b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Naomi Waltham-Smith — À (Review of Irving Goh’s L’Existence Prépositionelle)

    Naomi Waltham-Smith — À (Review of Irving Goh’s L’Existence Prépositionelle)

    Review of Irving Goh, L’Existence prépositionnelle. (Galilée 2019)

    By Naomi Waltham-Smith

    Irving Goh’s rich and intriguing book on recent French poststructuralist thought ends with a proposal for a new kind of writing that would belatedly fulfil the grammatological project, in other words elaborate a “positive science” of writing that generalizes the concept of writing beyond the narrow sense of a graphic gesture.[1] Following Jacques Derrida, Goh imagines a writing “under the weight of monstrosity,” but one that would also be constrained in the sense of a character limit on Twitter or the Oulipian project of George Perec’s 1969 novel, Disparition, which is a lipogram written entirely without the letter e (110). But instead of making a letter disappear, Goh is interested in putting in question everywhere the preposition à: a letter with its diacritical mark. This letter à, which is really a letter supplemented by its diacritical mark, is a letter before any alphabetical letter, or more precisely, simply the difference between the letter with diacritic and the mere letter, the difference between à and a.

    At first blush, this seems like an esoteric concern, one that might appear to justify deconstruction’s mistaken reputation for being inscribed within the very linguistic turn that it challenges. But Goh’s ambition rather exceeds the textual or rather it is an ambition for a textual detail, a mere preposition, to drive a radical rewriting of philosophy and ontological, ethical, and political concepts. For example, être-là (Heidegger’s Dasein) becomes être-l’à to suggest an altogether different kind of being-toward that Goh calls “prepositional being.” Goh also proposes a further quasi-homophonic twist on Derrida’s différance, rewriting it as différànce to underscore that, even before the explicit use of the prepositional phrases à-venir, deconstruction, in its attention to temporal and spatial self-differentiation, was always already a prepositional thought (15). To make an ethico-political revolution turn on a diacritical mark is an audacious move and one that does not entirely pay off, but the way in which it stumbles reveals the significant political stakes of the debates among Derrida and his followers and points to the urgent theoretical work to which Goh’s book is but a preposition.  After the complex philosophical maneuvers on display throughout  the book, the epilogue’s suggestion that we might begin to build a “prepositional community” by tweeting “à” in multiple languages as a form of hashtag activism not unlike the #MeToo movement might come as something of a surprise to the reader, less because of the change in register than because it reveals the political limits of a subtraction from representation, however philosophically nuanced or consistent, for the painstaking and crucial work of building solidarity and alliances across different experiences of oppression and exploitation. The proximity of communicative capitalism to its purported unworking shows the political perils of the post-deconstructive thinking to which Goh is attracted.

    Goh invites us to understand the term preposition in a double sense: both as a linguistic part of which à (to) is, for reasons that are more or less justified, the privileged exemplar, and also as the pre-positional or that which comes before taking position. As he notes, there is also the possibility for hearing the sense of près-position, suggesting a certain proximity (42n1).[2] For Goh, however, it is the implication of movement or momentum that gives à its appeal. Prepositional being is thus always on the way to being, never fixed or static. As such, it resists the reduction and substantialization of identity.[3] It is never permanent, given, or substantial. Rather, it is always in the process of becoming in relation to others. Prepositional being is always, to borrow the expression of the book’s most influential voice, a birth to presence (naître à la présence).

    In Goh’s hands, this prepositional existence is in the first instance an ontology and that is the focus of his book’s first substantial chapter. This ontology then becomes the basis for an ethics and a politics which are explored in the second and third chapters. The à above all expresses a constitutive relation or openness to the other, the fact that identity is always disrupted in advance by being exposed or disclosed to the other, an other that includes the internal difference that being “is.” It is for this reason that Goh boldly claims the preposition as the basis for an ethics and a politics that would end the hatred, discrimination, and violence in our world by affirming the freedom of the existence of each and every other. This bold claim, which appears to flirt with a post-racial stance, is perhaps the most controversial element of this provocative text and it requires closer scrutiny. Also provocative, though, is Goh’s claim that the preposition is not merely an ontological, ethical, or political category or object of philosophical thought but is what animates thinking itself. Thinking, by this reckoning, unlike thought “on paper” is instead dynamic and always in formation, a train of thought, as we say in English (la pensée en train de se penser—thought in the process of thinking [itself]). Thought itself, then, as Goh’s foreword describes, has the character of a preposition, remaining “open to all possibilities, trajectories, directions, and to all revisions and, indeed, changing its mind” (12). It is in that spirit that one perhaps ought to read this book: as a movement or force toward a prepositional philosophy but one whose goal is undetermined and which remains open to alternative paths and modifications in the act of reading corps à corps (literally body/ies-to-body/ies, but often connotes bodily struggle, especially hand-to-hand combat, and for deconstruction the originary interlocking of bodies with other bodies).

    Goh’s book is devoted to a cluster of recent French thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, Luce Irigaray, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière, although the text is chiefly addressed to Jean-Luc Nancy, who was one of Goh’s doctoral advisors and remains a close intellectual collaborator. What brings together this group of thinkers should, according to the theory advanced in the book, be nothing other than an inclination toward prepositional thinking. And yet insofar as the focus here is exclusively on French thinkers, and to the extent that Goh entertains the possibility of a second volume devoted to German thought, a certain philosophical nationalism—of the kind that Derrida analyzed in the seminars of 1980s and the Geschlecht essays—threatens to reassert itself and thus to undo everything that is supposedly gained by this pre-positional thought. The question—and this is posed to Nancy as well as to Goh—is: how can one avoid the presupposition remerging at the heart of the pre-position? How to avoid the preposition turning into a foundation, albeit a negative one of the withdrawal traced by that hyphen?

    The hypothesis that the thought of the preposition is also prepositional is presumably meant to warn off this problem by replicating the logic of the re-marking that Derrida attributes to the trace as retrait (redrawing and retreat). And Goh, after Nancy, insists that à can never be understood as penetration or gaining access but must always respect the limits and the “mystery” of each being. The approach—in the toucher à (touching, infringing upon), for example—is always marked by withdrawal, distance, and separation in the sense of, for example, s’arracher à (tearing oneself away from). He notes, however, that while Nancy’s initial prepositional fascination was with the “in” of être-en-commun (being-in-common) and was then displaced onto the being-with in a deconstruction of the Heideggerian Mitsein (being-with), the à is “closer to the heart of Nancy’s thought.”[4] This exorbitant privilege of the à, its proximity to immediacy, thus comes up against the same dangers that Derrida finds so troubling in Nancy’s attachment to the motifs of community and fraternity. Whilst Goh makes trenchant comparisons with Lévinas, Irigaray, and Badiou, he somewhat retreats from the corps à corps between Derrida and Nancy. There is a specific scene, for instance, where they are face à face at the beginning of Derrida’s Le toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy where that dash between the noun and the proper name will transform by the end of the lengthy book into the very preposition at stake—“et à toi [and to you]” Goh touches briefly upon this important text but swerves away from tackling directly those moments where Derrida articulates his distance from Nancy.

