b2o: boundary 2 online

Author: boundary2

  • Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

    Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

    Moira Weigel

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    Since the election of Donald Trump, a growing body of research has examined the role of digital technologies in new right wing movements (Lewis 2018; Hawley 2017; Neiwert 2017; Nagle 2017). This article will explore a distinct, but related, subject: new right wing tendencies within the tech industry itself. Our point of entry will be an improbable document: a German language dissertation submitted by an American to the faculty of social sciences at J. W. Goethe University of Frankfurt in 2002. Entitled Aggression in the Life-World, the dissertation aims to describe the role that aggression plays in social integration, or the set of processes that lead individuals in a given society to feel bound to one another. To that end, it offers a “systematic” reinterpretation of Theodor Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity (1973). It is of interest primarily because of its author: Alexander C. Karp.[1]

    Karp, as some readers may know, did not pursue a career in academia. Instead, he became the CEO of the powerful and secretive data analytics company, Palantir Technologies. His dissertation has inspired speculation for years, but no journalist or scholar has yet analyzed it. Doing so, I will argue that it offers insight into the intellectual formation of an influential network of actors in and around Silicon Valley, a network articulating ideas and developing business practices that challenge longstanding beliefs about how Silicon Valley thinks and works.

    For decades, a view prevailed that the politics of both digital technologies and most digital technologists were liberal, or neoliberal, depending on how critically the author in question saw them. Liberalism and neoliberalism are complex and contested concepts. But broadly speaking, digital networks have been seen as embodying liberal or neoliberal logics insofar as they treated individuals as abstractly equal, rendering social aspects of embodiment like race and gender irrelevant, and allowing users to engage directly in free expression and free market competition (Kolko and Nakamura, 2000; Chun 2005, 2011, 2016). The ascendance of the Bay Area tech industry over competitors in Boston or in Europe was explained as a result of its early adoption of new forms of industrial organization, built on flexible, short-term contracts and a strong emotional identification between workers and their jobs (Hayes 1989; Saxenian 1994).

    Technologists themselves were said to embrace a new set of values that the British media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron dubbed the “Californian Ideology.” This “anti-statist gospel of cybernetic libertarianism… promiscuously combine[d] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” they wrote; it answered the challenge posed by the social liberalism of the New Left by “resurrecting economic liberalism” (1996, 42 & 47). Fred Turner attributed this synthesis to the “New Communalists,” members of the counterculture who “turn[ed] away from questions of gender, race, and class, and toward a rhetoric of individual and small group empowerment” (2006, 97). Nonetheless, he reinforced the broad outlines that Barbrook and Cameron had sketched. Turner further showed that midcentury critiques of mass media, and their alleged tendency to produce authoritarian subjects, inspired faith that digital media could offer salutary alternatives—that “democratic surrounds” would sustain democracy by facilitating the self-formation of democratic subjects (2013). 

    Silicon Valley has long supported Democratic Party candidates in national politics and many tech CEOs still subscribe to the “hybrid” values of the Californian Ideology (Brookman et al. 2019). However, in recent years, tensions and contradictions within Silicon Valley liberalism, particularly between commitments to social and economic liberalism, have become more pronounced. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, several software engineers emerged as prominent figures on the “alt-right,” and newly visible white nationalist media entrepreneurs reported that they were drawing large audiences from within the tech industry.[2] The leaking of information from internal meetings at Google to digital outlets like Breitbart and Vox Popoli suggests that there was at least some truth to their claims (Tiku 2018). Individual engineers from Google, YouTube, and Facebook have received national media attention after publicly criticizing the liberal culture of their (former) workplaces and in some cases filing lawsuits against them.[3] And Republican politicians, including Trump (2019a, 2019b), have cited these figures as evidence of “liberal bias” at tech firms and the need for stronger government regulation (Trump 2019a; Kantrowitz 2019).

    Karp’s Palantir cofounder (and erstwhile roommate) Peter Thiel looms large in an emerging constellation of technologists, investors, and politicians challenging what they describe as hegemonic social liberalism in Silicon Valley. Thiel has been assembling a network of influential “contrarians” since he founded the Stanford Review as an undergraduate in the late 1980s (Granato 2017). In 2016, Thiel became a highly visible supporter of Donald Trump, speaking at the Republican National Convention, donating $1.25 million in the final weeks of Trump’s campaign for president (Streitfeld 2016a), and serving as his “tech liaison” during the transition period (Streitfeld 2016b). (Earlier in the campaign, Thiel had donated $1 million to the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC backed by Robert Mercer, and overseen by Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway; see Green 2017, 200.) Since 2016, he has met with prominent figures associated with the alt-right and “neoreaction”[4] and donated at least $250,000 to support Trump’s reelection in 2020 (Federal Election Commission 2018). He has also given to Trump allies including Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who has repeatedly attacked Google and Facebook and sponsored multiple bills to regulate tech platforms, citing the threat that they pose to conservative speech.[5]

    Thiel’s affinity with Trumpism is not merely personal or cultural; it aligns with Palantir’s business interests. According to a 2019 report by Mijente, since Trump came into office in 2017, Palantir contracts with the United States government have increased by over a billion dollars per year. These include multiyear contracts with the US military (Judson 2019; Hatmaker 2019) and with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (MacMillan and Dwoskin 2019); Palantir has also worked with police departments in New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles (Alden 2017; Winston 2018; Harris 2018).

    Karp and Thiel have both described these controversial contracts using the language of “nation” and “civilization.” Confronted by critical journalistic coverage (Woodman 2017, Winston 2018, Ahmed 2018) and protests  (Burr 2017, Wiener 2017), as well as internal actions by concerned employees (MacMillan and Dwoskin, 2019), Thiel and Karp have doubled down, characterizing the company as “patriotic,” in contrast to its competitors. In an interview conducted at Davos in January 2019, Karp said that Silicon Valley companies that refuse to work with the US government are “borderline craven” (2019b). At a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in July 2019, Thiel called Google “seemingly treasonous” for doing business with China, suggested that the company had been infiltrated by Chinese agents, and called for a government investigation (Thiel 2019a). Soon after, he published an Op Ed in the New York Times that restated this case (Thiel 2019b).

    However, Karp has cultivated a very different public image from Thiel’s, supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016, saying that he would vote for any Democratic presidential candidate against Trump in 2020 (Chafkin 2019), and—most surprisingly—identifying himself as a Marxist or “neo-Marxist” (Waldman et al. 2018, Mac 2017, Greenberg 2013). He also refers to himself as a “socialist” (Chafkin 2019) and according to at least one journalist, regularly addresses his employees on Marxian thought (Greenberg 2013). On one level, Karp’s dissertation clarifies what he means by this: For a time, he engaged deeply with the work of several neo-Marxist thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. On another level, however, Karp’s dissertation invites further perplexity, because right wing movements, including Trump’s, evince special antipathy for precisely that tradition.

    Starting in the early 1990s, right-wing think tanks in both Germany and the United States began promoting conspiratorial narratives about critical theory. The conspiracies allege that, ever since the failure of “economic Marxism” in World War I, “neo-“ or “cultural Marxists” have infiltrated academia, media, and government. From inside, they have carried out a longstanding plan to overthrow Western civilization by criticizing Western culture and imposing “political correctness.” To the extent that it attaches to real historical figures, the story typically begins with Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács, goes through Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other wartime émigrés to the United States, particularly those involved in state-sponsored mass media research, and ends abruptly with Herbert Marcuse and his influence on student movements of the 1960s (Moyn 2018; Huyssen 2017; Jay 2011; Berkowitz 2003).

    The term “Cultural Marxism” directly echoes the Nazi theory of “Cultural Bolshevism”; the early proponents of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory were more or less overt antisemites and white nationalists (Berkowitz 2003). However, in the 2000s and 2010s, right wing politicians and media personalities helped popularize it well beyond that sphere.[6] During the same time, it has gained traction in Silicon Valley, too.  In recent years, several employees at prominent tech firms have publicly decried the influence of Cultural Marxists, while making complaints about “political correctness” or lack of “viewpoint diversity.”[7]

    Thiel has long expressed similar frustrations.[8] So how is it that this prominent opponent of “cultural Marxism” works with a self-described neo-Marxist CEO? Aggression in the Life World casts light on the core beliefs that animate their partnership. The idiosyncratic adaptation of Western Marxism that it advances does not in fact place Karp at odds with the nationalist projects that Thiel has advocated, and Palantir helps enact. On the contrary, by attempting to render critical theoretical concepts “systematic,” Karp reinterprets them in a way that legitimates the work he would go on to do. Shortly before Palantir began developing its infrastructure for identification and authentication, Aggression in the Life-World articulated an ideology of these processes.

    Freud Returns to Frankfurt

    Tech industry legend has it that Karp wrote his dissertation under Jürgen Habermas (Silicon Review 2018; Metcalf 2016; Greenberg 2013). In fact, he earned his doctorate from a different part of Goethe University than the one in which Habermas taught: not at the Institute for Social Research but in the Division of Social Sciences. Karp’s primary reader was the social psychologist Karola Brede, who then held a joint appointment at Goethe University’s Sociology Department and at the Sigmund Freud Institute; she and her younger colleague Hans-Joachim Busch appear listed as supervisors on the front page. The confusion is significant, and not only because it suggests an exaggeration. It also obscures important differences of emphasis and orientation between Karp’s advisors and Habermas. These differences directly shaped Karp’s graduate work.

    Habermas did engage with psychoanalysis early in his career.  In the spring and summer of 1959, he attended every one of a series of lectures organized by the Institute for Social Research to mark the centenary of Freud’s birth (Müller-Doohm 2016, 79; Brede and Mitscherlich-Nielsen 1996, 391). He went on to become close friends and even occasionally co-teach  (Brede and Mitscherlich-Nielsen 1996, 395) with one of the organizers and speakers of this series, Alexander Mitscherlich, who had long campaigned with Frankfurt School founder Max Horkheimer for the funds to establish the Sigmund Freud Institute and became the first director when it opened the following year. In 1968, shortly after Mitscherlich and his wife, Margarete, published their influential book, The Inability to Mourn, Habermas developed his first systemic critical social theory in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972). Nearly one third of that book is devoted to psychoanalysis, which Habermas treats as exemplary of knowledge constituted by the “critical” or “emancipatory interest”—that is, the species interest in engaging in critical reflection in order to overcome domination. However, in the 1970s, Habermas turned away from that book’s focus on philosophical anthropology toward the ideas about linguistic competence that culminated in his Theory of Communicative Action; in 1994, Margarete Mitscherlich recounted that Habermas had “gotten over” psychoanalysis in the process of writing that book (1996, 399). Karp’s interest in the theory of the drives, and in aggression in particular, was not drawn from Habermas but from scholars at the Freud Institute, where it was a major focus of research and public debate for decades.

    Freud himself never definitively decided whether he believed that a death drive existed. The historian Dagmar Herzog has shown that the question of aggression—and particularly the question of whether human beings are innately driven to commit destructive acts—dominated discussions of psychoanalysis in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. “In no other national context would the attempt to make sense of aggression become such a core preoccupation,” Herzog writes (2016, 124). After fascism, this subject was highly politicized. For some, the claim that aggression was a primary drive helped to explain the Nazi past: if all humans had an innate drive to commit violence, Nazi crimes could be understood as an extreme example of a general rule. For others, this interpretation risked naturalizing and normalizing Nazi atrocities. “Sex-radicals” inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich pointed out that Freud had cited the libido as the explanation for most phenomena in life. According to this camp, Nazi aggression had been the result not of human nature but of repressive authoritarian socialization. In his own work, Mitscherlich attempted to elaborate a series of compromises between the conservative position (that hierarchy and aggression were natural) and the radical one (that new norms of anti-authoritarian socialization could eliminate hierarchy entirely; Herzog 2016, 128-131). Klaus Horn, the long-time director of the division of social psychology at the Freud Institute, whose collected writings Karp’s supervisor Hans-Joachim Busch edited, contested the terms of the disagreement. The entire point of sophisticated psychoanalysis, Horn argued, was that culture and biology were mutually constitutive and interacted continuously; to name one or the other as the source of human behavior was nonsensical (Herzog 2016, 135).

    Karp’s primary advisor, Karola Brede, who joined the Sigmund Freud Institute in 1967, began her career in the midst of these debates (Bareuther et al. 1989, 713). In her first book, published in 1972, Brede argued that “psychosomatic” disturbances had to be understood in the context of socialization processes. Not only did neurotic conflicts play a role in somatic illness; such illness constituted “socio-pathological” expressions of an increase in the forms of repression required to integrate individuals into society (Brede 1972). In 1976, Brede published a critique of Konrad Lorenz, whose bestselling work, On Aggression, had triggered much of the initial debate with Alexander Mitscherlich and others at the Institute, in the journal Psyche (“Der Trieb als humanspezifische Kategorie”; see Herzog 2016, 125-7).  Since the 1980s, her monographs have focused on work and workplace sociology, and on the role that psychoanalysis should play in critical social theory. Individual and Work (1986) explored the “psychoanalytic costs involved in developing one’s own labor power.” The Adventures of Adjusting to Everyday Work (1995) drew on empirical studies of German workplaces to demonstrate that psychodynamic processes played a key role in professional life, shaping processes of identity formation, authoritarian behavior, and gendered self-identity in the workplace. In that book, Brede criticizes Habermas for undervaluing psychoanalytic concepts—and unconscious aggression in particular—as social forces. Brede argues that the importance that Habermas assigned to “intention” in Theory of Communicative Action prevented him from recognizing the central role that the unconscious played in constituting identity, action, and subjectivity (1995, 223 & 225). At the same time, she was editing multiple volumes on psychoanalytic theory, including feminist perspectives in psychoanalysis, and in a series of journal articles in the 1990s, developed a focus on antisemitism and Germany’s relationship to its troubled history (Brede 1995, 1997, 2000).

