable in an era of sentient machines, routine genetic modification, looming ecological disaster, and irrefutable evidence that we share 99 percent of our biological information with chimpanzees” (653).
[6] The full quotation from Galloway’s essay reads: “Why, within the current renaissance of research in continental philosophy, is there a coincidence between the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism? [….] Why, in short, is there a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business?” (347). Digital Stockholm Syndrome begins by accepting Galloway’s provocations as descriptive instead of speculative. We do not necessarily wonder in 2017 if “there is a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business”; we now wonder instead how such a confluence came to be.
[7] Wendy Hui Kyun Chun makes a similar point in her 2016 monograph Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. She writes, “If users now ‘curate’ their lives, it is because their bodies have become archives” (x-xi). While there is not ample space here to discuss the full theoretical implications of her book, Chun’s discussion of the inherently gendered dimension to confession, self-curation as self-exposition, and online privacy as something that only the unexposed deserve (hence the need for preemptive confession and self-exposition on the internet) in digital/social media networks is tremendously relevant to Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, as both texts consider the Self as a set of mutable and “marketable/governable/hackable categories” (Jarzombek 26) that are collected without our knowledge and subsequently fed back to the data/media user in the form of its own packaged and unique identity. For recent similar variations of this argument, see Simanowski (2017) and McNeill (2012).
I also think Chun’s book offers a helpful tool for thinking through recent confessional memoirs or instances of “auto-theory” (fictionalized or not) like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010), Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013), and perhaps to a lesser degree Tao Lin’s Richard Yates (2010), Taipei (2013), Natasha Stagg’s Surveys, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). The extent to which these texts’ varied formal-aesthetic techniques can be said to be motivated by political aims is very much up for debate, but nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that many of them revel in the reveal. That is to say, via confession or self-exposition, many of these novels enact the allegedly performative subversion of political power by documenting their protagonists’ and/or narrators’ certain social/political acts of transgression. Chun notes, however, that this strategy of self-revealing performs “resistance as a form of showing off and scandalizing, which thrives off moral outrage. This resistance also mimics power by out-spying, monitoring, watching, and bringing to light, that is, doxing” (151). The term “autotheory,” which was has been applied to Nelson’s The Argonauts in particular, takes on a very different meaning in this context. “Autotheory” can be considered as a theory of the self, or a self-theorization, or perhaps even the idea that personal experience is itself a kind of theory might apply here, too. I wonder, though, how its meaning would change if the prefix “auto” was understood within a media-theoretical framework not as “self” but as “automation.” “Autotheory” becomes, then, an automatization of theory or theoretical thinking, but also a theoretical automatization; or more to the point: what if “autotheory” describes instead a theorization of the Self or experience wherein “the self” is only legible as the product of automated computational-algorithmic processes?
[8] Echoing the critiques of “correlationism” or “anthropocentrism” or what have you, Jarzombek declares that “The age of anthrocentrism is over” (32).
[9] Whatever notion of (self)identity the Self might find to be most palatable today, Jarzombek argues, is inevitably mediated via global satellites. “The intermediaries are the satellites hovering above the planet. They are what make us global–what make me global” (1), and as such, they represent the “civilianization” of military technologies (4). What I am trying to suggest is that the concepts and categories of self-identity we work with today are derived from the informatic feedback we receive from long-standing military technologies.
[10] Here Jarzombek seems to be suggesting that the “object” in the “objectivity” of “the social sciences” has been carelessly conflated with the “object” in “object-oriented” philosophy. The prioritization of all things “objective” in both philosophy and science has inadvertently produced this semantic and conceptual slippage. Data objects about the Self exist, and thus by existing, they determine what is objective about the Self. In this new formulation, what is objective about the Self or subject, in other words, is what can be verified as information about the self. In Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (2014), Ronald Day argues that these global tracking technologies supplant traditional ontology’s “ideas or concepts of our human manner of being” and have in the process “subsume[d] and subvert[ed] the former roles of personal judgment and critique in personal and social beings and politics” (1). While such technologies might be said to obliterate “traditional” notions of subjectivity, judgment, and critique, Day demonstrates how this simultaneous feeding-forward and feeding back of data-about-the-Self represents the return of autoaffection, though in his formulation self-presence is defined as information or data-about-the-self whose authenticity is produced when it is fact-checked against a biographical database (3)—self-presence is a presencing of data-about-the-Self. This is all to say that the Self’s informational “aboutness”–its representation in and as data–comes to stand in for the Self’s identity, which can only be comprehended as “authentic” in its limited metaphysical capacity as a general informatic or documented “aboutness.”