    Even if Nancy thinks the purported immediacy of touch more exactly—which is to say more deconstructively— than the phenomenologists, Derrida suspects Nancy of holding out at a higher level. Insofar as touch, Derrida argues, is not merely one category among others for Nancy, it assumes a quasi-transcendental ontologization. Something similar occurs with the category of resonance, which provides an explicit model for Goh’s prepositional ontology as an archi-sonorité (arche-sonority) or an étre “à l’écoute” (“to be listening to,” “to be attentive to,” or even “ears pricked” as an aural equivalent to “to be on the lookout”) as the title of Nancy’s book has it. Chosen for the way in which sound is propagated (its formless dissipation, its transitional status, and the way in which echoes do not return identical sounds), there is nonetheless nothing than can be said of aurality, Nancy argues, that must also not be said of the other senses, and yet sonority enjoys a certain privilege, much like touch or à, insofar as it is “nothing but” this reverberation.[5] Écriture (writing) thus assumes the character of a non- or pre-signifying language, a silence vibration before any meaning or even any sound.

    From Derrida’s perspective, Nancy’s tactful approach, which holds itself back from touching just as pre-positional existence or politics restrains itself from occupying a position, risks becoming a negative substantialization. Whereas Nancy will insist on the formulation “there is no ‘the’… [il n’y a pas ‘le’…]”—for example, there is no ‘the’ sense of touch—Derrida counterposes to this negative modality a conditional “if there is any such thing [s’il y en a].”[6] For Derrida, the difference between these two deconstructions is that Nancy’s risks losing precisely the contingency that he gains with the logic of the preposition by turning that contingency into a negative ground. Put differently, Nancy’s à is destined to never arrive whereas Derrida will stick to the undecidability of perhaps it will or will not arrive. The subtle difference here lies between structural impossibility and structural contingency, which has consequences for Goh’s politics and explains why the presuppositional lists toward the unpositioned (im-positioné). Like the inconditional, the unpositional—and any politics in the name of that unpositionality or unconditionality—only ever takes place in conditioned and conditional circumstances that render it both positional and positioned. From this standpoint, it is not simply race, for instance, that is an imposition but even more so the neoliberal deflection from structural constraints that multiples the injustice by the fiction that today we are on the way to stripping back the accumulation of oppression over many centuries to arrive at a post-racial future that mirrors a pre-racial ontology.

    In short, the danger is that the prepositional continues to presuppose a teleological horizon. Goh is certainly aware of the issue of turning politics into the long wait of infinite deferral and is careful to construe Derrida’s à-venir not as an event in some future horizon but as “an absolute surprise which would arrive at any time” (99). Goh’s arguments would, however, be even stronger if he had taken the time to patiently stage this corps à corps instead of eliding the difference between the kind of nomadic contingency he wants to capture with the notion of presupposition and the Derridean à-venir in which such contingency and drift is necessary.

    Another way to adjudicate this dispute between Nancy and Derrida is to say that Nancy inclines toward resolving the undecidability of the finite and the infinite in the direction of the infinite, always seeing the finite trace as a trace of the infinite, as Geoff Bennington has argued[7]—which, I might add, is why pre-positional existence ends up in dangerous proximity to the presupposition of the nation or other exclusionary logic as the basis for community. Even though Goh elsewhere insists that what is at stake in prepositional existence is a finite infinity, the difficulty remains insofar as the intricacies of the debate over Derrida’s little phrase “infinite différance is finite” and Nancy’s apparent misunderstandings of it on various occasions are left unchallenged here. In his book, Goh decribes the preposition as an infinite opening or an opening to infinity:

    The preposition à is at once the space and time of opening. It always opens itself to all alterity, to anything, to anyone, to any place, to any moment. Or, simply put, it opens infinitely. (18)

    He is at the same time careful to distinguish his être-l’à from the Heideggerian being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) and offers a compelling reading of Derrida’s “À force de deuil” to tear a notion of survival beyond death—what Derrida calls survie or la vie la mort—away from Heidegger. The distinction, Goh appears to argue, rests on substituting an infinite opening for the fixed horizon of death that would limit that opening. What would have been fruitful to pry open the difference between Nancy and Derrida is an analysis of Derrida’s discussion of being-toward-death in his extended essay on the work of Hélène Cixous where she is, initially at least, positioned on the side of life. This position becomes increasingly uncertain as Derrida’s reading unfolds and it comes to turn precisely on a preposition. Derrida characterizes Cixous as “being for life,” but is quick to add that this should not be understood as symmetrically opposed to Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode for multiple reasons. In the first instance this is because the notion of life-death that Derrida advances dissolves the opposition between life and death. The experience evoked in Cixous’s writings is a “living of death but yes, still living death, living it for oneself, for the other, and for life.”[8] More pertinently for present purposes, it is also because the “for” in this “for life” is not translatable by any “to.”

    Finally, even if the “or life” that is being analyzed here did not merely designate the other side symmetrically opposed to being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode), and if life and death here were nor antonyms, the semantic turbulence of this verbal animal, “for,” would certainly nor let itself be translated, exhausted, or comprehended by a zu or zum, which anyway is itself difficult to translate into another language.[9]

    Derrida speaks here of “surrendering to a preposition,” but the for or pro differs from the à in one decisive way. Like the pre of pre-position, the pro comes before—is the “prolegomenon” of—everything, including all finality and destination. The for, though, also has an additional sense of substitution. It is less a question of the ex- or dis-posing (or even of de-posing) that Goh borrows from Nancy than of re-placing “this for that, this one in the place of the other.”[10] Différance, on this reading, is not simply fluid and dynamic but above all prosthetic.

    This prostheticity is closely related to a point that Derrida makes in a number of places and specifically in relation to being-toward-death at the end of his final seminar. In contrast with Dasein’s relation to death, the impossibility of which Derrida speaks is something of which one is capable. He makes a similar point expressly in response to Nancy during a conversation at the Collège International de Philosophie in January 2002 devoted to the topic of “Résponsabilité du sens à venir.” Nancy argues:

    If the address probably can and even must always miss its mark, if it is always destinerrant, as you say, then there can be this whole configuration—question-demand-address and response—only if the address has somewhere awakened the possibility of the response and thus if, behind the response, there is something that I would want to call resonance.[11]

    Nancy goes on to argue that while “I cannot be responsible, in the sense of a programmatic, calculated, and calculating appropriation . . . I am at least responsible for the capacity, for the condition of possibility, of the response that is found within the resonance.” Derrida’s response is that responsibility necessarily exceeds all performative power which instead contains precisely the surprise and risk that Goh wants to hold onto.[12] If I am capable to responding to the other, what is thus problematic is the possibilization of impossibility: it removes the chance that I not respond. The prosthetic character of différance is what dislocates this power from the outset, which also means that force at once resists itself.

    This prepositional difference raises important questions for the politics that Goh draws out as the corollary of an ethical injunction to respect and affirm the openness to difference that defines prepositional existence. Goh offers an interesting analysis of Badiou’s theory of the event as an example of prepositional thinking insofar as the event marks something that is strictly incalculable and unforeseeable form the standpoint of the status quo. And yet Goh argues that Badiou ultimately subordinates this eventality to the communist hypothesis and ultimately to the very philosophy whose grasp he intends to escape. From this, Goh concludes that the only conscionable political stance is one that declines to take any position but which remains pre-positional or even im-positional. While complying with the ethical demand of the other and of difference, this pre-positional politics must remain free to take any form (Marxist, communist democratic, etc.). What is at stake in l’à politique is a “position without position,” a minimal positioning which resists taking any fixed, permanent, or definitive position (105). Goh confesses that he has little knowledge of concrete politics in action, but insists that his refusal to take a position follows from the prepositional logic he has elaborated and its resistance to appropriation.