    During his time as a PhD student, Karp seems to have worked very closely with Brede. The sole academic journal article that he published he co-authored with her in 1997. (An analysis of Daniel Goldhagen’s bestselling 1996 study, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the article attempted to build on Goldhagen’s thesis by characterizing a specific, “eliminationist” form of antisemitism that Karp and Brede argued could only be understood from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalytic theory; see Brede and Karp 1997, 621-6.) Karp wrote the introduction for a volume of the Proceedings of the Freud Institute, which Brede edited (Brede et al. 1999, 5-7). The chapter that Karp contributed to that volume would appear in his dissertation, three years later, in almost identical form. Karp’s dissertation itself also closely followed the themes of Brede’s research.

    Aggression in the Life World

    The full title of Karp’s dissertation captures its patchwork quality: Aggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture. “This work began,” the opening sentences recall, “with the observation that many statements have the effect of relieving unconscious drives, not in spite, but because, of the fact that they are blatantly irrational” (Karp 2002, 2). Karp proposes that such statements provide relief by allowing a speaker to have things both ways: to acknowledge the existence of a social order and, indeed, demonstrate specific knowledge of that order while, at the same time, expressing taboo wishes that contravene social norms. As result, rather than destroy social order, such irrational statements integrate the speaker into society while also providing compensation for the pains of being integrated. To describe these kinds of statements Karp indicates that he will borrow a concept from the late work of Adorno: “jargon.” However, Karp announces that he will critique Adorno for depending too much on the very phenomenological tradition that his Jargon of Authenticity is meant to criticize. Adorno’s concept is not a concept at all, Karp alleges, but a “reservoir for collecting Adorno-poetry” (Sammelbecken Adornoscher Dichtung) (2002, 58). Karp’s own goal is to clarify jargon into an analytical concept that could then be incorporated into a classical sociological framework. As synecdoche for classical sociology, Karp takes the work of Talcott Parsons.

    The second chapter of Karp’s dissertation, a reading and critique of Parsons, had appeared in the Freud Institute publication, Cases for the Theory of the Drives. In his editor’s introduction to that volume, Karp had stated that the goal of their group had been to integrate psychoanalytic concepts in general and Freud’s theory of the drives in particular into frameworks provided by classical sociology. The volume begins with an essay by Brede on the failure of sociology as a discipline to account for the role that aggression plays in social integration. (Brede 1999, 11-45, credits Georg Simmel with having developed an account of the active role that aggression played in creating social cohesion; more on that below.) Karp reiterates Brede’s complaint, directing it against Parsons, whose account of aggression he calls “incomplete” or “watered down” (2002, 11). In the version that appears in his dissertation, several sections of literature review establish background assumptions and describe what Karp takes to be Parsons’ achievement: integrating the insights of Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. Taking, from Durkheim, a theory of how societies develop systems of norms, and from Freud, how individuals internalize them, Parsons developed an account of culture as the site where the integration of personality and society takes place.

    For Parsons, pace Karp, culture itself is best understood as a system constituted through “interactions.” Karp credits Parsons with shifting the paradigm from a subject of consciousness to a subject in communication—translating the Freudian superego into sociological form, so that it appears, not as a moral enforcer, but as a psychic structure communicating cultural norms to the conscious subject. Yet, Karp protests that there are, in fact, parts of personality not determined by culture, and not visible to fellow members of a culture so long as an individual does not deviate from established norms of interaction. Parsons’ theory of aggression remains incomplete on at least two counts, then. First, Karp argues, Parsons fails to recognize aggression as a primary drive, treating it only as a secondary result that follows when the pleasure principle finds itself thwarted. Karp, by contrast, adopts the position that a drive toward death or destruction is at least as fundamental as the pleasure principle. Second, because Parsons defines aggression in terms of harms to social norms, he cannot explain how aggression itself can become a social norm, as it did in Nazi Germany. For an explanation of how aggressive impulses come to be integrated into society, Karp turns instead to Adorno.

    In Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity, Karp found an account of how aggression constitutes itself in language and, through language, mediates social integration (2002, 57). Adorno’s lengthy essay, which he had originally intended to constitute one part of Negative Dialectics, resists easy summary. The essay begins by identifying theological overtones that, Adorno says, emanate from the language used by German existentialists—and by Martin Heidegger in particular. Adorno cites not only “authenticity,” but terms like “existential,” “in the decision,” “commission,” “appeal,” and “encounter,” as exemplary” (3). While the existentialists claim that such language constitutes a form of resistance to conformity, Adorno argues that it has in fact become highly standardized: “Their unmediated language they receive from a distributor” (14). Making fetishes of these particular terms, the existentialists decontextualize language in several respects. They do so at the level of the sentence—snatching certain, favored words out of the dialectical progression of thought as if meaning could exist without it. At the same time, the existentialist presents “words like ‘being’ as if they were the most concrete terms” and could obviate abstraction, the dialectical movement within language. The function of this rhetorical practice is to make reality seem simply present, and give the subject an illusion of self-presence—replacing consciousness of historical conditions with an illusion of immediate self-experience. The “authenticity” generated by jargon therefore depends on forgetting or repressing the historically objective realities of social domination.

    Beyond simply obscuring the realities of domination, Adorno continues, the jargon of authenticity spiritualizes them.  For instance, Martin Heidegger turns the real precarity of people who might at any time lose their jobs and homes into a defining condition of Dasein: “The true need for residence consists in the fact that mortals must first learn to reside” (26). The power of such jargon—which transforms the risk of homelessness into an essential trait of Dasein—comes from the fact that it expresses human need, even as it disavows it. To this extent, jargon has an a- or even anti-political character: it disguises current and contingent effects of social domination into eternal and unchangeable characteristics of human existence. “The categories of jargon are gladly brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations but rather belonged to the essence of man,” Adorno writes. “Man is the ideology of dehumanization” (48). Jargon turns fascist insofar as it leads the person who uses it to perceive historical conditions of domination—including their own domination—as the very source of their identity. “Identification with that which is inevitable remains the only consolation of this philosophy of consolation.” Adorno writes. “Its dignified mannerism is a reactionary response to the secularization of death” (143, 144).

    Karp says at the outset that his goal is to make Adorno’s collection of observations about jargon “systematic.” In order to do so, he approaches the subject from a different perspective than Adorno did: focused on the question of what psychological needs jargon fulfills. For Karp, the achievement of jargon lies in its “double function” (Doppelfunktion). Jargon both acknowledges the objective forces that oppress people and allows people to adapt or accommodate themselves to those same forces by eternalizing them—removing them from the context of the social relations where they originate, and treating them as features of human existence in general. Jargon addresses needs that cannot be satisfied, because they reflect the realities of living in a society characterized by domination, but also cannot be acted upon, because they are taboo. For Karp, insofar as jargon is a kind of speech that designates speakers as belonging to an in-group, it also expresses an unconscious drive toward aggression. In jargon we see the aggression that drives individuals to exclude others from the social world doing its binding work. It is on these grounds that Karp argues that aggression is a constitutive part of jargon—its ever-present, if unacknowledged, obverse.

    Karp grants that Adorno is concerned with social life. The Jargon of Authenticity investigates precisely the social function of ontology, or how it turns “authenticity” into a cultural form, circulated within mass culture. Adorno also alludes to the specifically German inheritance of jargon—the resemblance between Heidegger’s celebration of völkisch rural life and Nazi celebration of the same (1973, 3). Yet, Karp argues, Adorno does not provide an account of how a deception or illusion of authenticity came to be a structure in the life-world. Even as he criticizes phenomenological ontology, Adorno relies on a concept of language that is itself phenomenological. Echoing critiques by Axel Honneth (1991) of Horkheimer and Adorno’s failures to account for the unique domain of “the social,” Karp turns to the same thinkers Karola Brede used in her article on “Social Integration and Aggression”: Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel.

    In that article, Brede develops a reading that joins Freud and Simmel’s accounts of the role of the figure of “the stranger” in modern societies. In Civilization and its Discontents, Brede argues, Freud described “strangers” in terms that initially appear incompatible with the account Simmel had put forth in his famous 1908 “Excursus on the Stranger.” Simmel described the mechanisms whereby social groups exclude strangers in order to eliminate danger—thereby controlling the “monstrous reservoir of aggressivity” that would otherwise threaten social structure. (The quote is from Parsons.) Freud wrote that, despite the Biblical commandment to love our neighbors, and the ban on killing, we experience a hatred of strangers, because they make us experience what is strange in us, and fear what in them cannot be fit into our cultural models. Brede concludes that it is only by combining Freudian psychodynamics with Simmel’s account of the role of exclusion in social formation that critical social theory could account for the forms of violence that dominated the history of the twentieth century (Brede 199, 43).

    Karp contrasts Adorno with both Freud and Simmel, and finds Adorno to be more pessimistic than either of these predecessors. Compared to Freud, who argued that culture successfully repressed both libidinal and destructive drives in the name of moral principles, Karp writes that Adorno regarded culture as fundamentally amoral. Rather than successfully repressing antisocial drives, Karp writes, late capitalist culture sates its members with “false satisfactions.” People look for opportunities to express their needs for self-preservation. However, since they know that their needs cannot be fully satisfied, they simultaneously fall over themselves to destroy the memory of the false fulfillment they have had. Repressed awareness of the false nature of their own satisfaction produces the ambient aggression that people take out on strangers.

    For Simmel, the stranger is part of all modern societies, Karp writes. For Adorno, the stranger extends an invitation to violence. Jargon gains its power from the fact that those who speak, and hear, it really are searching for a lost community. The very presence of the stranger demonstrates that such community cannot be simply given; jargon is powerful precisely in proportion to how much the shared context of life has been destroyed.  It therefore offers a “dishonest answer to an honest longing” for intersubjectivity, gaining strength in proportion to the intensity the need that has been thwarted (Karp 2002, 85).  Wishes that contradict social norms are brought into the web of social relations (Geflecht der Lebenswelt), in such a way that they do not need to be sanctioned or punished for violating social norms (91). On the contrary, they serve to bind members of social groups to one another.

    Testing Jargon

    As a case study to demonstrate the usefulness of his modified concept of jargon, Karp takes up a notorious episode in post-wall German intellectual history: a speech that the celebrated novelist Martin Walser gave in October 1998, at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. The occasion was Walser’s acceptance of the 1998 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The novelist had traveled a complex political itinerary by the late 1990s. Documents released in 2007 would uncover the fact that as a teenager, during the final years of the Second World War, Walser joined the Nazi Party and fought as a member of the Wehrmacht. But he first became publicly known as a left-wing writer. In the 1950s, Walser attended meetings of the informal but influential German writer’s association Gruppe 47 and received their annual literary prize for his short story, “Templones Ende”; in 1964 he attended the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, where low ranking officials were charged and convicted for crimes that they had perpetrated during the Holocaust. In his 1965 essay about that experience, “Our Auschwitz,” Walser insisted on the collective responsibility of Germans for the horrors of the Nazi period; indeed he criticized the emphasis on spectacular cruelty at the trial, and in the media, to the extent that this emphasis allowed the public to maintain an imaginary distance between themselves and the Nazi past (Walser 2015, 217-56). Walser supported Social Democratic Party member Willy Brandt for Chancellor and even joined the German Communist Party during that decade. By the 1980s, however, Walser was widely perceived to have migrated back to the right. And when he gave his speech “Experiences Composing a Sermon” on the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, he used the occasion to attack the public culture of Holocaust remembrance. Walser described this culture as a “moral cudgel” or “bludgeon” (Moralkeule).

    “Experiences Composing a Sermon” adopts a stream of consciousness, rather than argumentative, style in order to explain why Walser refused to do what he said was expected of him: to speak about the ugliness of German history. Instead, he argued that no further collective memorialization of the Holocaust was necessary. There was no such thing, he said, as collective or shared conscience at all: conscience should be a private matter. Critics and intellectuals he disparaged as “preachers” were “instrumentalizing” and “vulgarizing” memory, when they exhorted the public constantly to reflect on the crimes of the Nazi period. “There is probably such a thing as the banality of good,” Walser quipped, echoing Hannah Arendt (2015, 513). He did not spell out what ends he thought that these “preachers” aimed to instrumentalize German guilt for. He concluded by abruptly calling on the newly elected president Roman Herzog, who was in attendance, to free the former East German spy, Rainer Rupp, from prison. Walser’s speech received a standing ovation—though not, notably, from Ignatz Bubis, then the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who was also in attendance. The next day, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bubis called the speech an act of “intellectual arson” (geistiges Brandstiftung). The controversy that followed generated a huge amount of debate among German intellectuals and in the German and international media (Cohen 1998). Two months later, the offices of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung hosted a formal debate between the two men. It lasted for four hours. FAZ published a transcript of their conversation in a special supplement (Walser and Bubis 1999).