[11] Flusser is again instructive on this point, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way. Drawing attention to the strange unnatural plurality in the term “humanities,” he writes, “The American term humanities appropriately describes the essence of these disciplines. It underscores that the human being is an unnatural animal” (2002, 3). The plurality of “humanities,” as opposed to the singular “humanity,” constitutes for Flusser a disciplinary admission that not only the category of “the human” is unnatural, but that the study of such an unnatural thing is itself unnatural, as well. I think it is also worth pointing out that in the context of Flusser’s observation, we might begin to situate the rise of “the supplemental humanities” as an attempt to redefine the value of a humanities education. The spatial humanities, the energy humanities, medical humanities, the digital humanities, etc.—it is not difficult to see how these disciplinary off-shoots consider themselves as supplements to whatever it is they think “the humanities” are up to; regardless, their institutional injection into traditional humanistic discourse will undoubtedly improve both(sub)disciplines, with the tacit acknowledgment being that the latter has just a little more to gain from the former in terms of skills, technical know-how, and data management. Many thanks to Aaron Jaffe for bringing this point to my attention.
[12] In his essay “Algorithmic Catastrophe—The Revenge of Contingency,” Yuk Hui notes that “the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle” (125). Drawing from the work of Bernard Stiegler, Hui shows how the pharmacological dimension of “technics, which aims to overcome contingency, also generates accidents” (127). And so “as the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle…it no longer plays the role it did with the laws of nature” (132). Simply put, by placing algorithmic catastrophe on par with a failure of reason qua the operations of mathematics, Hui demonstrates how “algorithms are open to contingency” only insofar as “contingency is equivalent to a causality, which can be logically and technically deduced” (136). To take Jarzombek’s example of the failing computer or what have you, while the blue screen of death might be understood to represent the faithful execution of its programmed commands, we should also keep in mind that the obverse of Jarzombek’s scenario would force us to come to grips with how the philosophical implications of the “shit happens” logic that underpins contingency-as-(absent) causality “accompanies and normalizes speculative aesthetics” (139).
[13] I am reminded here of one of the six theses from the manifesto “What would a floating sheep map?,” jointly written by the Floating Sheep Collective, which is a cohort of geography professors. The fifth thesis reads: “Map or be mapped. But not everything can (or should) be mapped.” The Floating Sheep Collective raises in this section crucially important questions regarding ownership of data with regard to marginalized communities. Because it is not always clear when to map and when not to map, they decide that “with mapping squarely at the center of power struggles, perhaps it’s better that not everything be mapped.” If mapping technologies operate as ontological radars–the Self’s data points help point the Self towards its own ontological location in and as data—then it is fair to say that such operations are only philosophically coherent when they are understood to be framed within the parameters outlined by recent iterations of ontological thinking and its concomitant theoretical deflation of the rich conceptual make-up that constitutes the “the human.” You can map the human’s data points, but only insofar as you buy into the idea that points of data map the human. See http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.
[14] “Mind/paranoia: they are the same word!”(Jarzombek 71).
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Works Cited
- Adler, Renata. Speedboat. New York Review of Books Press, 1976.
- Altieri, Charles. “Are We Being Materialist Yet?” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016):241-57.
- Calloway, Marie. what purpose did i serve in your life. Tyrant Books, 2013.
- Chun, Wendy Hui Kyun. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. The MIT Press, 2016.
- Cohen, Joshua. Book of Numbers. Random House, 2015.
- Cole, Andrew. “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies.” minnesota review 80 (2013): 106-118.
- Colebrook, Claire. “Hypo-Hyper-Hapto-Neuro-Mysticism.” Parrhesia 18 (2013).
- Day, Ronald. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. The MIT Press, 2014.
- Floating Sheep Collective. “What would a floating sheep map?” http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.
- Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
- –––. The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication. 1975. Metaflux, 2016.
- –––. Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl. Translated by Erik Eisel. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
- Galloway, Alexander R. “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” Critical Inquiry 39.2 (2013): 347-366.
- Hansen, Mark B.N. Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Duke University Press, 2015.
- Hayles, N. Katherine. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014):199-220.
- –––. “The Cognitive Nonconscious: Enlarging the Mind of the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 42 (Summer 2016): 783-808.
- Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara. “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Collisions, Negotiations.” Common Knowledge 22.3 (2016):353-72.
- Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? Picador, 2010.
- Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. The MIT Press, 2016.