    Cixous’s for, though, suggests another logic of positioning which is explicitly one of repositioning and of taking the position of the other. For Derrida, the pre of pre-position—or more accurately, the pro of a pro-position—is nothing other than this for as substituting power. There is a subtle difference between these two prepositional forces, between à and pour. Goh seems determined to resist the propositional character of most politics and yet it is hard to imagine how simply tearing away from the politics of Trump and Brexit with the deterritorializing gesture of a minor politics would guarantee progress towards the proposition that Goh nonetheless clearly makes: namely the affirmation and respect for others and their differences that would end all racism and xenophobia.[13] This is where Nancy’s project reveals its political shortcomings because an attachment to the infinity of possibility in the guise of the infinite possibility of the impossible turns out to be more impotent than the Derridean and Cixousian impossibility of the possible whose might lies in a subjunctive or a conditional: would that it might happen! The implication of Goh’s prepositional thinking is that only an unconditional politics would be worthy of the name (digne de ce nom), as Derrida says of démocratie à venir.[14] Derrida, though, recognizes that the unconditional only takes place in conditional and conditioned—and typically undignified—circumstances and, in fact, that politics is only worthy of that name to the extent that it necessarily falls short. Goh’s à is perhaps best understood as naming this constitutive shortcoming, an approach that is necessarily always already in retreat.

    Goh’s project sometimes approximates something like a rehabilitation of indignity. Linking the notion of preposition to his earlier work on the figure of the reject and reinforcing his reading of Rancière’s notion of le part sans-part, Goh elsewhere argues that a “prepositional community” would entail the shift from reject as an abject, excluded, marginalized figure to one who, rejecting hypostasis, renounces any such position. On this logic, repositioning is at once ex-position and dis-position, even if Goh acknowledges that the refusal of all position would be tantamount to abandoning all politics since politics irreducibly involves taking a position. From this perspective the stakes of a mere diacritic could not be higher, but Goh’s attraction to transcendentalization shows how philosophy can so readily retreat into itself instead of recognizing that it unavoidably overflows its boundaries in the direction of practice and the work of changing material conditions. If we were to think instead of prepositional politics as the substitution or replacing of the irreplaceability of the other, this taking the place of would be precisely what opens up and gives place for the other in politics. And yet this would still only be the beginning of a political project.

    There is no doubting the sincerity of Goh’s commitment to a politics free of racialized hatred and discrimination and yet his rigorous theoretical endeavor at the same time reveals the limitations of (post)deconstructive philosophy when it comes, for instance, to articulating the difference between the freedom of the fluid, dynamic, nomadic flânerie that Goh describes and its ideological avatar in the flexible neoliberal subject. Insofar as the prepositional subject is without specific differences, it can only enter politics as an individual and not as a member of a class or oppressed group. The subtractive ontological gesture thus courts the dangers of a post-racial racism whose violence consists in bypassing the structural positionality of capitalist violence. Far from dissolving identity, liberation struggles demand a theory of situated empowerment (something that is also presupposed, for example, in post-autonomist notions of political exodus): that is, specifying exactly whence the preposition draws its force. Only then would it become possible to start reversing the horrific violence to which marginalized groups are subjected by taking up the places of oppressed others in a process of want Stuart Hall would call articulation. Instead of an identity out in front or to hand, Derrida’s deconstruction, if there is such a thing, points toward an originary prosthetic articulationality corps à corps (bodies-to-bodies).

    L’existence prépositionelle is a thought-provoking book, whose astute philosophical readings make a convincing case for a new way of understanding the connections among recent French thinkers. It makes an important contribution in opening up space for reassessing the political potential and limits of deconstructive and post-deconstructive thought. The book is a preposition both to Goh’s own future projects whose outlines are discernible in the text, including a tentative theory of failure, and also to a much-needed broader conversation about deconstruction and racialized politics.

     

    Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford, 2017) and Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham, 2021), and in 2019–20 she was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude.

     

    [1] Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 109.

    [2] Timothy Murray, “Philosophical Prepositions: Ecotechnics là où Digital Exhibition,” Special Issue on Jean-Luc Nancy, vol. 1, ed. Irving Goh and Timothy Murray, diacritics 42, no. 2 (2015), 10–34.

    [3] In the essay, Identité: fragments, franchises (Paris: Galilée, 2010), Jean-Luc Nancy explains why identity can never be self-identical but is always an act in the making, the identity of what- or whoever invents itself in the process of exposing itself both to others and to the other within.

    [4] Irving Goh, “Prepositional Thoughts,” Special Issue on Jean-Luc Nancy, vol. 1, ed. Irving Goh and Timothy Murray, diacritics 42, no. 2 (2015), 3.

    [5] Jean-Luc Nancy, À l’écoute (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 56n.

    [6] Jacques Derrida, Le toucher (Paris: Galilée, 323–24).

    [7] Geoffrey Bennington, “Handshake,” Derrida Today 1, no. 2 (2008), 182.

    [8] Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c’est-a-dire … (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 79.

    [9] Ibid., 78.

    [10] Ibid.

    [11] Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Résponsabilité du sens à venir,” in Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean- Luc Nancy, ed. Francis Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 173.

    [12] Ibid., 177–78.

    [13] It is also not accurate to say that the majority, even if they distrust mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties, reject a liberal-progressive politics; electorates are gradually becoming more liberal on average. The support for the far right is often overestimated, even if it is undoubtedly the case that in failing to take clear anti-racist positions, parties in the centre have normalised ant-immigration sentiments, for instance.

    [14] Jacques Derrida, Voyous: deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 27–28.

  • Zachary Loeb — Does Facebook Have Politics? (Review of Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, second edition)

    Zachary Loeb — Does Facebook Have Politics? (Review of Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, second edition)

    a review of Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, second edition (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    The announcement that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan would be donating $300 million to help address some of the challenges COVID-19 poses for the 2020 elections was met with a great deal of derision. The scorn was not directed at the effort to recruit poll workers, or purchase PPE for them, but at the source from whence these funds were coming. Having profited massively from allowing COVID-19 misinformation to run rampant over Facebook, and having shirked responsibility as the platform exacerbated political tensions, the funding announcement came across not only as too little too late, but as a desperate publicity stunt. The incident was but another installment in Facebook’s tumult as the company (alongside its CEO/founder) continually finds itself cast as a villain. Facebook can take some solace in knowing that other tech companies—Google, Amazon, Uber—are also receiving increasingly negative attention, and yet it seems that for every one critical story about Amazon there are five harsh pieces about Facebook.