    In February and March 1999, Karola Brede delivered two lectures about the controversy at Harvard University, which she subsequently published in Psyche (2000, 203-33). Brede examined both the text of Walser’s original speech and the transcript of his debate with Bubis in order to determine, first, why Walser’s speech had been received so enthusiastically, and second, whether Walser, despite eschewing explicitly antisemitic language, had in fact “taken the side of anti-Semites.” In order to explain why Walser’s speech had attracted so much attention, Brede carried out a close textual analysis. She found that, although Walser had not presented a very cogent argument, he had successfully staged a “relieving rhetoric” (Entlastungsrhetorik) that freed his audience from the sense of awkwardness or self-consciousness that they felt talking about Auschwitz in public and replaced these negative feelings with a positive sense of heightened self-regard. Brede argued that Walser used jargon, in the sense of Adorno’s “jargon of authenticity,” in order to flatter listeners into thinking that they were taking part in a daring intellectual exercise, while in fact activating anti-intellectual feelings. (In a footnote she recommended an “unpublished paper” by Karp, presumably from his dissertation, for further reading; Brede 2000, 215). She concluded that indeed Walser had taken the side of antisemites because, in both his speech and his subsequent debate with Bubis, he constructed a point of identification for listeners (“we Germans”) that systematically excluded German Jews (203). By organizing his speech entirely around “perpetrators” and the “critics” who shamed them, Walser elided the perspective of the Nazi’s victims. Invoking Simmel’s essay on “The Stranger” again, Brede argued that Walser’s behavior during his debate with Bubis offered a model of how unconscious aggression could drive social integration through exclusion. Regardless of what Walser said he felt, to the extent that his rhetoric excluded Bubis from his definition of “we Germans” as a Jew, his conduct had been antisemitic.

    In the final chapter of his dissertation, Karp also offers a reading of Walser’s prize acceptance speech, arguing that Walser made use of jargon in Adorno’s sense. Like Brede, Karp bases his argument on close textual analysis. He catalogs several specific literary strategies that, he says, enabled Walser to appeal to the unconscious or repressed emotions of his listeners without having to convince them. First, Karp tracks how Walser played with pronouns in the opening movement of the speech in order to eliminate distance and create identification between himself and his audience. Walser shifted from describing himself in the third person singular (the “one who had been chosen” for the prize) to the first-person plural (“we Germans”). At the same time, by making vague references to intellectuals who had made public remembrance and guilt compulsory, Walser created the sensation that he and the listeners he has invited to identify with his position (“we”) were only responding to attacks from outside—that “we” were the real victims. (In her article, Brede had quipped that this narrative of victimhood “could have come from a B-movie Western”; Brede 2000, 214). Through this technique, Karp writes, Walser created the impression that if “we” were to strike back against the “Holocaust preachers,” this would only be an act of self-defense.

    Karp stresses that the content of “Experiences Composing a Sermon” was less important than the effect that these rhetorical gestures had of making listeners feel that they belonged to Walser’s side. In the controversy that followed Walser’s acceptance speech, critics often asked which “intellectuals” he had meant to criticize; these critics, Karp says, missed the point. It was not the content of the speech, but its form, that mattered. It was through form that Walser had identified and addressed the psychological needs of his audience. That form did not aim to convince listeners; it did not need to. It simply appealed to (repressed) emotions that they were already experiencing.

    For Adorno, the anti-political or fascist character of jargon was directly tied to the non-dialectical concept of language that jargon advanced. By eliminating abstraction from philosophical language, and detaching selected words from the flow of thought, jargon made absent things seem present. By using such language, existentialism attempted to construct an illusion that the subject could form itself outside of history. By raising historically contingent experiences of domination to defining features of the human, jargon presented them as unchangeable. And by identifying humanity itself with those experiences, it identified the subject with domination.

    Karp does not demonstrate that Walser’s “jargon” performed any of these functions, precisely. Rather, he focuses on the psychodynamics motivating his speech. Karp proposes that the pain (Leiden) that Walser’s speech expressed resembled the “domination” (Zwang) that Adorno recognized in jargon. While Adorno’s jargon made the absent or abstract seem present, through an act of linguistic fetishization, Walser’s jargon embodied the obverse impulse: to wish the discomfort created by the presence of history’s victims away.

    Karp is less concerned with the history of domination, that is, than with Freudian drives. For Adorno, the purpose of carrying out a determinate negation of jargon was to create the conditions of possibility for critical theory to address the real needs to which jargon constituted a false response. For Karp, the interest of the project is more technical: his goal is to uncover forms and patterns of speech that admit aggression into social life and give it a central role in consolidating identity. By combining culturally legitimated expressions with taboo ones, Karp argues, Walser created an environment in which his controversial opinion could be accepted as “obvious” or “self-evident” (selbstverständlich) by his audience. That is, Walser created a linguistic form through which aggression could be integrated into the life-world.

    Unlike Adorno (or Brede), Karp refrains from making any normative assessment of this achievement. His “systematization” of the concept of jargon empties that concept of the critical force that Adorno meant for it to carry. If anything, the tone of the final pages of Aggression in the Life-World is forgiving. Karp concludes by arguing that Walser was not necessarily aware of the meaning of his speech—indeed, that he probably was not. By allowing his audience to express their taboo wishes to be done with Holocaust remembrance, Karp writes, Walser convinced them that, “these taboos should never have existed.” Then he cuts to his bibliography.

    Grand Hotel California Abyss

    The abruptness of the ending of Aggression in the Life-World is difficult to interpret. At one level, Karp’s apparent lack of interest in the ethical and political implications of his case study reflects his stated goals and methods. From the beginning, he has set out to reveal that the social is constituted through acts of unconscious aggression, and that this aggression becomes legible in specific linguistic interactions, rather than to evaluate the effects of aggression itself. Reading Walser, Karp explicitly privileges form over content, treating the former as symptomatic of unstated meanings and effects. Granting the critic authority over the text he is analyzing, such an approach presumes the author under analysis to be ignorant, if not innocent, of what he really has at stake; it treats conscious attitudes and overt arguments as holding, at most, a secondary interest. At another level, the banal explanations for Karp’s tone and brevity may be the most plausible. He was writing in a non-native language; like many graduate students, he may have finished in haste.[9] In any case, his decision to eschew the kinds of judgments made by both his subject, Adorno, and his mentor, Brede is striking—all the more so because Karp is descended from German Jews and “grew up in a Jewish family” (Karp 2019a). This choice reflects a different mode of engagement with critical theory than scholars of either digital media or digitally mediated right-wing movements have observed.

    Historians have shown that the Frankfurt School critiques of mass media helped shape the idea that digital media could constitute a more democratic alternative. Fred Turner has argued that the research Adorno conducted on the role of radio and cinema in shaping the authoritarian personality, as well as the proximity of Frankfurt School scholars to the Bauhaus and other practicing artists, generated a set of beliefs about the democratic character of interactivity (Turner 2013). Orit Halpern is more critical of the essentially liberal assumptions of media and technology critique in which she, too, places Adorno (2015, 18-19). However, like Turner, Halpern identifies the emergence of interactivity as a key epistemic shift away from the Frankfurt School paradigm that opposed “attention” and “distraction.”  Cybernetics redefined the problem of “spectatorship” by transforming the spectator from an individual into a site of perceptions and cognitions—an “interface or infrastructure for information processing.” Where radio, cinema, and television had promoted conformity and passivity, cybernetic media promised to facilitate individual choice and free expression (2015, 224-6).

    More recently, critics and scholars attempting to account for the phobic fascination that new right-wing movements show for “cultural marxism” have analyzed it in a variety of ways. The least sophisticated take at face value the claims of “alt-right” figures that they are only reacting to the ludicrous and pernicious excesses of their opponents.[10] More substantial interpretations have described the far right fixation on the Frankfurt School as a “dialectic of counter-Enlightenment” or form of “inverted appropriation.” Martin Jay (2011) and Andreas Huyssen (2017, 2019) both argue that the attraction of critical theory for the right lies in the dynamics of projection and disavowed recognition that it sets in motion. As Huyssen puts it, “wider circles of American white supremacists and their publications… have been drawn to critique and deconstruction because, on those traditions, they project their own destructive and nihilistic tendencies” (2017).

    Aggression in the Life World does none of these things. Karp’s dissertation does not take up the critiques of mass media or the authoritarian personality that were canonized in the Anglo-American world at all, much less use them to develop democratic alternatives. Nor does it project its own penchant for destruction onto its subjects. In contrast with the “lunatic fringe” (Jay, 30) Karp does not carry out an “inverted appropriation” of critical theory, so much as a partial one.  He adapts Frankfurt School concepts for technical purposes, making them more instrumentally useful to the disciplines of sociology or social psychology by abstracting them from their contexts. In the process, he also abandons the Frankfurt School commitment to emancipation. It is at this level of abstraction that his neo-Marxism—from which Marx and materialism have all but disappeared—can coexist with the nationalism that he and Thiel invoke to defend Palantir.

    I asked at the beginning of this paper what beliefs Karp shares with Peter Thiel and what their common commitments might reveal about the self-consciously “contrarian” or “heterodox” network of actors that they inhabit. One answer that Aggression in the Life World makes evident is that both men regard the desire to commit violence as a constant, founding fact of human life. Both also believe that this drive expresses itself in social forms like language or group structure, even if speakers or group members remain unaware of their own motivations. These are ideas that Thiel attributes to the work of the eclectic French theorist René Girard, with whom he studied at Stanford, and whose theories of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and herd mentality he has often cited. In 2006 Thiel’s nonprofit foundation established an institute to promote the study of Girard and support the further development of mimetic theory; this organization, Imitatio, remains one of the foundation’s three major projects (Daub 2020, 97-112).

    The text that Karp chose to analyze, as his case study, also shares a set of concerns with Thiel’s writings and statements against campus multiculturalism and political correctness; Walser’s speech became a touchstone of debates about historical memory in Germany, in which the newly imported Americanism politische Korrektheit circulated widely. In his dissertation, Karp does not celebrate Walser’s taboo speech in the same way that Thiel and his associates have sometimes celebrated violations of speech norms.[11] However, he does assert that jargon, and the unconscious aggression that it expresses, plays a role in the formation of all social groups, and refrains from evaluating whether Walser’s jargon was particularly problematic. Of course, the term “jargon” itself became a commonplace during the U. S. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s, used to accuse academics and university administrators who purported to be speaking for vulnerable populations of in fact deploying obscure terms to aggrandize themselves. Thiel and his co-author David O. Sacks devote a chapter of The Diversity Myth to an account of how the vagueness of the word “multiculturalism” enabled activists and administrators at Stanford to use it in this manner (1995, 23-49). The idea that such terms express ressentiment and a will to power is consistent with the theoretical framework that Karp went on to develop.

    Ironically, by attempting to expunge jargon of its subjective or impressionistic content, Karp renders it less materially objective. Rather than locating jargon in specific experiences of modernity, he transforms it into an expression of drives that, because they are timeless, are merely psychological. Karp makes a version of the eternalizing move that Adorno criticizes in Heidegger, in other words. Rather than elevating precarity into the essence of the human, Karp makes aggressive violence the substance of the social. In the process, he empties the concept of jargon of its critical power. When he arrives at the end of Walser’s speech, a speech that Karp characterizes as consolidating community based on unspeakable aggression, he can conclude only that it was effective.

    A still greater irony in retrospect may be how, in Karp’s telling, Adorno’s jargon anticipates the software tools Palantir would develop. By tracing the rhetorical patterns that constitute jargon in literary language, Karp argues that he can reveal otherwise hidden identities and affinities—and the drive to commit violence that lies latent in them. By looking back to Adorno, he points toward a possible critique of big data analytics as a kind of authenticity jargon. That is, a way of generating and eternalizing false forms of selfhood. In data analysis, the role of the analyst is not to demystify and dispel reification. On the contrary, it is precisely to fix identity from its digital traces and to make predictions on the basis of the same. For Adorno, jargon is a form of language that seems to authenticate identity—but only seems to. The identities it makes available to the subject are based on an illusion that jargon sustains by suppressing the self-difference that historicity introduces into language. The illusion it offers is of timeless “human” experience. It covers for domination insofar as it makes the human condition—or rather, human conditions as they are at the time of speaking—appear unchangeable.

    Big data analytics could be said to constitute an authenticity jargon in this sense: although they treat the data set under analysis as having something like an unconscious, they eliminate the temporal gaps and spaces of ambiguity that drive psychoanalytic interpretation. In place of interpretation, data analytics substitutes correlations that it treats simply as given. To a machine learning algorithm that has been trained on data sets that include zip codes and rates of defaulting on mortgage payments, for instance, it does not matter why mortgagees in a given zip code may have been more likely to default in the past. Nor will the algorithm that recommends rejecting a loan application necessarily explain that the zip code was the deciding factor. Like the existentialist’s illusion of immediate experience these procedures generate an aura of incontestable self-evidence.

    As in Adorno, here, the loss of particular contexts can serve to conceal, and thus perpetuate, domination. Algorithms take the histories of oppression embedded in training data and project them into the future, via predictions that powerful institutions then act on. If the identities constituted in this way are false, the reifications they generate do real work, and can cause real harm. And yet, to read these figures historically is to recognize that they need not come true. This is not an interpretive path that Karp pursues. But for those of us concerned about the relationship between digital technologies and justice, this repressed insight of his dissertation is the most critical to follow.

    _____

    Moira Weigel is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an editor and cofounder of Logic Magazine. She received her PhD from the combined program in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University in 2017.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Translations from German are mine unless otherwise noted.

    [2] In 2017, when activists doxxed the founder of the neofascist blog the Right Stuff and the antisemitic podcasts Fash the Nation and The Daily Shoah, who went by the alias Mike Enoch, they revealed that he was in fact a programmer named Michael Peinovich (Marantz 2019, 275-9). Curtis Yarvin, who wrote a widely read blog advocating the end of democracy under the name Mencius Moldbug, also worked as a software engineer (Gray 2017). Several journalists have documented the interest that figures in or adjacent to the tech industry evince with Yarvin’s Neoreaction (NRx) or Dark Enlightenment (Gray 2017; Goldhill 2017). Prominent white nationalist media entrepreneurs also claim to have substantial followings in the tech industry. In 2017, Andrew Anglin told a Mother Jones reporter that Santa Clara County was the highest source of inbound traffic to his website, The Daily Stormer; Chuck Johnson said the same about his (now defunct) website Got News (Harkinson 2017). In response to an interview question about his “average” supporter, the white nationalist Richard Spencer claimed that, “many in the Alt-Right are tech savvy or actually tech professionals” (Hawley 2017, 78).