- Huehls, Mitchum. After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age. Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Hui, Yuk. “Algorithmic Catastrophe–The Revenge of Contingency.” Parrhesia 23(2015): 122-43.
- Jarzombek, Mark. Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
- Lin, Tao. Richard Yates. Melville House, 2010.
- –––. Taipei. Vintage, 2013.
- McNeill, Laurie. “There Is No ‘I’ in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82.
- Murphet, Julian. “A Modest Proposal for the Inhuman.” Modernism/Modernity 23.3(2016): 651-70.
- Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf P, 2015.
- O’Gorman, Marcel. “Speculative Realism in Chains: A Love Story.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18.1 (2013): 31-43.
- Rosenberg, Jordana. “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” Theory and Event 17.2 (2014): n.p.
- Sheldon, Rebekah. “Dark Correlationism: Mysticism, Magic, and the New Realisms.” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016): 137-53.
- Simanowski, Roberto. “Instant Selves: Algorithmic Autobiographies on Social Network Sites.” New German Critique 44.1 (2017): 205-216.
- Stagg, Natasha. Surveys. Semiotext(e), 2016.
- Wolfendale, Peter. Object Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes. Urbanomic, 2014.
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David Thomas – On No-Platforming
by David Thomas
No-platforming has recently emerged as a vital tactical response to the growing mainstream presence of the self-styled alt-right. Described by proponents as a form of cordon sanitaire, and vilified by opponents as the work of coddled ideologues, no-platforming entails the struggle to prevent political opponents from accessing institutional means of amplifying their views. The tactic has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Former US President Barack Obama was himself so disturbed by the phenomenon that during the closing days of his tenure he was moved to remark:
I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. …I gotta tell you I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view…Sometimes I realized maybe I’ve been too narrow-minded, maybe I didn’t take this into account, maybe I should see this person’s perspective. …That’s what college, in part, is all about…You shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say” … That’s not the way we learn either. (qtd. Kingkade 2017 [2015])
Obama’s words here nicely crystalize one traditional understanding of the social utility of free speech. In classical liberal thought, free speech is positioned as the cornerstone of a utilitarian account of political and technological progress, one that views the combat of intellectually dexterous elites as the crucible of social progress. The free expression of informed elite opinion is imagined as an indispensable catalyst to modernity’s ever-accelerating development of new knowledge. The clash of unfettered intellects is said to serve as the engine of history.
For John Stuart Mill, one of the first to formulate this particular approach to the virtues of free expression, the collision of contrary views was necessary to establish any truth. Mill explicitly derived his concept of the truth-producing “free market of ideas” from Adam Smith’s understanding of how markets work. In both cases, moderns were counselled to entrust themselves to the discretion of a judicious social order, one that was said to emerge spontaneously as rational individuals exerted their vying bids for self-expression and self-actualization. These laissez faire arguments insisted that an optimal ordering of ends and means would ultimately be produced out of the mass of autonomous individual initiatives, one that would have been impossible to orchestrate from the vantage point of any one individual or group. In both cases – free speech and free markets – it was said that if we committed to the lawful exercise of individual freedoms we could be sure that the invisible hand will take care of the rest, sorting the wheat from the chaff, sifting and organizing initiatives according to the outcomes that best befit the social whole, securing our steady collective progress toward the best of all possible worlds. No surprise, then, that so much worried commentary on the rise of the alt-right has cautioned us to abide by the established rules, insisting that exposure to the free speech collider chamber will wear the “rough edges” off the worst ideas, allowing their latent kernels of rational truth to be developed and revealed, whilst permitting what is noxious and unsupportable to be displayed and refuted.
A key point, then, about no-platforming is that its practice cuts against the grain of this vision of history and against the theory of knowledge on which it is founded. For in contrast to proponents of Mill’s proceduralist epistemology, student practioners of no-platforming have appropriated to themselves the power to directly intervene in the knowledge factories where they live and work, “affirmatively sabotaging” (Spivak 2014) the alt-right’s strategic attempts to build out its political legitimacy. And it is this use of direct action, and the site-specific rejection of Mill’s model of rational debate that it has entailed, that has brought student activists to the attention of university administrators, state leaders, and law enforcement.
We should not mistake the fact that these students have been made the object of ire precisely because of their performative unruliness, because of their lack of willingness to defer to the state’s authority to decide what constitutes acceptable speech. One thing often left unnoticed in celebrations of the freedoms afforded by liberal democracies is the role that the state plays in conditioning the specific kinds of autonomy that individuals are permitted to exercise. In other words, our autonomy to express opposition as we see fit is already much more intensively circumscribed than recent “free speech” advocates care to admit.