    Where Facebook, and Zuckerberg, had once enjoyed laudatory coverage, with the platform being hailed as an ally of democracy, by 2020 it has become increasingly common to see Facebook (and Zuckerberg) treated as democracy’s gravediggers. Indeed, much of the animus found in the increasingly barbed responses to Facebook seem to be animated by a sense of betrayal. Many people, including more than a few journalists and scholars, had initially been taken in by Facebook’s promises of a more open and connected world, even if they are loathe to admit that they had ever fallen for that ruse now. Certainly, or so the shift in sentiment conveys, Facebook and Zuckerberg deserve to be angrily upbraided and treated with withering skepticism now… but who could have seen this coming?

    “Technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning” (6). When those words were first published, in 1986, Mark Zuckerberg was around two years old, and yet those words provide a more concise explanation of Facebook than any Facebook press release or defensive public speech given by Zuckerberg. Granted, those words were not written specifically about Facebook (how could they have been?), but in order to express a key insight about the ways in which technologies impact the societies in which they are deployed. The point being not only to consider how technologies can have political implications, but to emphasize that technologies are themselves political. Or to put it slightly differently, Langdon Winner was warning about Facebook before there was a Facebook to warn about.

    More than thirty years after its initial publication, The University of Chicago Press has released a new edition of Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor. Considering the frequency with which this book, particularly its second chapter “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” is still cited today, it is hard to suggest that Winner’s book has been forgotten by scholars. And beyond the academy, those who have spent even a small amount of time reading some of the prominent recent STS or media studies works will have likely come across his name. Therefore, the publication of the this second edition—equipped with a new preface, afterword, an additional chapter, and a spiffy red cover—represents an important opportunity to revisit Winner’s work. While its citational staying power suggests that The Whale and the Reactor has become something of an essential touchstone for works on the politics of technological systems, the larger concerns coursing through the book have not lost any of their weight in the years since the book was published.

    For at its core The Whale and the Reactor is not about the types of technologies we are making, but about the type of society we are making.

    Divided into three sections, The Whale and the Reactor wastes no time in laying out its central intervention. Noting that technology had rarely been treated as a serious topic for philosophical inquiry, Winner sets about arguing that an examined life must examine the technological systems that sustain that life. That technology has so often been relegated to the background has given rise to a sort of “technological somnambulism” whereby many “willingly sleepwalk” as the world is technologically reconfigured around them (10). Moving forward in this dreamy state, the sleepers may have some vague awareness of the extent to which these technological systems are becoming interwoven into their daily lives, but by the time they awaken (supposing they ever do awaken) these systems have accumulated sufficient momentum as to make it seemingly impossible to turn them off at all. Though The Whale and the Reactor is not a treatise on somnambulism, this characterization is significant insofar as a sleepwalker is one who staggers through the world in a state of unawareness, and thus cannot be held truly responsible. Contrary to such fecklessness, the argument presented by Winner is that responsibility for the world being remade by technology is shared by all those who live in that world. Sleepwalking is not an acceptable excuse.

    In what is almost certainly the best-known section of the book, Winner considers whether or not artifacts have politics—answering this question strongly in the affirmative. Couching his commentary in a recognition that “Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation of a free society” (20), Winner highlights that social and economic forces leave clear markers on technologies, but he notes that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Two primary ways in which “artifacts can contain political priorities” (22) are explored: firstly, situations wherein a certain artifact is designed in such a way as to settle a particular larger issue; and secondly, technologies that are designed to function within, and reinforce, a certain variety of political organization. As an example of the first variety, Winner gives an example of mechanization at a nineteenth century reaper manufacturing plant, wherein the process of mechanization was pursued not to produce higher quality or less expensive products, but for the purposes of breaking the power of the factory’s union. While an example of the second sort of politics can be seen in the case of atomic weaponry (and nuclear power) wherein the very existence of these technologies necessitates complex organizations of control and secrecy. Though, of the two arguments, Winner frames the first example as presenting clearer proof, technologies of the latter case make a significant impact insofar as they tend to make “moral reasons other than those of practical necessity appear increasingly obsolete” (36) for the political governance of technological systems.

    Inquiring as to the politics of a particular technology provides a means by which to ask questions about the broader society, specifically: what kind of social order gets reified by this technology? One of freedom and equality? One of control and disenfranchisement? Or one that distracts from the maintenance of the status quo by providing the majority with a share in technological abundance? It is easy to avoid answering such questions when you are sleepwalking, and as a result, “without anyone having explicitly chosen it, dependency upon highly centralized organizations has gradually become a dominant social form” (47). That this has not been “explicitly chosen” is partially a result of the dominance of a technologically optimistic viewpoint that has held to “a conviction that all technology—whatever its size, shape, or complexion—is inherently liberating” (50). Though this bright-eyed outlook is periodically challenged by an awareness of the ways that some technologies can create or exacerbate hazards, these dangers wind up being treated largely as hurdles that will be overcome by further technological progress. When all technologies are seen as “inherently liberating” a situation arises wherein “liberation” comes to be seen only in terms of what can be technologically delivered. Thus, the challenge is to ask “What forms of technology are compatible with the kind of society we want to build?” (52) rather than simply assume that we will be content in whatever world we sleepily wander into. Rather than trust that technology will be “inherently liberating,” Winner emphasizes that it is necessary to ask what kinds of technology will be “compatible with freedom, social justice, and other key political ends” (55), and to pursue those technologies.

    Importantly, a variety of people and groups have been aware of the need to push for artifacts that more closely align with their political ideals, though these response have taken on a range of forms. Instead of seeing technology as deeply intertwined with political matters, some groups saw technology as a way of getting around political issues: why waste time organizing for political change when microcomputers and geodesic domes can allow you to build that alternative world here and now? In contrast to this consumeristic, individualistically oriented attitude (exemplified by works such as the Whole Earth Catalog), there were also efforts to ask broader political questions about the nature of technological systems such as the “appropriate technology” movement (which grew up around E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful). Yet such attempts appear already in the past, rearguard actions that were trying to meekly resist the increasing dominance of complex technical systems. As the long seventies shifted into the 1980s and increasing technological centralization became evident, such movements appear as romantic gestures towards the dream of decentralization. And though the longing for escape from centralized control persists, the direction  “technological ‘progress’ has followed” is one in which “people find themselves dependent upon a great many large, complex systems whose centers are, for all practical purposes, beyond their power to influence” (94).

    Perhaps no technology simultaneously demonstrates the tension between the dream of decentralization and growth of control quite like the computer. Written in the midst of what was being hailed as “the computer revolution” or the “information revolution” (98), The Whale and the Reactor bore witness to the exuberance with which the computer was greeted even as this revolution remained “conspicuously silent about its own ends” (102). Though it was not entirely clear what problem the computer was the solution to, there was still a clear sentiment that the computer had to be the solution to most problems. “Mythinformation” is the term Winner deploys to capture this “almost religious conviction that a widespread adoption of computers and communications systems along with easy access to electronic information will automatically produce a better world for human living” (105). Yet “mythinformation” performs technological politics in inverse order: instead of deciding on political goals and then seeking out the right technological forms for achieving those goals, it takes a technology (the computer) and then seeks to rearrange political problems in such a way as to make them appear as though they can be addressed by that technology. Thus, “computer romantics” hold to the view that “increasing access to information enhances democracy and equalizes social power” (108), less as a reflection of the way that political power works and more as a response to the fact that “increasing access to information” is one of the things that computers do well. Despite the equalizing hopes, earnest though they may have been, that were popular amongst the “computer romantics” the trends that were visible early in “the computer revolution” gave ample reason to believe that the main result would be “an increase in power by those who already had a great deal of power” (107). Indeed, contrary to the liberatory hopes that were pinned on “the computer revolution” the end result might be one wherein “confronted with omnipresent, all-seeing data banks, the populace may find passivity and compliance the safest route, avoiding activities that once represented political liberty” (115).