    [3] James Damore, the engineer who wrote the July 2017 memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” and was subsequently fired, toured the right wing speaking circuit (Tiku 2019, 85-7). Brian Amerige, the Facebook engineer who identified himself to the New York Times in July 2018 as the creator of a conservative group on Facebook’s internal forum, Workplace, and then left the company, did the same (Conger and Frankel 2018). Shortly after, it was reported that Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey’s departure from the company in 2017 had also been driven by conflicts with management over his support of Donald Trump (Grind and Hagey 2018); Luckey has since publicly claimed to speak on behalf of a silent majority of “tech conservatives” (Luckey 2018). Arne Wilberg, a long time recruiter of technical employees for Google and YouTube, filed a reverse discrimination suit in 2018, alleging that he had been fired for “opposing illegal hiring practices… systematically discriminating in favor of job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, against Caucasian and Asian men” (Wilberg v. Google 2018). Most recently, in August 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that the former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee had been fired in 2017 in retaliation for expressing “conservative” viewpoints on internal listservs (Copeland 2019). Former colleagues subsequently published screenshots showing that, among other things, Cernekee had proposed raising money for a bounty for finding the masked protestor who punched Richard Spencer at the Presidential inauguration in 2017 using WeSearchr, the now-defunct fundraising platform run by Holocaust “revisionist” Chuck C. Johnson. They also shared screenshots showing that Cernekee had defended two neo-Nazi organizations, The Traditionalist Workers Party and Golden State Skinheads, suggesting that they should “rename themselves to something normie-compatible like ‘The Helpful Neighborhood Bald Guys’ or the ‘Open Society Institute’” (Wacker 2019; Tiku 2019, 84). Like Damore, Amerige, and Wilberg, Cernekee received national media coverage.

    [4] For instance, emails that BuzzFeed reporter Joe Bernstein obtained from Breitbart.com stated that Thiel invited Curtis Yarvin to watch the 2016 election results at his home in Hollywood Hills, where he had previously hosted Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos; New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz reported running into Thiel at the “DeploraBall” that took place on the eve of Trump’s inauguration (2019, 47-9).

    [5] Thiel supported Hawley’s campaign for Attorney General of Missouri in 2016 (Center for Responsive Politics); in that office, Hawley initiated an antitrust investigation of Google (Dave 2017) and a probe into Facebook exploitation of user data (Allen 2018). Thiel later donated to Hawley’s 2018 Senate campaign (Center for Responsive Politics); in the Senate, Hawley has sponsored multiple bills to regulate tech platforms (US Senate 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d, 2019e, 2019f, 2019g). These activities earned him praise from Trump at a White House Social Media Summit on the theme of liberal bias at tech companies, where Hawley also spoke (Trump 2019a).

    [6] Pat Buchanan devoted a chapter to the subject, entitled “The Frankfurt School Comes to America,” in his 2001 Death of the West. Breitbart editor Michael Walsh published an entire book about critical theory, in which he described it as “the very essence of Satanism” (Walsh 2016, 50). Andrew Breitbart himself devoted a chapter to it in his memoir (Breitbart 2011, 113). Jordan Peterson more often rails against “postmodernism,” or “political correctness.” However, he too regularly refers to “Cultural Marxism”; at time of writing, an explainer video that he produced for the pro-Trump Epoch Times, has tallied nearly 750,000 views on YouTube (Peterson 2017).

    [7] The memo that engineer James Damore circulated to his colleagues at Google presented a version of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy in its endnotes, as fact. “As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their ‘capitalist oppressors,’” Damore wrote, “the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics” (Conger 2017). The group that Brian Amerige started on Facebook Workplace was called “Resisting Cultural Marxism” (Conger and Frankel 2018).

    [8] The Stanford Review, which Thiel founded late in his sophomore year and edited throughout his junior and senior years at the university, devoted extensive attention to questions of speech on Stanford’s campus, which became a focal point of the US culture wars and drew international media attention when the academic senate voted to (slightly) revise its core curriculum in 1988 (see Hartman 2019, 227-30). In 1995, with fellow Stanford alumnus (and later PayPal Chief Operating Officer) David O. Sacks, Thiel published The Diversity Myth, a critique of the “debilitating” effects of “political correctness” on college campuses that, among other things, compared multicultural campus activists to “the bar scene from Star Wars” (xix). In 2018 he moved to Los Angeles, saying that political correctness in San Francisco had become unbearable (Peltz and Pierson 2018; Solon 2018) and in 2019 Founders Fund, the venture capital firm where he is a partner, announced that they would be sponsoring a conference to promote “thoughtcrime” (Founders Fund 2019).

    [9] Aggression in the Life World is significantly shorter than either of the other two dissertations submitted to the sociology department at Frankfurt that year: Margaret Ann Griesese’s The Brazilian Women’s Movement Against Violence clocked in at 314 pages, and Konstantinos Tsapakidis, Collective Memory and Cultures of Resistance in Ancient Greek Music at 267; Karp’s is 129.

    [10] Angela Nagle (2017) put forth an extreme version of this argument, arguing that the excesses of “social justice warrior” identity politics provoked the formation of the alt-right and that trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos were only replicating tactics of “transgression” that had been pioneered by leftist intellectuals like bell hooks and institutionalized on liberal campuses and in liberal media. Kakutani similarly argued that the Trumpist right was simply taking up tactics that the relativism of “postmodernism” had pioneered in the 1960s (2018, 18).

    [11] In The Diversity Myth Sacks and Thiel describe on instance of resistance to the Stanford speech code, which was adopted in May 1990 and revoked in March 1995, as heroic. The incident took place on the night of January 19, 1992, when three members of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, Michael Ehrman, Keith Rabois, and Bret Scher, were walking home from a party through one of Stanford’s residential dormitories. Rabois, then a first year law student, began shouting slurs at the home of a resident tutor in the dormitory, who had been involved in the expulsion of Ehrman’s brother Ken from residential housing four years earlier, after Ken called the resident tutor assigned to him a “faggot.” “Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” Rabois shouted. “Can’t wait until you die, faggot.” He later confirmed and defended these statements in a letter to the Stanford Daily. “Admittedly, the comments made were not very articulate, nor very intellectual nor profound,” he wrote. “The intention was for the speech to be outrageous enough to provoke a thought of ‘Wow, if he can say that, I guess I can say a little more than I thought.” The speech code, which had not until that point been used to punish any student, was not used to punish Rabois; however, Thiel and Sacks describe the criticism of Rabois from administrators and fellow students that followed as a “witch hunt” (1995, 162-75). Rabois subsequently transferred to Harvard but later worked with Thiel at PayPal and later as a partner at Founders Fund. More recently, the blog post that Founders Fund published to announce the Hereticon conference cited in Footnote 8, described violating taboos on speech as its goal: “Imagine a conference for people banned from other conferences. Imagine a safe space for people who don’t feel safe in safe spaces. Over three nights we’ll feature many of our culture’s most important troublemakers in the fields of knowledge necessary to the progressive improvement of our civilization” (2019).

    _____

    Works Cited

  • Scott Ferguson, Benjamin Wilson, William Saas, Maxximilian Seijo — Overcoming COVID-19 Requires Rethinking University Finance

    Scott Ferguson, Benjamin Wilson, William Saas, Maxximilian Seijo — Overcoming COVID-19 Requires Rethinking University Finance

    This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff. 

    By Scott Ferguson, Benjamin Wilson, William Saas, and Maxximilian Seijo

    As an interminable spring gave way to an uncertain summer, the stewards of higher education at last stepped up efforts to mitigate the financial fallout from the COVID-19 health emergency. As long suspected, their remedy is austerian shock therapy.

    Dredging up higher ed’s playbook from the Great Financial Crisis, university executives allege that only sweeping layoffs, freezes, and closures can salvage their institutions from the incursion of collapsing state budgets, unprecedented revenue loss, and inadequate Federal aid.

    The reality, of course, is that such remedies are themselves unmitigatedly toxic. Austerity threatens to not only harm countless faculty, staff, and students during a time of need, but also strangle productive activity well beyond campus boundaries. In fact, contrary to the prevailing managerial wisdom, mass disinvestment in higher ed will by definition exacerbate, not ameliorate, the coronavirus depression.

    A growing chorus of critics has arisen to contest the counterintuitive logics behind these lethal measures. François Furstenberg, for instance, has raised a red flag about newly announced cutbacks at Johns Hopkins University: “How does a university with a $6-billion endowment and $10 billion in assets suddenly find itself in a solvency crisis?”

    Critics like Furstenberg are right to lambast contemporary higher ed’s casino-like investment strategies. Predicated upon risky and often-illiquid assets, universities’ tax-sheltered investment portfolios favor speculation and elites over education and community. What is more, they render powerhouse institutions such as Hopkins suddenly ineffectual under severe financial strain.

    Still, regardless of whether any hands are legitimately tied, if U.S. higher education is to overcome the COVID-19 catastrophe, critics will need to advance beyond autopsies of portfolio capitalism and wholly rethink university finance from the ground up. More important, the exigency of the present situation requires proceeding in the spirit of John Dewey and American pragmatism. We must learn by doing.

    Our proposal is this: Universities can immediately circumvent feckless state & federal legislatures and finance themselves directly by issuing their own credit called “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve.

    As outlined by Modern Money Network Research Director, Nathan Tankus, Unis shall be issued as “University Payment Anticipation Notes.” Modeled on the better-known “Tax Anticipation Note,” the Uni will attain value as circulating money as a result of a university’s capacity to redeem them in future payments. Finally, the Federal Reserve needs to assist universities by extending its purchasing support for municipal debts, or “Munis,” to Unis, ensuring that Unis, too, are trustworthy and widely receivable.

    The Uni, we submit, is no technocratic stop-gap meant merely to keep universities afloat during a pandemic. The Uni, rather, represents a thorough-going democratic challenge to the financial ideology that got the American university into the present crisis.

    Choreographers of Credit 

    The Uni’s technical specifications may seem complicated. Beneath the specialized language, however, the Uni teaches a very basic, yet essential lesson about the nature of credit creation and what a university can genuinely afford.

    According to the anemic microeconomics that have come to define university finance, credit is a private and scarce resource that permits a firm or institution to obtain money it otherwise lacks. An elusive “price mechanism” regulates credit’s supply, delimited by market investors’ willingness to lend. Financial viability, meanwhile, hinges upon balancing income against expenditures and debts. When revenue collapses in this sink-or-swim regime, reserves drain out and credit dries up. Barring government intervention, the result can destroy countless productive enterprises until markets mysteriously self-correct.

    From this dismal view, today’s variously defunded and revenue-threatened universities stand no chance against a pandemic liquidity crunch. Fortunately, however, credit is in reality neither conditioned by such zero-sum premises nor doomed to their dire consequences.

    In truth, modern credit allocation derives from a public finance franchise which, according to Cornell Law School’s Robert C. Hockett and Saule T. Omavora, is legally constructed, nominally inexhaustible, and readily transformable. “Contrary to contemporary orthodoxy,” they explain, “modern finance is not primarily scarce, privately provided, and intermediated, but is, in its most consequential respects, indefinitely extensible, publicly supplied, and publicly disseminated.”

    The counterintuitive consequences of this analysis become clear when considering the operations of traditional private banks. In opposition to conventional misconceptions, banks do not act as intermediators for pre-accumulated capital, recycling private dollars by lending out deposits at a markup. Instead, as finance franchisees, banks command new production when lending by creating fresh, federally insured-credit on behalf of the U.S. government. Insofar as credit issuance is nominally inexhaustible, moreover, a bank’s financial viability is contingent, not upon some irreversible income-to-expenditure tipping point, but rather upon the embedded rules and values that shape the institution’s legal construction. For this reason, a bank could very well operate beyond the balance sheet, if it were, for example, legally licensed to prioritize communal and environmental investment over revenue generation and so-called “sound finance.”

    Per Hockett & Omarova, “Reconfiguring our basic understanding of the financial system in this way is a necessary first step toward making finance work in a manner that aids, rather than hinders, inclusive and stable economic development. It underwrites explicit recognition that the public must take an active role in modulating and allocating credit aggregates across the economy. It also offers a bolder, more creative approach to designing new means of doing so.”

    The Uni draws on this public capacity and exposes the untapped and frequently misdirected powers of banks in order to reclaim the American university for people and planet.

    Universities and colleges—and particularly large public university systems—are tremendous provisioning authorities. Their ongoing investments anchor regional and state economies in far-reaching ways. Many are classified as political subdivisions, with powers of tax, police and eminent domain. Myriad universities administer chartered credit unions. Yet all higher ed institutions maintain elaborate payment systems, levying regular, non-reciprocal obligations in the form of tuition, rents, meal cards, fees, and fines.

    Thus, aside from their hazardous dealings on Wall Street, universities and colleges already function as preeminent choreographers of credit. The problem is that a punishingly private vision of finance has long concealed higher education’s real capacities and potentials.

    By issuing Unis, universities assert and expand their rights as allocators of credit in their communities. They take responsibility for social and ecological wellbeing in the face of negligent legislators. Most important, they withdraw from capitalist speculation and refuse to place arbitrary fiscal strictures before education, health, and prosperity.

    Likewise, the Uni must serve as an intersectional rallying cry, inviting fresh opportunities to remediate seemingly disparate and long-standing injustices. The Uni ought to foment democratic governance and participation from campus to surrounding neighborhoods. It needs to ensure generous and equitable support for students, staff and faculty. Above all, it demands diversifying the meaning of public service and education in ways that make Black and other marginalized lives truly matter.