Representations of no-platforming in the media bring us to the heart of the matter here. Time and again, in critical commentary on the practice, the figure of the wild mob resurfaces, often counter-posed to the disciplined, individuated dignity of the accomplished orator:
[Person X] believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue. But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings. Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement. Given this set of assumptions, perhaps it is no surprise that the students behave like bullies even as they see themselves as victims. (Friedersdorf 2015)
These remarks are exemplary of a certain elective affinity for a particular model citizen – a purportedly non-bullying parliamentarian agent or eloquent spokesperson who is able to establish an argument’s legitimacy with calm rationality. These lofty incarnations of “rational discourse” are routinely positioned as the preferred road to legitimate political influence. Although some concessions are made to the idea of “peaceful protest,” in the present climate even minimal appeals to the politics of collective resistance find themselves under administrative review (RT 2017). Meanwhile, champions of free speech quietly endorse specific kinds of expression. Some tones of voice, some placard messages, some placements of words and bodies are celebrated; others are reviled. In practice, the promotion of ostensibly “free” speech often just serves to idealize and define the parameters of acceptable public conduct.
No-platforming pushes back against these regulatory mechanisms. In keeping with longstanding tactics of subaltern struggle, its practice demonstrates that politics can be waged through a diversity of means, showing that alongside the individual and discursive propagation of one’s political views, communities can also act as collective agents, using their bodies and their capacity for self-organization to thwart the rise of political entities that threaten their wellbeing and survival. Those conversant with the history of workers’ movements will of course recognize the salience of such tactics. For they lie at the heart of emancipatory class politics, in the core realization that in standing together in defiance of state violence and centralized authority, disenfranchised communities can find ways to intervene in the unfolding of their fates, as they draw together in the unsanctioned shaping and shielding of their worlds.
It is telling that so much media reportage seems unable to identify with this history, greeting the renewed rise of collective student resistance with a combination of bafflement and recoil. The undercurrent of pearl-clutching disquiet that runs through such commentary might also be said to perform a subtle kind of rhetorical work, perhaps even priming readers to anticipate and accept the moment when police violence will be deployed to restore “order,” to break up the “mob,” and force individuals back onto the tracks that the state has ordained.
Yet this is not to say there is nothing new about this new wave of free speech struggles. Instead, they supply further evidence that longstanding strategies of collective resistance are being displaced out of the factory systems – where we still tend to look from them – and into what Joshua Clover refers to, following Marx, as the sphere of circulation, into the marketplaces and the public squares where commodities and opinions circulate in search of valorization and validation. Disenfranchised communities are adjusting to the debilitating political legacies of deindustrialization. As waves of automation have rendered workers unable to express their resistance through the slowdown or sabotage of the means of production, the obstinacy of the strike has been stripped down to its core. And as collective resistance to the centralized administration of social conduct now plays out beyond the factory’s walls, it increasingly takes on the character of public confrontation with the state. Iterations of this phenomenon play out in flashpoints as remote and diverse as Berkeley, Ferguson, and Standing Rock. And as new confrontations fall harder on the heels of the old, they make a spectacle of the deteriorating condition of the social contract.
If it seems odd to compare the actions of students at elite US universities and workers in the industrial factory systems of old, consider the extent to which students have themselves become increasingly subject to proletarianization and precarity – to indebtedness, to credit wages, and to job prospects that are at best uncertain. This transformation of the university system – from bastion of civil society and inculcator of elite modes of conduct, to frenetic producer of indebted precarious workers – helps to account for the apparent inversion of campus radicalism’s orientation to the institution of free speech.