    Considering the overwhelming social forces working in favor of unimpeded technological progress, there are nevertheless a few factors that have been legitimated as reasons for arguing for limits. While there is a long trajectory of theorists and thinkers who have mulled over the matter of ecological despoilment, and while environmental degradation is a serious concern, “the state of nature” represents a fraught way to consider technological matters. For some, the environment has become little more than standing reserve to be exploited, while others have formed an almost mystical attachment to an imagination of pristine nature; in this context “ideas about things natural must be examined and criticized” as well (137). Related to environmental matters are concerns that take as their catchword “risk,” and which attempt to reframe the discussion away from hopes and towards potential dangers. Yet, in addition to cultural norms that praise certain kinds of “risk-taking,” a focus on risk assessment tends to frame situations in terms of tradeoffs wherein one must balance dangers against potential benefits—with the result being that the recontextualized benefit is generally perceived as being worth it. If the environment and risk are unsatisfactory ways to push for limits, so too has become the very notion of “human values” which “acts like a lawn mower that cuts flat whole fields of meaning and leaves them characterless” (158).

    In what had originally been The Whale and the Reactor’s last chapter, Winner brought himself fully into the discussion—recalling how it was that he came to be fascinated with these issues, and commenting on the unsettling juxtaposition he felt while seeing a whale swimming not far from the nuclear reactor at Diablo Canyon. It is a chapter that critiques the attitude towards technology, that Winner saw in many of his fellow citizens, as being one of people having “gotten used to having the benefits of technological conveniences without expecting to pay the costs” (171). This sentiment is still fully on display more than thirty years later, as Winner shifts his commentary (in a new chapter for this second edition) to the age of Facebook and the Trump Presidency. Treating the techno-utopian promises that had surrounded the early Internet as another instance of technology being seen as “inherently liberating,” Winner does not seem particularly surprised by the way that the Internet and social media are revealing that they “could become a seedbed for concentrated, ultimately authoritarian power” (189). In response to the “abuses of online power,” and beneath all of the glitz and liberating terminology that is affixed to the Internet, “it is still the concerns of consumerism and techno-narcissism that are emphasized above all” (195). Though the Internet had been hailed as a breakthrough, it has wound up leading primarily to breakdown.

    Near the book’s outset, Winner observes how “In debates about technology, society, and the environment, an extremely narrow range of concepts typically defines the realm of acceptable discussion” (xii), and it is those concepts that he wrestles with over the course of The Whale and the Reactor. And the point that Winner returns to throughout the volume is that technological choices—whether they are the result of active choice or a result of our “technological somnambulism”—are not just about technology. Rather, “What appear to be merely instrumental choices are better seen as choices about the form of social and political life a society builds, choices about the kinds of people we want to become” (52).

    Or, to put it a slightly different way, if we are going to talk about the type of technology we want, we first need to talk about the type of society we want, whether the year is 1986 or 2020.

    *

    Langdon Winner began his foreword to the 2010 edition of Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization with the comment that “Anyone who studies the human dimensions of technological change must eventually come to terms with Lewis Mumford.” And it may be fair to note, in a similar vein, that anyone who studies the political dimensions of technological change must eventually come to terms with Langdon Winner. The staying power of The Whale and the Reactor is something which Winner acknowledges with a note of slightly self-deprecating humor, in the foreword to the book’s second edition, where he comments “At times, it seems my once bizarre heresy has finally become a weary truism” (vii).

    Indeed, to claim in 2020 that artifacts have politics is not to make a particularly radical statement. That statement has been affirmed enough times as to hardly make it a question that needs to be relitigated. Yet the second edition of The Whale and the Reactor is not a victory lap wherein Winner crows that he was right, nor is it the ashen lamentation of a Cassandra glumly observing that what they feared has transpired. Insofar as The Whale and the Reactor deserves this second edition, and to be clear it absolutely deserves this second edition, it is because the central concerns animating the book remain just as vital today.

    While the second edition contains a smattering of new material, the vast majority of the book remains as it originally was. As a result the book undergoes that strange kind of alchemy whereby a secondary source slowly transforms into a primary source—insofar as The Whale and the Reactor can now be treated as a document showing how, at least some, scholars were making sense of “the computer revolution” while in the midst of it. The book’s first third, which contains the “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” chapter, has certainly aged the best and the expansiveness with which Winner addresses the question of politics and technology makes it clear why those early chapters remain so widely read, while ensuring that these chapters have a certain timeless quality to them. However, as the book shifts into its exploration of “Technology: Reform and Revolution” the book does reveal its age. Read today, the commentary on “appropriate technology” comes across more as a reminder of a historical curio than as an exploration of the shortcomings of an experiment that recently failed. It feels somewhat odd to read Winner’s comments on “the state of nature,” bereft as they are of any real mention of climate change. And though Winner could have written in 1986 that technology was frequently overlooked as a topic deserving of philosophical scrutiny, today there are many works responding to that earlier lack (and many of those works even cite Winner). While Winner certainly cannot be faulted for not seeing the future, what makes some of these chapters feel particularly dated is that in many other places Winner excelled so remarkably at seeing the future.

    The chapter on “Mythinformation” stands as an excellent critical snapshot of the mid-80s enthusiasm that surrounded “the computer revolution,” with Winner skillfully noting how the utopian hopes surrounding computers were just the latest in the well-worn pattern wherein every new technology is seen as “inherently liberating.” In writing on computers, Winner does important work in separating the basics of what these machines literally can do, from the sorts of far-flung hopes that their advocates attached to them. After questioning whether the issues facing society are genuinely ones that boil down to access to information, Winner noted that it was more than likely that the real impact of computers would be to help those in control stay in control. As he puts it, “if there is to be a computer revolution, the best guess is that it will have a distinctively conservative character” (107) .In 1986, it may have been necessary to speak of this in terms of a “best guess,” and such comments may have met with angry responses from a host of directions, but in 2020 it seems fairly clear that Winner’s sense of what the impact of computers would be was not wrong.

    Considering the directions that widespread computerization would push societies, Winner hypothesized that it could lead to a breakdown in certain kinds of in-person contact and make it so that people would “become even more susceptible to the influence of employers, news media, advertisers, and national political leaders” (116). And moving to the present, in the second edition’s new chapter, Winner observes that despite the shiny toys of the Internet the result has been one wherein people “yield unthinkingly to various kinds of encoded manipulation (especially political manipulation), varieties of misinformation, computational propaganda, and political malware” (187). It is not that The Whale and the Reactor comes out to openly declare “don’t tell me that you weren’t warned,” but there is something about the second edition being published now, that feels like a pointed reminder. As former techno-optimists rebrand as techno-skeptics, the second edition is a reminder that some people knew to be wary from the beginning. Some may anxiously bristle as the CEOs of tech giants testify before Congress, some may feel a deep sense of disappointment every time they see yet another story about Facebook’s malfeasance, but The Whale and the Reactor is a reminder that these problems could have been anticipated. If we are unwilling to truly confront the politics of technologies when those technologies are new, we may find ourselves struggling to deal with the political impacts of those technologies once they have wreaked havoc.