    Storming the Fed 

    Now is the time to demand full accommodation from a paradigm-smashing Fed.

    While Congress sits on their hands, a learning-by-doing experiment is already underway at the Federal Reserve. With more than 40 million Americans out of work, the Fed appears ready to fulfill its congressional mandate to both maximize employment and promote stable prices. Indeed, the strongest signal that this time things can be different is the opening of the Fed’s new Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF), which promises to buy both existing and future state and municipal debt.

    The significance of this facility for universities will be determined largely by their ability to be as politically effective as banks, insurance companies, and the fossil fuel industry at adjusting the Fed’s terms and conditions to meet their own needs. First, university leadership must pressure state governors and legislators to use the MLF to stabilize local balance sheets, saving local economies and eliminating justifications for draconian cuts. Second, they need to petition the Fed to guarantee Uni liquidity.

    To be sure, jump-starting the Uni does not necessarily require Fed accommodation. Universities can at once embrace their experimental ethos and fashion context-specific systems keyed to institutional mission statements and the goods and services they generate.

    However, Fed accommodation remains our endgame. The combined severity of the crisis and Washington’s heedlessness make Federal Reserve assistance indispensable to stem cascading austerity, let alone to address systemic ills. It also reveals the Fed to be a central site of contestation.

    So far, the first to seek Fed assistance include the State of Illinois, Port Authorities in New York and New Jersey, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the New York subway, busses, and commuter rails. If the Fed stands ready to save the New York subway, then we have pushed well beyond normative pearl-clutching about Fed neutrality as well as ideologically-laden claims that higher ed’s critical infrastructures are somehow undeserving.

    When it comes to extending permanent purchasing support for the Uni, of course, the Fed is unlikely to comply without complaints, hearings and even trials. Yet politically speaking, motivating university leadership to adopt the Uni is by far the heavier lift. To do so necessitates mass mobilization and solidarity between faculty, students, staff and community members across many systems and campuses.

    At the same time, however, systemic transformation demands organizers appeal to pragmatic concerns they share with university leadership, despite historic differences. After all, as Minnesota Fed chair, Neel Kashkari, now openly declares, “There’s an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve.” This renders austerity not merely impractical, but also suicidal.

     

    Scott Ferguson is associate professor film & media studies in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida.

    Benjamin Wilson is associate professor of economics at the State University of New York at Cortland.

    William Saas is assistant professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University.

    Maxximilian Seijo is a Ph. D. student in comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

  • Muneeb Hafiz — What is a Key Worker?

    Muneeb Hafiz — What is a Key Worker?

    This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff. 

    By Muneeb Hafiz

    In the UK, Black people across England and Wales are more than four times as likely to die from Covid-19 as white people; Bangladeshi and Pakistani people around three and a half times more likely; and those of Indian origin two and a half times as likely. Two thirds of British Bangladeshi men over the age of sixty have a long-term health condition that puts them at particular risk from infection, while underlying health conditions are also especially prevalent among older people of a Pakistani or Black Caribbean background. “Minority” groups are over-represented by as much as 27% in the overall Covid-19 death toll and 63% of the first 106 health and social care staff known to have died from the virus were Black or Asian. Around a third of all working-age people from Black African backgrounds, and over a fifth from Indian backgrounds are employed in “key worker” roles (Office for National Statistics, 2020; Siddique, 2020).

    Body-Capital-Breath

    Across the long night of capitalism, embodiment – skin, flesh, colour, labour – and the struggle to breathe have constituted its fundamental questions (Alcoff, 1999; Weheliye, 2014). Is it not true that in one way or another, in the end, everything brings us back to the body? That whatever our descriptive statement of the human (Wynter, 2003), whatever substance or hue is its form, the absorption of oxygen and release of carbon dioxide, the resuscitation of muscle and tissue, the creation of energy (to live and, more importantly, to work) through a series of dynamic exchanges, is what it all comes down to? Is life not at least in part an essential question of embodiment, and embodiment a question of what constitutes proper life? (Spillers, 2003).

    And, thus, does its opposite, death, not become both an immanent question of how to dispose of the body that has ceased to breathe, and a transcendental question of what happens to the body in the time after it is no longer kept alive? Surely any assault on the body – saying nothing of the many wars on life which plague, and have constituted our modern moment – must have breath as both its affect and effect. Pain, grief, loss, anxiety, exhaustion, disease each having discernible if shifting consequences for one’s breathing.

    What has capitalism – work and its faceless workers, labour and its mystification, multiplying services and its veiled supply chains – been founded upon if not the attempt to master the breath of countless hordes, to mobilise the metabolic and reproductive energies produced, and life sustained by their exhalation? (Hartman, 1997). Taking the long view, with the advent of the New World and the constitutive excrement of its discoveries – genocide, (trans)plantations, ecological catastrophe, disease, psychic, spiritual and familial alienation, human-wood, human-metal – to the appearance of the so-called “industrialised races” (of Europe) some several centuries later, the struggle to breathe of some, and the will to suffocate of others has been a world-founding dialectic (Wallerstein, 2011).

    Capital’s Other

    This back and forth between breath and its suffocation, between beings and those who would spit at them, between peoples simultaneously denied their humanity and put to work precisely on the basis of human creativity, has cleared the terrain, both physical and symbolic, for the assembly-line Products of “Liberty,” “Welfare” and the “Rights of Man” (Lowe, 2015). These gifts of progress are weighed down with the unanswered, unaccounted – though never completely invisible – subjects of the marked; the breath stifled, the beings told that they are not. For the conditions of their possibility (or, production) at home, among those who delegated to themselves sovereign will and the space to breathe, have required whole economies of silhouetted peoples denied their own, and industries of death elsewhere that have been modern Capital’s nuclear power plant.

    There were always Others with whom nothing could be shared or owed, peoples turned into ghosts of an inaudible, imperceptible, delimited condition, despite the essential relation of dependence – or indebtedness – others have to them, and through whom their own lives are sustained. These people have been made to work for another who refuses to see her as such, who, in truth, could never allow cognition of the uneliminable fact of their shared embodiment. While both, ‘human’ (Man) and ‘labourer’ (ghost), require the space to exert energy and breathe, the spectre of the Other becomes also a vehicle for contamination who everywhere – in schools, in hospitals, in custody – challenges the sacred, but always already provincial, boundary of proper life due a share of the world, of the genre of the human constituted under regimes of capital. It is only he who is truly of here that becomes signatory to a contract of care and (re)cognition as an entity owed certain obligations. Those unfortunate Wretcheds over there, or indeed here, that is, the half-subjects of Capital’s bloody service supply chain, whose existence is registered as mere happenstance or as singular function, must instead be spoken for and kept clocking in (Fanon, 2001).

    Despite the work they do and the forms they must fill, with bodies that move and hands that write and feel as well as work, these transients are the subjects par excellence of the application clause, or its internal logic of the exception: If you insist on being here then you must not be seen. If you insist on being seen then you must not be heard. If you insist on being heard then it must be in a tongue and with sentences of our choosing. And if you do indeed pick up this new language of ours then you would do well to forget your mother’s.

    Dark mortalities

    Our moment of mass death and the makeshift morgue, more corpses than we are willing to bring ourselves to count, drives home the inescapable limit of the body and breath. This despite the principle of unequal shares through which certain lives become disproportionately superfluous or at risk, and others naturally secured. To be sure, this virus has brought with it notions of a great levelling (Alexander, 2020). The reality that anyone, anywhere is vulnerable and, thus, its attack on our shared embodiment speaks to a planetary predicament in which each and every human is caught It is this reason that today death is measured as being in excess.

    But just as the breathing or gasping body lives and labours in the midst of certain historical, social, political and economic tendencies, this levelling, which has brought on an hour of autophagy – bodies devouring themselves of the capacity to draw breath and live on – also shares in those tendencies. “Disease is never neutral,” Anne Boyer (2019) has told us, “treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.” This longstanding politics of mortality, which draws a great separation between the visible person and invisible worker, and has been instituted through industrial progress, its colony, outpost, and tax haven, is the systematic legislation of death and an all-out war on life. The freedom to live and breathe is made possible by many more who cannot.

    It is not clear that this fundamental relation of my life to the death or murder of an Other has left us (Mbembe, 2003). Before the arrival of this virus, humanity – as both physical subject and ethical concept – was already threatened with suffocation (Mbembe, 2020). Entire segments of the earth’s population, entire races caught and mobilised in an intense struggle to breathe when others would have them disappear, or more fittingly under the reign of capitalism, die at work.

    The sharing of tendencies between virus and the worldly context of its transmission, a world not so much of a great levelling but one built on a great separation (Fanon, 1967); of my body, breath and labour kept a world- and time-apart from the Other’s, thus speaks to and amidst certain regimes of erasure. Because of the industries of strangulation upon which the modern world was founded and continues to proceed, that the makeshift morgue has already been a central logic of capitalism, we were always already haunted by the supposed excess (death) of the Other long before this virus’s eruption.

    This disproportionate risk, exposure and perishing to the virus is among peoples already marked, as Black, brown, poor, jobless, homeless, unsettled, resident with no recourse to public funds. That is, names which sanction the deaths of Others whose work sustains life elsewhere, a haunted exchange that should be set in the larger contexts of, and intimacies between, breathing, labouring bodies across time and space.

    The relation of my life to the disproportionate death of an Other, a worker whose ‘key’ status is contingent on his/her ability to labour but whose humanness as worthy of protection has long been in question, speaks to a profound emergency that could never be recognised as such. This is a loss not merely of Black and brown life, of the marked person’s ability to breathe freely. It rather amounts to an exit from a confrontation with the scale of mass death, mapped yesterday onto faraway frontiers and processes of extraction, accumulation, settlement and repopulation, with all the skeletal and geologic spikes that were their castoff, and that today is right here, seeking answers.

    A day after

    The body of the Other has long been drawn as a vehicle for contamination, a haunting figure, who is there but not, who must be kept at bay, locked down but productive, one whose own suffocation or deportation allegedly spells safety for those unmarked. In this negative relation of my body to the breath of the Other, we have never learned how to die, never mind how to live, in a world that was always and remains the only one we have, and which we must share with everything that breathes.

    The contingency of my breathing freely on the stifling of an Other (what is that if not at core a definition of freedom as it arose from colony), bespeaks the pathogenic quality of capitalism. The great levelling of this new virus that is transmitted and kills indiscriminately does its work in a world of deep discrimination. The profound unmooring of untimely death and grief drift through an earthly condition in which the premature death of its simultaneously marked (hypervisible) and neglected (masked) peoples is proposed as the natural order of things.

    It is not a question, then, of pre- and post-COVID. There must be a more expansive notion of the day after. It must be one in which to have a body – at the level of species-being – is to be owed the space to breathe. The delimiting terms of the political sphere, of law and state, capital and its endless abstractions will no longer suffice if we are to learn how to live and die in-common, as occupants of ultimately transitory but visible life (Glissant, 1997). These are questions biospheric in nature and planetary in scale. We are from the very beginning “given over” (Butler, 2004) to the world of an Other – human and natural, this distinction can no longer be allowed to hold – however much their presence is denied. Each of us must now answer to our own names, and are to be held responsible for an Other’s share, for their right to breathe clean air, if this earth is to survive.

    Now it is true that the day after may herald an even greater separation than before, that the relation of the body who lives and breathes to the many more who suffocate and die is deepened as a logic of our world, and given renewed legitimacy through euphemisms of economic recovery, (bio)political security and national integrity.

    Living and dying together, breath and its expiration, however, is an, if not the unassailable surplus of being. Hard as some might try to graft the ephemeral and elementally vulnerable nature of our embodiment to the machine – the birth of the new synthetic-body or object-body or digital-body – living and dying together will remain our lot as beings on this earth-not-of-our-making. At least for now.

    A proper day after will only come through today’s and yesterday’s reckoning, of both its light and dark faces, its breathing and gasping bodies. Until we bring ourselves to confront premature death’s relation to the manmade, though no less extrahuman, factors of race, gender, labour, wealth, citizenship and much more, our existence will be forever haunted by the lives and death of Others; our own bodies weighed down by the breathless who may well be gone but whose body-the-same-as-mine can never truly be denied.

     

    Muneeb Hafiz is an Associate Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University, UK. His current research concerns the intersections between race, subjectivity and ecology.

     

    Alcoff, Linda Martin. 1999. “Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment.” Radical Philosophy, no. 95: 15-26.

    Alexander, Ella. “Coronavirus is not a great leveller: we do not suffer the same.” Harper’s Bazaar, 12 April 2020. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/culture-news/a32107262/coronavirus-is-not-a-great-leveller/

    Boyer, Anne. 2019. The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

    Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

    Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin.

    Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The intimacies of four continents. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11-40.

    Mbembe, Achille. 2020. “The universal Right to Breathe.” Critical Inquiry, 13 April 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/

    Office for National Statistics, “Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by ethnic group, England and Wales: 2 March 2020 to 10 April 2020.” ONS, 7 May 2020. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/coronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwales/2march2020to10april2020.

    Siddique, Haroon. 2020. “British BAME Covid-19 death rate ‘more than twice that of whites’” The Guardian, 1 May 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/british-bame-covid-19-death-rate-more-than-twice-that-of-whites.

    Spillers, Hortense. 2003. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, pp. 203–229. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. The Modern World System. 4 vols. London: University of California Press.

    Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation. An Argument.” New Centennial Review no. 33: 257-337.

  • Anthony Bogues — Writing About Empire in the Nineteenth Century Caribbean (Review of Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect)

    Anthony Bogues — Writing About Empire in the Nineteenth Century Caribbean (Review of Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect)

    by Anthony Bogues

    Review of Christopher Taylor, Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2018).