Longtime observers will recall that the same West Coast campuses that have been key flashpoints in this wave of free speech controversies were once among the most ardent champions of the institution. Strange, then, that in today’s context the heirs to Mario Savio’s calls to anti-racist civil disobedience seem more prone to obstruct than to promote free speech events. Asked about Savio’s likely response to this trend, social scientist and biographer Robert Cohen finds that “Savio would almost certainly have disagreed with the faculty and students who urged the administration to ban Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, and been heartened by the chancellor’s refusal to ban a speaker” (Cohen 2017). The alt-right has delighted in trolling student radicals over this apparent break with tradition:
Milo Inc.’s first event will be a return to the town that erupted in riots when he was invited to speak earlier this year. In fact, Yiannopoulos said that he is planning a “week-long celebration of free speech” near U.C. Berkeley, where a speech by his fellow campus agitator, Ann Coulter, was recently canceled after threats of violence. It will culminate in his bestowing something called the Mario Savio Award for Free Speech. (The son of Savio, one of the leaders of Berkeley’s Free Speech movement during the mid-1960s, called the award “some kind of sick joke”.) (Nguyen 2017)
Yet had Milo named his free speech prize after Savio’s would-be mentor John Searle, then the logic of current events might have appeared a little more legible. For as Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Beezer de Martelly have recently reminded us, in the period between 1965 and 1967 when the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was emerging as the home of more militant forms of student resistance, the US government commission Searle to research the movement. The resulting publication would eventually come to serve “as a manual for university administrators on how to most efficiently dismantle radical student protests” (Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly 2017). One of the keys to Searle’s method was the effort to “encouraged students to focus on their own … abstract rights to free speech,” a move that was to “shift campus momentum away from Black labor struggles and toward forming a coalition between conservatives and liberals on the shared topic of free speech rights” (Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly 2017). Summing up the legacies of this history from today’s vantage, Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly remark:
In hindsight, it becomes clear that the “alt-right”‘s current use of the free speech framework as a cover for the spread of genocidal politics is actually a logical extension of the FSM — not, as some leftists would have it, a co-optation of its originally “radical” intentions. In addition to the increasingly violent “free speech rallies” organized in what “alt-right” members have dubbed “The Battle for Berkeley,” the use of free speech as a legitimating platform for white supremacist politics has begun to spread throughout the country. (Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly 2017)
It is in relation to this institutional history that we might best interpret the alt-right’s use of free speech and the responses of the student left. For as Hofmann-Kuroda and de Martelly suggest, the alt-right’s key avatars such as Milo and Richard Spenser have now succeeded in building out the reach of Searle’s tactics. Their ambitions have extended beyond defusing social antagonisms and shoring up the prevailing status quo; indeed, in an eerie echo of Savio’s hopes for free speech, the alt-right now sees the institution as a site where dramatic social transformations can be triggered.
But why then is the alt-right apt to see opportunities in this foundational liberal democratic institution, while the student left is proving more prone to sabotage its smooth functioning? It certainly appears that Searle’s efforts to decouple free speech discourse and anti-racist struggle have been successful. Yet to grasp the overall stakes of these struggles it can be helpful to pull back from the abstract debates that Searle proved so adept in promoting, to make a broader assessment of prevailing socio-economic and climatic conditions.
For in mapping how the terrain has changed since the time of Salvo and Searle we might take account of the extent to which the universal summons to upward mobility, and the global promise of endless material and technological enfranchisement that defined the social experience of postwar modernization, have lately begun to ring rather hollow. Indeed as we close in on the third decade of the new millennium, there seems to be no end to the world system’s economic woes in sight, and no beginning to its substantive reckoning with problem of anthropogenic climate change.
In response, people are changing the way they orient themselves toward the centrist state. In another instance of his welcome and ongoing leftward drift, Bruno Latour argues that global politics are now defined by the blowback of a catastrophically failed modernization project:
The thing we share with these migrating peoples is that we are all deprived of land. We, the old Europeans, are deprived because there is no planet for globalization and we must now change the entire way we live; they, the future Europeans, are deprived because they have had to leave their old, devastated lands and will need to learn to change the entire way they live.
This is the new universe. The only alternative is to pretend that nothing has changed, to withdraw behind a wall, and to continue to promote, with eyes wide open, the dream of the “American way of life,” all the while knowing that billions of human beings will never benefit from it. (Latour 2017)
Apprehending the full ramifications of the failure of modernization will require us to undertake what the Club of Rome once referred to as a “Copernican revolution of the mind” (Club of Rome 1972: 196). And in many respects the alt-right has been quicker to begin this revolution than the technocratic guardians of the globalist order. In fact, it seems evident that the ethnonationalists look onto the same prospects as Latour, while proscribing precisely the opposite remedies. Meantime, guardians of the “center” remain all too content to repeat platitudinous echoes of Mills’ proceduralism, assuring us all that – evidence to the contrary – the market has the situation in invisible hand.
This larger historical frame is key to understanding campus radicalism’s turn to no-platforming, which seems to register – on the level of praxis – that the far right has capitalized far more rapidly on emergent conditions that the center or the left. In understanding why this has occurred, it is worth considering the relationship between the goals of the FSM and the socioeconomic conditions that prevailed in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the movement was at its peak.