    Beyond its classic posing of the important “do artifacts have politics?” question, the present collision between technology and politics helps draw attention to a deeper matter running through The Whale and the Reactor. Namely, that the book keeps coming back to the idea of democracy. Indeed, The Whale and the Reactor shows a refreshingly stubborn commitment to this idea. Technology clearly matters in the book, and technologies are taken very seriously throughout the book, but Winner keeps returning to democracy. In commenting on the ways in which artifacts have politics, the examples that Winner explores are largely ones wherein technological systems are put in place that entrench the political authority of a powerful minority, or which require the development of regimes that exceed democratic control. For Winner, democracy (and being a participant in a democracy) is an active process, one that cannot be replaced by “passive monitoring of electronic news and information” which “allows citizens to feel involved while dampening the desire to take an active part” (111). Insofar as “the vitality of democratic politics depends upon people’s willingness to act together in pursuit of their common ends” (111), a host of technological systems have been put in place that seem to have simultaneously sapped “people’s willingness” while also breaking down a sense of “common ends.” And though the Internet may trigger some nostalgic memory of active democracy, it is only a “pseudopublic realm” wherein the absence of the real conditions of democracy “helps generate wave after wave of toxic discourse along with distressing patterns of oligarchical rule, incipient authoritarianism, and governance by phonies and confidence men” (192).

    Those who remain committed to arguing for the liberatory potential of computers and the Internet, a group which includes individuals from a range of perspectives, might justifiably push back against Winner by critiquing the vision of democracy he celebrates. After all, there is something rather romantic about  Winner’s evocations of New England townhall meetings  and his comments on the virtues of face-to-face encounters. Do all participants in such encounters truly get to participate equally? Are such situations even set up so that all people can participate equally? What sorts of people and what modes of participation are privileged by such a model of democracy? Is a New England townhall meeting really a model for twenty-first century democracy? Here it is easy to picture Winner responding that what such questions reveal is the need to create technologies that will address those problems—and where a split may then open up is around the question of whether or not computers and the Internet represent such tools. That “technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning” (6) opens up a space in which different technologies can be built, even as other technologies can be dismantled, but such a recognition forces us to look critically at our technologies and truly confront the type of world that we are making and reinforcing for each other. And, in terms of computers and the Internet, the question that The Whale and the Reactor forces to the fore is one of: which are we putting first, computers or democracy?

    Winner warned his readers of the dangers of “technological somnambulism,” but it unfortunately seems that his call was not sufficient to wake up the sleepers in his midst in the 1980s. Alas, that The Whale and the Reactor remains so strikingly relevant is partially a testament to the persistence of the sleepwalkers’ continual slouch into the future. And though there may be some hopeful signs of late that more and more people are groggily stirring and rubbing the slumber from their eyes—the resistance to facial recognition is certainly a hopeful sign—a danger persists that many will conclude that since they have reached this spot that they must figure out some way to justify being here. After all, few want to admit that they have been sleepwalking. What makes The Whale and the Reactor worth revisiting today is not only that Winner asks the question “do artifacts have politics?” but the way in which, in responding to this question, he is willing to note that there are some artifacts that have bad politics. That there are some artifacts that do not align with our political goals and values. And what’s more, that when we are confronted with such artifacts, we do not need to pretend that they are our friends just because they have rearranged our society in such a way that we have no choice but to use them.

    In the foreword to the first edition of The Whale and the Reactor, Winner noted “In an age in which the inexhaustible power of scientific technology makes all things possible, it remains to be seen where we will draw the line, where we will be able to say, here are the possibilities that wisdom suggests we avoid” (xiii). For better, or quite likely for worse, that still remains to be seen today.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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  • Efe Khayyat and Ariel Salzmann — On the Perils of Thinking Globally while Writing Ottoman History: God’s Shadow and Academia’s Self-Appointed Sultans

    Efe Khayyat and Ariel Salzmann — On the Perils of Thinking Globally while Writing Ottoman History: God’s Shadow and Academia’s Self-Appointed Sultans

    a response to reviews of Alan Mikhail, God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (Norton, 2020)

    by Efe Khayyat and Ariel Salzmann

    ~

    One of the more curious academic controversies to emerge during the pandemic revolves around the recent publication and positive reception of Alan Mikhail’s God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World. Although it is Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520-66) who has received the lion’s share of publicity beyond the Middle East—thanks, most recently, to a popular Turkish soap opera with fans across the world, from Ukraine to Mexico—it is actually his father, Selim I (r. 1512-20), who died 500 years ago that marks the true inflection point for world history. Selim’s lifetime spanned a period that witnessed the re-peopling of the newly conquered City of Constantinople, the welcoming of Jewish refugees from Spain in the Ottoman Balkans and the Aegean, and the first Iberian voyages toward the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. His relatively short reign overlapped with that of Moctezuma II, the ninth tlatoani of the Aztec Empire; Babur (Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad) who sent his armies from Afghanistan and founded the Mughal dynasty in India; the Ming dynasts in China; and the drafting of the 95 Theses by an otherwise obscure German Priest by the name of Martin Luther. Moreover, it was this sultan’s conquests that greatly expanded Ottoman hegemony across the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, as well as into the Red Sea, leaving the empire in a commanding position that Selim’s neighbors to the east and west could ignore only at their peril.

    Given the number of endowed chairs in Ottoman and Turkish Studies at major research universities in the United States and the proliferation of scholars in Ottoman Studies at post-secondary North American institutions large and small, we Ottomanists should be better at inviting a wider audience to our field. And yet, almost singularly among historical fields, we have been unable to translate our research for nonspecialists and popular audiences. There are, of course, some noteworthy recent exceptions: popular works in German and English by the indefatigable Suraiya Faroqhi, Caroline Finkel’s synthetic overview, chapters on the Ottoman Empire in Elizabeth F. Thompson’s Justice Interrupted, Eugene Rogan’s timely book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and Leslie Peirce’s work on Roxelana.[1]

    Given the paucity of efforts to bridge the divide between the academia and popular readership, one might assume that Ottoman historians would welcome a work in Ottoman history which has garnered attention from The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. And yet quite the opposite has occurred: for some reason this book has provoked an intensely hostile reaction by some of the most prominent scholars in the field. Under the guise of a critical and purely academic assessment, Mikhail’s book has recently been subjected to an unfortunate attack by Cornell Fleischer, Cemal Kafadar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, published in English in an Italian online journal and then quickly translated into Turkish and other languages. It should be noted that only two of these scholars are Ottoman historians, while the third is an internationally known scholar specializing in the history of South Asia and the Indian Ocean. The very title of their screed, “How to Write Fake Global History,” portents ominously, borrowing from both the terminology and tone of the current occupant of the White House’s assaults on the press. Not only does their tract misrepresent and mischaracterize the aims and methods of God’s Shadow, but its vitriol launches a further broadside attack on other examples of global and popular history and has fueled a social media frenzy attacking the author and his book in Turkey as well as United States.