    To write about Empire today is of some significance. To connect Empire to the practices of nineteenth century British liberalism is critical. Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect, which argues that in British colonial policy, “liberal freedom becomes a form of liberal neglect,” Taylor, 2018, 3) is thus already doing important work. That it does this through a critical literary lens marks an opening for those of us who think that critical scholarship currently demands an interdisciplinary approach. In the field of political thought/political theory the writings of Uday Metha, Jennifer Pitts and others have laid some grounds for thinking about the ideology of liberalism and its entanglements with the various European  colonial projects, particularly the British and French colonial empires. In these studies, the Caribbean—despite being one of the early centers of British colonial rule and site of several conflicts and territorial transfers from one colonial power to the next — is often elided. And, all of this is strange since the Caribbean before the late 1870s scramble for Africa was the venue from which many theories about blackness were formulated. One only has to read Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia to see the copious references to the Jamaican colonial administrator and historian Edward Long’s three volumes on the history of Jamaica published in 1774. Jamaica was considered in the eighteenth century the “best jewel in the British Diadem.” And even after the abolition of slavery there was continued British preoccupation with these former slave societies.

    Nineteenth century British political ideas and thought in general were deeply engaged with the Caribbean in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and then the ending  of the formal social system of racial plantation slavery in 1838. In the words of the 1839 “Memorandum of the West Indian Assemblies” from the Colonial Office, the new key concern for the British colonial policy was the “institutions of the colonies and the new rights given to the negroes” (Cited in Bogues 2018, 156). These rights, which purported to make the once enslaved black population subjects but not citizens would become a contested terrain. All of this was not accidental once we recall that John Stuart Mill argued in Liberty that “despotic government” was acceptable for the colonies until they had arrived at a stage where they could be offered self-government. In this tutelage model of rule, what I have called elsewhere the “ladder of civilization,”(Bogues 2005, 217) there was a profound set of distinctions between being a subject and citizen. Included in these distinctions were issues of suffrage and conception of capacity. The conceptions of capacity meant several things including: political self-rule, mastery over the self, and forms of rationality, all summed in the word character.[i] This conception of capacity became a key element of Anglophone Caribbean anti-colonial  thought so that in many of the writings of the newly formed black intelligentsia during this period the frame for anti-colonial thinking was around them having the capacity for self-rule. However, a key issue issue would be who was judging who and therefore what did the color of capacity look like? Part of the strength of Empire of Neglect is to point to how capacity was a problematic terrain of anti-colonial thinking.

    Liberalism and colonialism

    Often times, in our general thinking about liberalism and empire we focus on the main political thinkers of the period. Yet, as Empire of Neglect reminds us, liberalism was not only wrought through theoretical work; it was constructed as well by colonial practices. And here one is thinking about what colonial power did and how these deeds were then formulated back into liberalism and where that did not happen, how liberalism would create sites of difference in which might was right. Liberalism therefore was not an ideology and theory without practices, but rather within forms of colonial rule it was one in which colonial practice shaped political ideas. Therefore, to tell a more complex story of the history of political thought requires us to probe practices of thought because in any ideological configurations there is a profound relationship between the deed and the word. In trying to grapple with British liberalism in the mid-nineteenth century it behooves us to grapple with the critical issue that faced British colonial power at that time. So one might read Empire of Neglect as working through a form of rule which British colonial policy sought to enact. In the case of the Caribbean, colonial rule was a complex matter  because the colonies were slave colonies. Within some Caribbean slave colonies there were local white legislative assemblies that governed the territories. All slave colonies were run by a colonial governor who worked in tandem with the British colonial office that set colonial policy based on British parliamentary decisions. In such contexts violence as an technology of rule was the order of the day.

    As stated before, after the abolition of slavery, the crucial question for British colonial policy and politics was: how were these colonies to be ruled now that slavery was abolished? One current of this preoccupation was expressed in the phrase the “new rights of the negroes.” By the 1850s this preoccupation about how the colonies should be ruled became a driver of British colonial policy towards the Caribbean. A figure who represented this drive and wrote many essays about this as an Oxford professor of political economy was Herman Merivale. His essays and speeches brought him some public acclaim and he moved from Oxford to become colonial secretary in the British colonial office.[ii] In the lecture “Colonies without slaves or convicts,” Merivale noted that “the economical objects of colonization are two only: First, to furnish means of bettering their condition to the unemployed, ill–employed, portion of  the people of the mother country. Secondly, to create a new market for the trade of the mother country” (Merivale 1842, 33). To create a new market for British trade required creating new subjects who were not slaves. For this to happen, Merivale recommended that the “duties of the colonial government … seem to arrange themselves under two heads – protection and civilization” (155). The idea of this form of rule, which I have called elsewhere “pastoral coloniality” (Bogues 2018, 156) was at the core of British rule of the Caribbean colonies in the immediate post abolition period. This did not mean that when deemed necessary by the colonial governor, the conventional practices of colonial power—that might was right–did not operate, clearly discernible by the actions of Governor Eyre in the aftermath of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion.[iii] Also, the black Jamaican was not simply a subject of the British colonial crown but he or she was in the words of Anthony Trollope, “a creole Negro.” This invented subject was in the mind of many British colonial officials different from continental Africans, a difference characterized by Trollope as one made possible by the close proximity of the African enslaved in the Caribbean living closely with and in societies with Europeans (See: Trollope 1860).

    The British Caribbean colonies from the abolition of slavery onwards were therefore former slave societies in gestation. Within this context, the Afro-Caribbean person operated on dual grounds partly shaped by the color-class codes of the period. On the one hand, there was the construction of the black ex-slave subject as a “Christian Black.”[iv] This was a subject who would wear the coat of Victorian respectability and who could, in the end and over time, might  be considered “civilized.” On the other hand, there were the ways in which many former black slaves created alternative subjectivities as they constituted new forms of culture and alternative Afro-Caribbean religious forms.[v] These latter subjectivities would never be and could never be considered civilized.

    An important aspect of the Empire of Neglect is its concern with the figure of the respectable black, the “Christian Black.” Taking its title from the poem England in the West indies; A Neglected and Degenerating Empire by the poet George Reginald Margetson, who hailed from St Kitts, the core arguments of Empire of Neglect are about the ways in which “the Jamaican ex-slave navigated  the institution of black life as worthless…[and how] ex-slaves moved through worthlessness to find another horizon of social being that they associated with empire (27). In this argument there is a concern for “imperial belonging” on the part of these ex-slaves. Taylor develops this argument through different readings including that of a pamphlet of an absentee white planter and the novel of Trinidadian intellectual Michel Maxwell Philip. The over-arching point of this book is to illustrate how Caribbean political imageries were constituted in relation to the rise of forms of anti-colonial nationalism as the “political horizon of Caribbean writing.” Yet, I pause here. I do so because black subjectivities in post-slavery Caribbean societies were not homogenous even within the newly emergent black intelligentsia. Because while there was black imperial belonging, there was another current of anti-colonialism one in which forms of black nationalism under various symbolic orders of Afro Caribbean religious-politico forms would appear. Alongside these counter-symbolic forms were mass actions so that in Jamaica in 1884 there was black mass anger which frightened the colonial authorities and by 1895 the dockworkers went on massive strike, one which Dr Robert Love perhaps the most radical black intellectual  in the Caribbean at the time suggested was a new marker. All of this pushed the British colonial authorities to increase Indian and Chinese indenture labor schemes. In recalling these moments while Empire of Neglect opens up the space for us to grapple with the complexities of “imperial belonging,” one might also attend to other archives and figures, such as the ordinary Caribbean ex-slave who sought to create different forms of belonging other than that which primarily rested upon an imperial imaginary. Empire of Neglect makes it clear that central to the emergence of a certain kind of Caribbean nationalism is J.J. Thomas’s work and his seminal book Froudacity.

     JJ Thomas and the struggle for recognition

    Empire of Neglect engages adroitly with the reception of J.J. Thomas’s work in Caribbean intellectual and political history. Following Empire of Neglect, I want to reread Froudacity as a complex anti-colonial text, one in which there is a longing for Britishness or recognition from the British colonial power of capacity, and within this capacity, a desire for some form of Caribbean self-government. In his writings on Thomas, Rupert Lewis makes clear that “the book marks a state of mind that is in direct transition to the ideas which later became known as Garveyism” (Lewis, 54). At the core of this complexity was Thomas’s idea that the Black Anglo-Caribbean person was equal to any British white person. It was an argument about capacity and the readiness of the colonies for forms of internal self-government, if not full independence.[vi] In his 1969 introduction to the republication of Thomas’s book, C.L.R. James noted that James Anthony Froude, the British professor who wrote the book The English in the West Indies: The Bow of Ulysses, to which Thomas had responded, had embarked on this project because he was part of the British intelligentsia opposed to any form of West Indian self-government. Thomas, who read the book in Grenada, wrote a series of articles in response to Froude’s travelogue.[vii]

    Christopher Taylor provides us with a nuanced and excellent read of Froudacity. He writes, “Froudacity did not simply cut ties with the empire … it also cut ties with the empire centered political and literary tradition” (232). In one sense, I think this is an accurate assessment, but in another, I wonder if we can think further about the complexity of this kind of anti-colonial thought, predicated as it was on  the idea that “we were ready.” On whose terms were we [the Caribbean] ready for self rule? And more importantly, who was ready? Thomas, while exposing the anti-black racism of Froude, simultaneously agrees with one of the markers of anti-black racism of the period, the ways in which the West understood the black sovereign power of the Haitian republic. One nineteenth century current of anti-black racism was the “Haitian Fear.” The idea of black sovereignty expressed through the dual Haitian revolution shook the colonial world. The idea of Haiti, was the worst nightmare for colonial powers and American slave masters.[viii] Liberalism feared Haiti. Many a liberal abolitionist believed that Haiti was the worst example of black freedom. Froude was not an exception to this and raged against the black republic. Thomas, while vindicating the black self, wrote in repose to this anti-black rage, “we saw them free, but perfectly illiterate barbarians, impotent to use the resources of their valour.” In this statement, he repeats what some black figures at the time felt about Haiti. Attempting to mitigate this sentiment, Thomas noted that part of the political difficulties in Haiti had been generated by the mulatto social grouping (Thomas 54). His ambivalences towards Haiti were rooted in a certain respectable black subjectivity created by British colonial power. Here we should remember that Thomas was a schoolmaster. Such a figure was at the pinnacle of what was then considered the “Christian Black.” But Thomas was a complex figure because he wrote the very first defense of the black vernacular languages of the Caribbean and his book, Creole Grammar, remains the starting point for creole linguistics in the Anglophone Caribbean.

    In the final chapter of his book, Thomas makes it clear that “the extra – African millions in the Western Hemisphere” will make a significant contribution to what he considers as human development. Interestingly, he deploys the American reconstruction period as an example of this, but elides the racial terror of the period. In all of this, Thomas was attempting to stake out a different ground for Caribbean anti-colonialism and the capacity of the black Caribbean person.[ix] Froude had written that within the Caribbean “there are no people here in the sense of the word and  the islands [were] becoming nigger warrens” (Cited in Thomas, 19). J.J. Thomas, learned schoolmaster and respectable Black, was not only deeply offended by this, but in his act of writing in defense of the capacity of the Caribbean black ex-slave, began to formulate the idea of a nation. I would argue that for him, as well for his work, Creole Grammar was in part illuminating capacity, making it clear that this nation in gestation had a language.[x]

    Thus, Taylor’s book, in teasing out a sentiment of “imperial belonging,” makes a signal contribution by bringing Thomas as an example of this kind of current. I would argue that this was one hall mark of this Caribbean black intelligentsia—a deep anti-racism combined with a sense of belonging to the British empire while desiring all the rights of citizenship. Thus even in his advocacy for a modicum of internal self-government within the juridical context of a crown colony, Thomas appeals to fact that the black Caribbean subject as outgrown “ the stage of political tutelage” (215). But this capacity or political readiness was not an argument for full independence but rather a call for fuller internal political participation and the end to crown colony government. Perhaps nowhere is this kind of advocacy most pronounced than in the writings of T. E. S. Scholes, an extraordinary figure who wrote two volumes attacking the idea of Black inferiority, The Glimpses of the Ages, or the Superior and Inferior Races So  Called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History (1905/1907). Before that he had written the important political economy pamphlet in 1897, “The Sugar Questions of the West Indies.”[xi]

    One of the major contributions of Empire of Neglect is to illuminate the political economy circumstances that Thomas and others inhabited. In the eighteenth century, colonial Britain operated economically through a closed system of mercantilism. One effect of industrialization, a process facilitated enormously by Caribbean plantation slavery was the demand by another set of British economic elites for free trade. In such a context the economic frame became a balance between the overseas sale to foreign regions of manufactured goods. Critical to that was the access to raw materials and finance. All this meant that the Caribbean colonies were no longer jewels in the British colonial crown. Thus, the matter of how to rule the newly emancipated ex-slaves occurred within an economic situation in which the core drives of colonial power had shifted from plantation slavery to imperial colonial control and command over new lands, as well as to the construction of the figure of the native in Africa and elsewhere. To put this in another way, deploying Stuart Hall, the conjecture had shifted. Yet, we know that in these kinds of shifts the old does not die but is reworked into new forms. One strength of Empire of Neglect is to mark this historic shift.