For Savio and his anti-racist allies at the FSM, free speech afforded radicals both a platform from to which protest US imperialism with relative impunity, and an institutional lodestar by which to steer a course that veered away from the purges and paranoia of the Stalinist culture of command. It seemed that the institution itself served as a harbinger of a radicalized and “socialized” state, one that was capable of executing modernization initiatives that would benefit everyone.
The postwar program of universal uplift then seemed apt to roll out over the entire planet, transforming the earth’s surface into a patchwork of independent modern nation states all locked into the same experience of ongoing social and technological enfranchisement. In such a context Savio and other contemporary advocates of free-speech saw the institution as a foreshadowing of the modern civil society into which all would eventually be welcomed as enfranchised bearers of rights. Student activism’s commitment to free speech thus typified the kind of statist radicalism that prevailed in the age of decolonization, a historical period when the postcolonial state seemed poised to socialize wealth, and when the prospect of postcolonial self-determination was apt to be all but synonymous with national modernization programs.
Yet in contrast to this expansive and incorporative modernizing ethos, the alt-right savior state is instead being modeled around avowedly expulsive and exclusionary initiatives. This is the state reimagined as a gated community writ large, one braced – with its walls, border camps, and guards – to resist the incursion of “alien” others, all fleeing the catastrophic effects of a failed postwar modernization project. While siphoning off natural wealth to the benefit of the enwalled few, this project has unleashed the ravages of climate change and the impassive violence of the border on the exposed many. The alt-right response to this situation is surprisingly consonant with the Pentagon’s current assessment, wherein the US military is marketed as a SWAT team serving at the dispensation of an urban super elite:
Given the lines along which military and official state policy now trends, it is probably a mistake to characterize far-right policy proposals as a wholescale departure from prevailing norms. Indeed, it seems quite evident that – as Latour remarks – the “enlightened elite” have known for some time that the advent of climate change has given the lie to the longstanding promises of the postwar reconstruction:
The enlightened elites soon started to pile up evidence suggesting that this state of affairs wasn’t going to last. But even once elites understood that the warning was accurate, they did not deduce from this undeniable truth that they would have to pay dearly.
Instead they drew two conclusions, both of which have now led to the election of a lord of misrule to the White House: Yes, this catastrophe needs to be paid for at a high price, but it’s the others who will pay, not us; we will continue to deny this undeniable truth. (Latour 2017)
From such vantages it can be hard to determine to what extent centrist policies actually diverge from those of the alt-right. For while they doggedly police the exercise of free expression, representatives of centrist orthodoxy often seem markedly less concerned with securing vulnerable peoples against exposure to the worst effects of climate change and de-development. In fact, it seems all too evident that the centrist establishment will more readily defend people’s right to describe the catastrophe in language of their own choosing than work to provide them with viable escape routes and life lines.
Contemporary free speech struggles are ultimately conflicts over policy rather than ironic contests over theories of truth. For it has been in the guise of free speech advocacy that the alt-right has made the bulk of its initial gains, promoting its genocidal vision through the disguise of ironic positional play, a “do it for the lolz” mode of summons that marshals the troops with a nod and wink. It seems that in extending the logic of Searle’s work at Berkley, the alt-right has thus managed to “hack” the institution of free speech, navigating it with such a deft touch that defenses of the institution are becoming increasingly synonymous with the mainstream legitimation of their political project.
Is it then so surprising that factions of the radical left are returning full circle to the foundationally anti-statist modes of collective resistance that defined radical politics at its inception? Here, Walter Benjamin’s concept of “the emergency brake” suggests itself, though we can adjust the metaphor a little to better grasp current conditions (Benjamin 2003: 401). For it is almost as if the student left has responded to a sense that the wheel of history had taken a sickening lurch rightward, by shaking free of paralysis, by grabbing hold of the spokes and pushing back, greeting the overawing complexities of our geopolitical moment with local acts of defiance. It is in this defiant spirit that we might approach the free speech debates, arguing not for the implementation of draconian censorship mechanisms (if there must be a state, better that it is at least nominally committed to freedom of expression than not) but against docile submission to a violent social order—an order with which adherence to the doctrine of free speech is perfectly compatible. The central lesson that we might thus draw from the activities of Berkley’s unruly students is that the time for compliant faith in the wisdom of our “guardians” is behind us (Stengers 2015: 30).
David Thomas is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholar in the Department of English at Carleton University. His thesis explores narrative culture in post-workerist Britain, and unfolds around the twin foci of class and climate change.
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