    We will leave aside the rather bizarre aspects of Fleischer, Kafadar, and Subrahmanyam’s text—the repeated ad hominem attacks; the immature disparaging of Mikhail; the abject ignorance of genre; the willful distortion of the methods and feigned naiveté about the nature of contemporary trade publishing; the suggestion of a conspiracy by Mikhail and his “agents and admirers;” and even the badgering of the editors of The Washington Post who refused to grant these critics a podium. Skipping these elements, we would like to declare in advance what their text truly is: an attempt by senior male scholars in a particular branch of American academy to flex institutional, professional, and cultural muscle within and abroad, particularly in Turkey, to defame and denigrate honest efforts to write Ottoman history and in doing so reinforce their own seemingly hegemonic and certainly outdated idea of what constitutes true history writing.

    A few examples should suffice to illustrate the disingenuousness Fleischer, Kafadar, and Subrahmanyam employ to make their case. Let’s take the Ottoman role in disseminating coffee and coffee drinking (two pages in Mikhail’s 450-page book). Citing page 318 of the book, they claim that Mikhail says that “it was Selim’s military that first discovered” coffee. In fact, he does not say that, but rather explains that it was “the intercontinental unity Selim achieved” that allowed coffee to become a global phenomenon, one the Ottomans would monopolize for centuries. In another instance, they point to Mikhail’s supposed overreliance on a book by Fatih Akçe as evidence of insufficient scrutiny of and attention to Ottoman Turkish and other sources, a point they pirate from a sober and scholarly review by Caroline Finkel. Thirty-one citations is hardly a lot in a book with over 1,300 total citations. To take the example of the section about the caliphate (one page) that seems particularly irksome to them, Mikhail cites Akçe once there, not as the sole source but alongside seven other sources. The main primary source is the eyewitness account of the Egyptian chronicler Ibn Iyās, and Mikhail footnotes the historiographical debate about the caliphate, including a citation to Finkel herself. Mikhail does not rely on Akçe for any substantive part of his argument.

    As for their conceptual objections, they rest their case on two principle lines. The first is that this book is nothing more than navel-gazing “great man” history, an interesting tactic given that at least two of these historians have published usefully on major (and male) historical figures. As if to reduce the book to its title, the three authors continually term Selim “Mikhail’s hero.” This is laughable. No honest reading of the book could conclude that Mikhail seeks the celebration (or destruction) of Selim. God’s Shadow is not a monument to Selim. If anything, in fact, Selim comes off as violent and conniving. And though Fleischer, Kafadar, and Subrahmanyam say Mikhail neglects Selim’s massacre of thousands of his own Alevi (Shiite) subjects, Mikhail does reference this event on pages 258-59 and then on page 402 and then in the book’s chronology.

    The rather obvious point Fleischer, Kafadar, and Subrahmanyam miss or ignore is that Mikhail uses the figure of this single and singular historical subject to show how an appropriately narrow scholarly focus can “shed light in a radiating fashion” on a world historical moment.[2] This method of picking the right “tangible hook” for traversing our vast and intricate cultural past has long been advocated by humanists since its pioneer, Erich Auerbach, taught us how to practice cultural criticism and interpret historical “figures.”

    The second major complaint the trio lodge against Mikhail may seem at odds with the first—that he grossly overstates the place of the Ottomans on the world stage. It is only the most limited understanding of the contingent nature of history that could prevent one from grasping how in the absence of concrete evidence of the concrete presence of the Ottomans in Mexico, or say a letter from an Ottoman to an Aztec, there could be any, in their words, “real connection of the conquest of Mexico to the Ottomans.” Here they slyly splice together sentences some 130 pages apart in God’s Shadow combined with a phrase from The Washington Post to suggest that Mikhail claims that Selim and Cortés were somehow in touch. There is no such claim in the book.

    Mikhail’s approach offers something far more sophisticated—an analysis of how the faculty of imagination shaped historical actions, decisions, ideas, and emotions. He takes us from the Middle East to Mexico to demonstrate the extent to which the terrible and fabulous Turk marked the European-Christian mind in the sixteenth century. In God’s Shadow, one of the great fears of Spanish merchants and colonial authorities on Mexico’s Pacific shore in the sixteenth century turns out to have been imaginary “Turks or Moors,” possibly plotting with Native Americans to attack Christians. We know that this is absurd—that no vassal of the “Grand Turk” or his spies made it to Mexico, let alone plotted with Native Americans. Yet Mikhail demonstrates that upon sighting a fearsome fleet of vessels, the first thing the Spaniards could think of remained their Old-World enemy. We will never know with exact certitude in what ways this fear and the association of Native Americans with the Grand Turk affected the actions and decisions of the colonizers. Yet we know that the Christian mind and imagination of the era was deeply marked by the Ottomans (and other Muslims)—that the state of mind of Spanish merchants and colonial authorities reflected a significant influence of the imaginary Turk. We know that Columbus considered his own adventures and even the crossing of the Atlantic to be merely a part of the Reconquista and the Crusades against Muslims, which had already expelled Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492.The attempt by Fleischer, Kafadar, and Subrahmanyam to make it seem as though Mikhail is unaware of “real” history serves to excise a vast amount of evidence of vital early modern global connections: the papal bull issued in the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople that licensed Iberian princes to conquer and enslave peoples to the west, including in Africa, or the keen Ottoman interest in reports and documents concerning the lands across the Atlantic as evidenced by the map of South America reproduced by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis. Mikhail’s work here is akin to Carina L. Johnson’s research situating both the Ottomans and Aztecs in the mental map of the Habsburg world, a major contribution to understanding the lingering image of the Terrible Turk in western literature and cultural memory.[3]

    Focusing on Sultan Selim’s Ottoman Empire against the background of the world historical moment of the conquests, conflicts, and voyages of the sixteenth century, God’s Shadow makes a case for the centrality of the at once “real” and imagined, at once terrible and fabulous Turk in the making of our global cultural universe. On the one hand, this book of world history asks American readers to view Ottoman history as “a branch of world history à part entière.”[4] Yet it also allows anyone interested in Ottoman studies to view the Ottoman past with an eye on its intended and unintended implications for the world beyond the Ottoman cultural universe.

    Both interventions have significant consequences for world history and Ottoman history alike. The centrality of the figure of Selim to Mikhail’s world history seems almost conventional at first, yet it draws new boundaries for the globe by merely expanding them a little. Mikhail’s choice to zoom in on the “figure” of Sultan Selim while writing world history provides a synthetic view of a global historical moment without compromising historical and philological scrutiny. The new world that Mikhail’s gentle rhetorical move makes visible hardly resembles the image of anything we have seen before. That Mikhail’s “Ottoman” figure is not easily recognizable from an “Ottoman” or modern “Turkish” perspective is refreshing. Mikhail’s figure of Selim is not some self-sufficient, self-same, homogenous entity but one that was molded by multiple Western and non-Western rivals warring, trading, competing, and sharing, and in the process literally sculpting one another. This type of intellectual intervention is exactly what one expects from not only good history, but also the burgeoning disciplines of world literature and art, or comparative religions and all the other—impossibly—global perspectives on the past that the contemporary critical humanities pursue today. That Selim’s indelible mark on the world and world consciousness remained unaccounted for—as historical reality and as part of a historically real “fiction”—with all its implications for our cultural and political past, until the publication of God’s Shadow only makes the case for how urgent Mikhail’s intervention has been all along, especially for American readers.