    It is safe to say that many Afro-Caribbean persons felt the shift but paid no attention. I would argue that, in part, this was due to the growing importance in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century of the banana trade, and the emergence of the United States as an economic presence in the region. And here we should recall that by December 1823, the US had promulgated the Monroe doctrine. The doctrine made it clear that Europe should no longer seek new colonies in the Western Hemisphere. It was a clear sign of the beginning of US hegemonic power in the region. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the so-called respectable Afro-Caribbean individual would still look to Britain as a place where he or she could make a mark. Thus, for example, between 1931 and 1932 C.L.R. James would first consider migrating to London, while Garvey and Sylvester Williams years earlier would think about moving to the US. One could argue that the migratory patterns of the Caribbean, even as British subjects, was largely directed toward Central America and the US before London recalling that West Indian labor was critical for the building of the Panama Canal and the revitalization of the sugar industry in Cuba in the early 20th century. So, while there were migratory movements in the late 19th and 20th centuries which social grouping went where is an important fact. Here the issue was not so much geography but rather the sense of the neglectful distance, which colonial Britain had so carefully cultivated. So we have a paradox: the Anglophone Caribbean person  was still constituted as a  British colonial subject and yet those black Caribbean political  subjects, who were preoccupied with forms of black consciousness, would find themselves in the US and while they belonged to empire, and also seeing themselves  as part of the Black world.[xii]

    The rule of Crown Colony

    Empire of Neglect provides an important alternative view of the emergence of Caribbean anti-colonialism and its nineteenth century context. One of the central features of British colonial rule in the Caribbean in the aftermath of the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion in 1865 was the enactment of crown colony government. This form of juridical rule meant that the local white legislative assemblies were abolished. Some of the arguments for their abolishment circled around the sense that sooner rather later the emerging black intelligentsia would begin to clamor for rights and representation in the assemblies. From as early as the 1840s the colonial secretary of state wrote the following letter: “From all I can hear it seems certain that before long the negro population will obtain a preponderating influence in the Assby…[thus] the authority of the Crown should be for the protection of the higher classes be somewhat strengthened” (Cited in Hart, 66). But there were many complexities involved here. How was a liberal colonial government to treat the former black slaves as subjects? What did it mean to be subjects and not citizens? How was rule to be constituted over a black intelligentsia which was rapidly emerging in part through missionary education? Within this context this intelligentsia created forms of anti – racism. A feature of these forms was the ground for racial equality. It meant that the black Caribbean had the capacity for internal self rule. It also meant that as a black diaspora they were better equipped in their minds to redeem Africa.[xiii] This kind of anti-racism in the understanding of many of these figures was compatible with being a citizen of the British colonial empire. Therefore, in many instances their struggles circled around what was considered to be the features of the rights of this citizenship. In this sense one aspect of colonial rule and domination had created a Caribbean black native for whom empire was a form of rule in which they had rights. It is from this perspective that for them empire was neglectful.

    By the 1930s, this kind of anti-colonialism would congeal into forms of creole nationalism, a form of political nationalism which would focus on constitutional independence.[xiv] The various currents within this form of anti-colonial nationalism would eschew the ordinary black Jamaican and Caribbean person. For the ordinary black Caribbean person forms of black radical nationalisms dominated life, either through religious practices such as Rastafarianism, through the work of black prophets like Alexander Bedward, or through radical political organizations like the Poor Man’s Land Improvement Association.[xv]

    These various forms of anti-colonial nationalisms would tussle with each other even after constitutional independence in the 1960’s and would remain in a political alliance for a brief moment during the Michael Manley regime of the 1970s.[xvi] The importance of Empire of Neglect is that it allows us to revisit a historical period of Caribbean history when the conjuncture was in flux. In its close readings of some of the key texts of the period, it reminds us of another historiography of thought that demands our attention. Finally, it makes plain that the Caribbean continued to be a crucial site, even if a neglected one, for nineteenth century Imperial Britain. In all of this, the Caribbean created various forms of anti-colonial ideas and practices. These included radical anti-colonial ideas that drew from Afro-Caribbean alterative epistemological practices. In moments of what C.L.R. James would call the “fever and fret” of the times, these radical practices would challenge both colonial and post-colonial state formations and its ways of life (James xi). In thinking about mapping the intellectual history and political thought of the region, writers like J.J. Thomas and Maxwell Philips became key figures. However, in the words of Bob Marley, the half is still to be told. Empire of Neglect, in this way, gives us an excellent rendering of the figure of the respectable “Christian black” and his desire for racial vindication and self-government. It is a necessary book.

     

    Anthony Bogues is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory and  the inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at  Brown University. He is also a visiting professor  and curator at the University of Johannesburg. The author/editor of nine books, he has curated exhibitions in USA, Caribbean, and South Africa. He is currently working on a book titled Black Critique and editing with Bedour Algraa a volume on Sylvia Wynter’s work. He is the co-convener of an Africanand African Diasporic contemporary art project/platform on Black Lives today titled, Imagined New.

     

    [i] For a discussion of this see Stefan Collini, “The Idea of Character in Victorian Political Thought” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol 35, fifth series (1985) 29-50.

    [ii]  For a discussion about the writings of Merivale, liberalism and nineteenth century Jamaica see Bogues 2018, 150-173.  Merivale’s lectures were published as Lectures on colonization and Colonies, delivered before the University of Oxford in1839, 1840 and 1841 (London 1842). As well it should be noted that there is a rich Caribbean historiography  which argues that the political contours of the Caribbean were put in place during this period. Emerging from this historiography is the concept posited by Rex Nettleford of the “battle for space.” The argument rests on the idea that within the Anglophone Caribbean there is not a revolutionary political tradition but rather a rebellious one which circles around contestations for space within society. For a historical account of these battles see, Moore and Johnson 2004. One of the most impressive historical text on the practices of the British Empire is Catherine Hall’s Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (2002).

    [iii] Of course, the debate within the Jamaica committee then led by John Stuart Mill was indicative of a divide about how to rule the Caribbean. Mill and his colleagues including Charles Darwin argued that the killing of the leadership of the rebellion by the colonial governor without due legal process of trial was an abrogation of the rights of British-Jamaican subjects. Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens argued otherwise.

    [iv] The idea of the “Christian Black” emerged out of studies of nineteenth century post-slavery Jamaica and complicated the imperial  narrative by foregrounding the role of British missionaries sent to Jamaica and the British Caribbean to train the ex-slave in Christianity and civilization. For a discussion of this concept see Russell, 51-58.

    [v] For a discussion of these Afro-Caribbean religious forms see Curtin 1955.

    [vi] It should be noted that at the core of C.L.R. James’s pamphlet, “The Case for West Indian Self Government” (1933) is the central political argument that West Indians were ready for self-rule. It was an argument against the colonial office which at that time made clear that there was need for more years of preparation before the region could be self-governing.

    [vii] It is important to note that Froude and Trollope were travel writers and both had written on South Africa and the Caribbean. Thomas’s response therefore should also be seen as a nationalist response to the colonial gaze which dominated European travel writing at that time.

    [viii] For a discussion of this vision of Haiti see the essays in the collection in eds. Dillon and Drexler 2016.

    [ix] I think in these views that the anti-colonial figure from Trinidad who follows closely some of the lines of thinking that Thomas lays down is Henry Sylvester Williams who was born in Trinidad in 1869 and by 1897 had formed the African Association in London. In 1901 he and W.E.B. Du Bois organized the first Pan African congress in London. Thomas’s thought moved from a focus on an emancipated ex-slave population to then consider the African diaspora. Williams began by thinking about blacks in the Caribbean and then moved to continental Africa. It is important to note that he lived for a time in Cape Town, South Africa.

    [x] For a full and careful reading of J.J. Thomas’s life and work see Smith 2002.

    [xi] For a good description of T. E. S. Scholes see Bryan, 47-67.

    [xii] It is interesting to note that Garvey seeks to build the UNIA in the US and that George Padmore comes to the US to study at Howard University where he joins the Communist Party before going to Moscow.

    [xiii] The idea of the “redemption of Africa” by the African diaspora in the Caribbean has a long history which includes figures of the Haitian revolution like Baron de Vastey, the writer and political personality whose 1814 text is critical in any study of the revolution. I would argue that  J.J. Thomas and others belonged to this current who believe that one of the obligations of the African diaspora is to “redeem Africa.” One does not understand the ways in which Africa becomes a signifier in the work of Garvey without not locating it inside this political tradition.

    [xiv]  I would argue that this kind of anti-racism would then merge  with a  Brown Jamaican nationalism which emerges with the formation of Sandy Cox and  Alexander Dixon’s  organization National Club  and the newspaper  Our Own, which began publication in July 1910. In Grenada in 1883 the newspaper Grenada People also began to advocate for a modicum of self rule and that blacks  should be allowed the right to vote and be  represented.

    [xv] For a discussion of nationalism in Jamaica see Bogues,  “ Nationalism and Jamaican Political  Thought’ in Kathleen Monteith & Glen Richards ( eds ) Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History , Heritage and Culture.  2002, 363-388. For a discussion of the leader of the Poor Man Land Improvement Association see, Rumble 1974. For a exemplary  novel that examines the ideas and work of Alexander Bedward see Miller 2016.

    [xvi] There has been intense discussion and debate about these nationalisms and how the 1970’s was a transformative moment, from constitutional independence to decolonization, as well as ar national liberation. This is part of a critical oral history project in political thought of the 1970’s that is currently underway in the Caribbean.  In the eyes of many,  this kind of  project is required to fill the gaps of the numerous the scholarly works of the period. Such a project also reimages what kinds of archives can and should be engaged in circumstances when a society is in deep flux and change.

     

    Works Cited:

    Merivale, Herman. 1842. Lectures on colonization and Colonies, delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840 and 1841. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman.

    Bogues, Anthony. “John Stuart Mill and the “Negro Question” Race, Colonialism and the Ladder of Civilization.” In Andrew Valls, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy Cornell University Press, 2005.

    Bogues, Anthony. “Liberalism, Colonial Power, Subjectivities and the Technologies  of Pastoral Coloniality: The Jamaica Case” in Tim Barringer & Wayne Modest, Victorian Jamaica  Duke University Press, 2018

    Elizabeth Dilion & Michael Drexler. The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

    Miller, Kei. 2016. August Town. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

    Moore, Brian and Michelle Johnson. 2004. Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Colonial Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920. Kingston: University of West Indies Press.

    Richard Hart. From Occupation to Impendence ; A Short History of the Peoples of the English Speaking Caribbean (London: Pluto Press, 1998) p. 66.   

    Rumble, Robert. 1974. “As told to Robert Hill & Richard Small : The Teaching of Robert Rumble – A Jamaican Peasant Leader.” In Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World. Cambridge: The Harvard Educational Review.

    Smith, Faith. 2002. Creole Recitations, J.J. Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late 19th century Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

    Taylor, Christopher. 2018. Empire of Neglect. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Thomas, J.J. 1969. Froudacity. London: New Beacon Books.

    Trollope, Anthony. 1860. The West Indies and the Spanish Main. London: Chapman and Hall.

    Russell, Horace. 1983. “The Emergence of the Christian Black: The Making of a Stereotype.” Jamaica Journal, 16.1: 51-58.

  • Andrew Zimmerman — Decolonizing Decolonization (Review of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire)

    Andrew Zimmerman — Decolonizing Decolonization (Review of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire)

    by Andrew Zimmerman

    A review essay on Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

    In Worldmaking after Empire Adom Getachew demonstrates how scholars might decolonize political theory by examining the political theory of decolonization. She works against the narrative, widespread in both popular and scholarly discourse, in which decolonization ironically completes, rather than rejects, the colonial project. It is a narrative in which colonized Africans, Asians, Indigenous Americans, and Pacific Islanders learn to demand national self-determination only from their colonizers, learn from those who oppress them to demand their freedom. By winning national sovereignty and independence, this common narrative suggests, colonized people did not overthrow but rather completed their European tutelage.[i] That narrative ultimately extends the colonial misrepresentation of conquest, oppression, and exploitation as beneficence. Worldmaking after Empire rejects this false and pernicious account. Its important contribution is then to analyze a body of decolonial political theory without recapitulating what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ structure of global historical time.”[ii]

    Eurocentric misrepresentations of decolonization typically credit US President Woodrow Wilson with the call for national self-determination, though this portrayal strains even so basic a feature of historical interpretation as chronology. Wilson, rather, appropriated Lenin’s earlier call for national self-determination in an effort to replace communist decolonial solidarity with a warmed over colonial “civilizing mission” perhaps best embodied in the “mandates” of  the League of Nations in Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific. This has been clear even to scholars in the Global North at least since Arno Mayer’s 1959 Political Origins of the New Diplomacy and Gordon Levin’s 1968 Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, though it was, of course, obvious to intellectuals and activists in the Global South from the beginning.[iii] Wilson’s anti-Black racism, including his drive to introduce segregation into the U.S. Federal Government, was no anomaly to an otherwise consistent democratic internationalism. Whatever the shortcomings of Lenin’s own vision of decolonization and anti-racism, Lenin’s Marxism and his writings on the national question remained central to decolonial and anti-racist struggles around the world at least through the twentieth century.[iv]

    Who today could look for the origins of global anti-imperialism and anti-racism in the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and South African Jan Smuts rather than in the Black internationalism of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and so many others? Who would today see the League of Nations, with its declaration that the territories of the former German and Ottoman Empires would be placed under a “sacred trust of civilization” as anything but a cruel parody of decolonization? Many scholars, in fact: the Eurocentric view of decolonization that these views embody remains powerfully entrenched in ongoing neocolonial projects by the Global North. The United Nations, moreover, continued much of the frankly colonial internationalism of the League until enough colonies won their independence to use their voting powers as independent states to transform the United Nations, at least in its pronouncements.

    It is in this moment, Getachew shows, that intellectuals of the Global South, building on the longstanding, intertwined anti-imperialist traditions of Black and Communist internationalisms, worked out a theory of colonialism and decolonization that colonizers could not, as Wilson had done, assimilate to their own racial, political, and epistemological order.