    Mikhail does not only take the faculty of imagination seriously. He takes religion and its history seriously as well. Both gestures mean that the sort of history Mikhail writes is a service to disciplines beyond disciplinary history, from cultural criticism to literary and art history. Moreover, his argument is based on the simple and undeniable fact that the religion and culture of Christianity had a significant role to play in the making of our modern world. What Mikhail does with this fact is to turn the tables to remind us that the history of Christianity did not take shape in a vacuum. Islam had a hand in the making of Christianity. This is a simple and obvious fact that should be clear to any reader and that no competent and ethical student of history can possibly overestimate.

    It is both a perfectly reasonable objection and an objective fact that such a global scope can pose a challenge to the nuanced views of the past that we owe to scholarly specialization. Mikhail’s pioneering work in environmental history displays impeccable historical scrutiny and empirical depth. If the goal of God’s Shadow is to write Ottoman history against a global background, this obviously requires that he paint with broad strokes at times. Writing any sort of complete global history is obviously impossible, yet it is also imperative in our day and age to write world history. The goals of commensurability and comparison across all the fields of the humanities seeking world historical perspectives demand such impossible yet imperative tasks, not merely for the sake of writing and, in some cases, rewriting more inclusive histories, but also to account for the ways in which the reality of our radically intertwined contemporary world took shape despite very old and persistent claims to exceptionality and homogeneity, whether national, religious, ethnic, or otherwise.

    One must ask why this particular text and its author has generated such controversy. It is well known that coffee arrived in Europe via Ottoman connections and that the pressure from the Ottoman Empire prevented Catholic kings and emperors from repressing the “heresy” of Protestantism. What then is the real, not fake, reason for the energy behind this seemingly orchestrated campaign in the United States and Turkey against this book? Those outside the field of Ottoman history read this as “pique” by a trio of holders of major chairs at pinnacle institutions at the remarkable success of a younger, highly productive scholar. Pamela Kyle Crossley adds that the controversy serves as an opportunity and excuse for the three to paper over their “genteel misogyny” by feigning to enlarge the scope of historical interpretation by leveling a charge of “fake global history.” For students and established scholars in the field of Ottoman Studies, the transparent animus motivating this attack on the author and his work replay a politics of policing and gatekeeping that is by now as predictable as it is debasing to the field. The attendant social media mobbing of Mikhail and God’s Shadow in the US and Turkey demonstrates how this power flexing operates. In surrendering their intellectual autonomy, acolytes and former students signal their fealty to their hocas, for they know they must fear this type of public pillorying by chairs in Ottoman and Turkish studies who exert inordinate influence on appointments, publication possibilities, and tenure and promotion in our field.

    Although no field is free from such controversies, Ottoman historians in the United States should regard this episode with a degree of sadness and considerable embarrassment. To be clear—we see this tempest as an intellectual problem that underscores increasingly entrenched tendencies in our field that stymie development and renewal. Over the last decade the loss of highly productive and institution building senior scholars, the late Donald Quataert (1941-2011) in particular,[5] has left a critical vacuum in Ottoman Studies in the United States. Now to think big and comparatively and to raise large questions that affect the way we interpret entire periods of global history, or even parallel regional developments within what seem to be universal patterns, seem to detract from the increasing provincialism and the preciousness of mainstream Ottoman history in the United States, a historiography that seems to have moved only slightly beyond the cultural turn of the 1990s. In the last decades, dismissing more recent and sophisticated approaches in favor of a narrow range of outdated emphases and methods to interpret largely narrative sources of Ottoman history has contributed to the neo-Ottomanism of the contemporary moment, unwittingly or not.

    It has taken a collective, transnational and multi-disciplinary effort to begin to recover and restore the global legacy of the peoples and cultures of the tri-continental Ottoman polity. Indeed, scholars across the humanities and social sciences whose work engages different aspects of Ottoman, Turkish, and, more broadly, Middle Eastern pasts, have all contributed to the methodological sophistication Mikhail’s overall work reflects as well as helping to prepare the intellectual terrain for its reception. However we may regard the merits of God’s Shadow, we must thank its author for his efforts in making the empire’s significance understandable to new audiences while defying those who seek to impose boundaries on the horizons of Ottoman scholarship to solidify their fading authority.

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    Efe Khayyat is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers and a Senior Researcher at St. Edmund’s College of Cambridge. He works mostly with Turkish (Ottoman and modern), Ladino (Judeo-Espagnol), Italian, French, German, and Arabic. He is the author of Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Among his awards are various fellowships and visiting professorships at Gutenberg in Mainz, Science Po and Paris 8 in Paris, Cambridge University, and Jamia Millia Islamia of Delhi; a UNESCO award, the Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellowship and an ICLS fellowship at Columbia, and the Sir Mick and Lady Barbara Davis Fellowship at the Woolf Institute. He was a member of the founding board of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. Efe is currently working on an edited volume on the cultural history of artificial intelligence, and a new book on “Kariye” (Khôra).

    Ariel Salzmann is Associate Professor of Islamic and World History at Queen’s University. Her intellectual interests span world regions, disciplines, past and present. In addition to her 2004 monograph on the political sociology of the later Ottoman Empire, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State, Professor Salzmann has published articles on a wide range of subjects, from a sociological analysis of the integration/exclusion of religious minorities in Medieval Christendom and the Islamic World, to an account of the conversion of a Maltese priest to Islam in seventeenth-century Egypt and an analysis of the consumer craze over tulips in eighteenth-century Istanbul. Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities/American Research Institute in Turkey Fellowship (1988, 1999), the American Council of Learned Societies (2000), and Queen’s University’s A.R.C/ S.A.R.C. (2005, 2011). Her current research project, which seeks to document cultural and diplomatic relations between the popes and Ottoman sultans, was the alternate for the American Academy in Rome’s Senior Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Italian Studies in 2010. She was awarded a Senior Fellowship at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey for Winter Term 2011. Before Queen’s, Professor Salzmann taught graduate and undergraduate students at the Pratt Institute, the University of Cincinnati and New York University. At Queen’s University she teaches seminars and lectures on Middle Eastern and world history.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes
    [1] Suraiya Faroqhi, A Cultural History of the Ottomans: The Imperial Elite and its Artefacts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); Suraiya Faroqhi, Kultur und Alltag im Osmanischen Reich: Vom Mittelalter bis zum Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H.Beck, 1995); Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1923 (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Elizabeth F. Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

    [2] Erich Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 262-63.

    [3] Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

    [4] Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.

    [5] Ariel Salzmann, “The Education of an Ottomanist: Donald Quataert and the Narrative Arc of Ottoman Historiography, 1985-2011,” in History From Below: A Tribute in Memory of Donald Quataert, eds. Selim Karahasanoğlu & Deniz Cenk Demir (Istanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayinlari 2016) pp.75-106.