    Getachew laid out her decolonial approach to theory in an important 2016 article on interpretations of the Haitian Revolution. She showed how the common view that the Haitian Revolution universalized the republican ideals of the French Revolution does so only by rendering the Haitian Revolution “neither Haitian nor revolutionary.”[v] This still common view strips the Haitian Revolution of much of its history in order to serve as the ironic completion of some other history, the history of its former colonizers and enslavers. That narrative of ironic completion is also the one that Getachew overturns in Worldmaking After Empire, in which decolonization completes, rather than overthrows, the project of colonial tutelage. In fact, as Getachew argues, the anti-racist universalism of the enslaved was a rejection of, and remains an alternative to, the racist universalism of the enslavers.

    In  a similar vein, Worldmaking After Empire presents the decolonial internationalism of the Global South not only as historical challenge to the imperialist world system, but also as a model of continuing importance for decolonizing the broad tradition of Eurocentric theory that emerged with that imperialist world system. The book reveals, moreover, the way thinkers of decolonial internationalism drew on the earlier anti-racist universalism of the enslaved

    Worldmaking After Empire focuses on a cohort of decolonizing intellectuals, most of whom became heads of post-colonial states. These philosopher sovereigns and internationalists include Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, Michael Manley of Jamaica, and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. For each of these thinkers, decolonization did not mean full participation of their nations within the world system of European imperialism, for they already fully participated in that world system — as colonies. The imperialist world system, that is, already included their nations as subordinate members and was even predicated on that subordination. The politics of decolonization called, rather, for the creation of a fundamentally different world system, one predicated on equality rather than inequality, cooperation rather than exploitation, emancipation rather than oppression. Decolonization, Getachew agrees with much recent scholarship, did not aim at national autarky; it only appeared to do so to those who could not imagine an international system other than imperialism.

    The first transformation that Getachew focuses on is UN Resolution 1514, passed by the new postcolonial powers over the abstentions of the United States and other European colonial powers. The Resolution transformed the “principle of equal rights and the self-determination of peoples” from a distant goal, avowed but not pursued by the UN, into a language of sovereignty for present-day anti-colonial fighters and leaders. Resolution 1514 declared “the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights.” This did not simply force the United Nations to endorse immediate decolonization but also transformed the meaning of decolonization. Colonialism was no longer just rule by a foreign nation. It also included domination and exploitation, the racist order of colonial rule. The framers of Resolution 1514 and the other thinkers of decolonization whom Getachew analyzes understood colonialism as a world system whose dismantling involved the transformation of regional and international economies.

    Getachew offers an illuminating analysis of two efforts to put this this decolonial internationalism into place: the first were the efforts at creating regional federations spearheaded by President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Prime Minister Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago. These projects foundered on concerns of potential member states to protect their own sovereignty and the sovereignty of minority nationalities within multiethnic states. The second project was that for a New International Economic order (NIEO), which would have replaced the unequal exchange characteristic of the colonial world order with a decolonial system of equal exchange. This led to two important intellectual centers of decolonial thought: the New World Group of Jamaica and the Dar es Salaam school of Tanzania. But, drawing on work of Johanna Bockman, Getachew shows how the kinds of structural adjustments to the world economy that the NIEO demanded were undermined by IMF-imposed structural adjustments that drove Jamaica and Tanzania and much of the Global South into new forms of poverty and dependence.[vii]

    But while neither of these attempts succeeded in realizing a democratic, decolonial world system, the project of decolonizing political theory, including its original analysis of colonialism, remains as valid and urgent as ever. By revealing the profound and original political thought at the heart of these particular decolonial projects, Getachew makes clear that particular shortcomings of particular initiatives do not mean that decolonization was itself a failure, though this is a staple of much hegemonic thinking in the Global North. In this, World Making after Empire also participates in the project of decolonizing political theory.

    Getachew shows how decolonial theorists employed the history of Atlantic slavery to support their argument that colonialism was not simply foreign rule, but rather the global systems of racism and exploitation that continued even after formal decolonization. Works such as C.LR. James’s Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction make the history of the overthrow of slavery in the Americas central to anti-colonial struggles. The history of Atlantic slavery was also important for the colonial internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, as his own white supremacist history of the Civil War and Reconstruction makes clear.

    Getachew reveals, in one of the more surprising turns in her account, the important role that the history of the United States played in decolonial internationalist thought. One would hardly expect the thinkers Getachew discusses to look for positive models in the history of a nation that was arguably the most powerful enemy of the decolonial internationalism they advocated, and certainly one of the longest-lived and most powerful slave societies in the Americas. But, as Getachew shows, Nkrumah and Williams in fact turned to the U.S. Federalists and the U.S. Constitution for models of the federation of their own formerly colonized states.

    For Getachew this was neither Eurocentrism, nor an attempt by Nkrumah and Williams to defend themselves against one of their likely enemies by clothing their own projects in its stated ideals. Nkrumah and Williams figured, in Getachew’s words, “the postcolonial predicament as a recurring political problem and the federal idea as replicable answer.”

    But the anti-Black racism of the United States also continued to play a role in fighting against the democratic internationalism of decolonization. We thus see Daniel Patrick Moynihan, turning from his infamous culture of poverty account of supposed African American matriarchy to a screed against decolonization that is perhaps equally worthy of infamy. Neither the colonizers nor the decolonizers were pro- or anti- American, for the interpretation of the Americas was an agonistic field in which imperialists and anti-imperialists struggled.

    Getachew describes an anti-imperialist political theory that posits a world system that is neither a particularistic “no” nor a universalizing “yes” to the imperialist world system. Worldmaking after Empire proposes a number of interpretive tools to help understand decolonization instead as a form of global political thought that is different but not derivative from imperialist globalization. Rather than completions and universalizations of European theory, we see a struggle of appropriations and counterappropriations: Wilson appropriating from Lenin, the framers of Resolution 1514 appropriating from the UN, Nkrumah and Williams appropriating from the Federalists, for example.

    Getachew is of course not the first scholar to call for decolonizing theory. It is worth contrasting her approach with the earlier, and still influential, approach of the Subaltern Studies Group. Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty have each called on scholars to refuse to place popular, subaltern politics, into either the colonizers’ narrative arc of modernization or the decolonizing elites’ narrative of national liberation.[viii] Getachew reminds us that the two competing narratives should not be characterized as  imperialist internationalism and anti-imperialist nationalism, but rather as competing internationalisms on an agonistic field defined by racism and anti-racism, appropriation and counterappropriation. But, to borrow a question from Gayatri Spivak, can the subaltern speak in the political-theoretical landscape that Getachew offers?[ix] That is, is there a place in the intense struggle between colonial and decolonial internationalisms for varieties of subaltern politics that are amenable neither to the colonial nor the postcolonial elites? There is, of course, no necessary contradiction between the two approaches to decolonizing theory, Getachew’s and that of the Subaltern Studies Group. They are, perhaps, supplemental and mutually illuminating partial accounts.

    Decolonization was never, of course, political theory in isolation. Decolonial war making has always accompanied decolonial “Worldmaking.” Frantz Fanon argued that attempts “to settle the colonial problem around the negotiating table,” without combat, preserve the colonial class and international structures that true decolonization requires.[x] But by showing the ways that anti-colonial political theory offered a world diametrically opposed to the world of the colonizers, not simply a nationalist rejection of that world, Getachew suggests that even around Fanon’s “negotiating table” there was already a fundamental enmity. That is what makes this theory political.[xi] By decolonizing decolonization, Adom Getachew not only offers an important analysis of a group of political theorists who continue to be marginalized in our Eurocentric academies, but also calls on us to continue their projects of decolonial worldmaking.

     

    Andrew Zimmerman is professor of history at the George Washington University. He is the author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010) and the editor of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (International Publishers, 2016). He is currently writing a history of the US Civil War as a transnational revolution titled “A Very Dangerous Element.” Many of his publications can be found here.

     

    [i] Perhaps the best recent version of this common narrative is Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Getachew discusses this text on 192n19.

    [ii] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7.

    [iii]Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918, Yale Historical Publications. Studies 18 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). On the decolonial response to the version of national self-determination offered by Wilson and the League, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

    [iv] See, for one account spanning much of the century, Harry Haywood’s splendid Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978).

    [v] Adom Getachew, “Universalism After the Post-Colonial Turn: Interpreting the Haitian Revolution,” Political Theory 44, no. 6 (December 1, 2016): 821–45, 823.

    [vii] Johanna Bockman, “Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (March 16, 2015): 109–28.

    [viii] Ranajit Guha, “On the Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–86; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

    [ix] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

    [x] Frantz Fanon, “On Violence,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 1–62, 23.

    [xi] In the sense of the political put forward by Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (1932; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  • The Global Plantation: An Exchange between Adom Getachew and Christopher Taylor

    The Global Plantation: An Exchange between Adom Getachew and Christopher Taylor

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    In the Spring of 2019, Adom Getachew and Chris Taylor co-taught a seminar on “The Global Plantation.” In the following exchange, Getachew and Taylor consider the pedagogical, disciplinary, and theoretical challenges that emerge out of attempts to think about the plantation an adequately global, transnational, or postcolonial fashion.—Leah Feldman

    Dear Adom,

    I hope you are in good health. Let’s talk about the plantation.

    I want to begin with a question that is at once pedagogical and conceptual. In our course, we read key texts and concepts of canonical European political theory alongside various histories of, and historical material drawn from, the plantation. Under the rubric of “Property,” we spent a class on Locke’s Treatises; in subsequent classes we read Walker’s Appeal, John Jea’s slave narrative, scholarship on colonial property relations, and so on. One of the things that struck me, across all of our units, is the minimal presence that the plantation as a nameable institution maintains in the European political-theoretical texts that we selected to emblematize concepts. Locke, for instance, doesn’t use the term once in the Second Treatise. And I think that this observation can be scaled up: the plantation really isn’t a named object or institution in European political theory through the eras of slavery and emancipation. The terms “planting” or “plantation” do pop up to name the sovereign act of establishing colonies, as in Bacon or Harrington; in Gonzalo’s speech in The Tempest, “plantation” names the possibility of founding utopia. But, generally speaking, European political theory through the eras of slavery and abolition doesn’t really think about, think from, or refer to the institutional form or political-social relation of the plantation, and certainly not with anything like the robustness with which it will think about and from topoi such as the family, say, or civil society. This is perhaps an ongoing problem; consider the frequent Caribbeanist complaint that Agamben takes the camp, not the plantation, as the paradigm of modernity.

    Obviously, any given corpus of texts won’t talk about lots of things, and I’m not interested in saying that European political philosophers should have thematized the plantation—as if, say, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is fatally compromised because the plantation doesn’t appear as a moment in the development of the ethical state. I’m not lamenting or castigating an absence, or diagnosing a disavowal. My question is more something like this: Once we posit (or accept) the exorbitance of the plantation from the referential world of European political theory, what nonetheless can be thought or is made thinkable through a staging of their encounter? This was, I suppose, the premise of our course, but it was a hard premise to maintain in pedagogical practice. Generally, we thought about the plantation via a metonymy, through political theory’s omnipresent figure of the slave. I think this caused a kind of pedagogical wobble in our class, inasmuch as its object continually risked replacement. But I’m curious how you—if you agree with my rather inflationary claim—think about the plantation’s minimal referential place in European political theory from the eras of slavery and abolition. One set of questions I could pose would be broadly symptomatic: What might this absence tell us about political theory, its composition of its proper objects, and perhaps the composition of its canon? I don’t think these questions adequately get at what interested us in the course or what interests us in our research. So, maybe the better question to pose to you: What analytic, methodological, conceptual, or political possibilities are opened up by this absence? What happens to our reading practices when we force a relation despite a deficit of reference?

    Best,

    Chris

    **

    Dear Chris,

    Hope you are doing well.

    Thanks for getting us started.

    You raise important questions about the absence of the plantation in the history of European political thought. I want to first take up the problem of cannon composition and the reading practices that emerge alongside this composition. It is first important to note that both the subfield of political theory and its canon from roughly Plato to Nietzsche are very much products of the mid-twentieth century. Think here of the books that inaugurated the canon and the field—George Sabine’s History of Political Theory (1937), Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953), and Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision (1960). (I leave aside here Quentin Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) both because it is later and because I think it is responding to this earlier set of framings.) I think the construction of the canon does a number of things to the kind of reading practices we employ. We are taught (and often also teach) the texts of this canon as part of a tradition that has as its primary object questions of order, justice and legitimacy within a bounded political unit. We also read these texts for a straightforward set of prescriptions or to identify what they authorize or don’t authorize. We discussed this most concretely in the case of Locke and slavery and the long-standing debate about whether one can find support for or against the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Second Treatise. As you show in your forthcoming article “Divine Servitude against the Work of Man: Dispossessive Subjects and Exoduses to and from Property,” however, we might be better served by thinking through the connection between chapter 4 (on slavery) and 5 (on property) of the Second Treatise. In this exercise too we will not find a justificatory theory of slavery, but we can locate a way of thinking about self-ownership and property that came to dominate debates about slavery.

    There has been currents in the field of political theory that have resisted the set of approaches I identify above and for these last two decades this has inaugurated a whole body of scholarship on the place of empire and the extra-European world in canonical texts.[1] I think these interventions have done much to reconfigure the cannon to show how conquest, enslavement and colonization were central preoccupations for canonical figures and to diagnose the rhetorical and ideological strategies by which this centrality was also occluded.

    We took a different approach. We didn’t read Locke, Hobbes, Hegel and Marx because approached in the right way or with the right frame the plantation would appear. Instead we read these authors as figures who wrestled with the concepts of property, sovereignty and labor alongside the historical development of the colonial plantation an institutional form that also was a site in which these same concepts emerged and were contested. Rather than think of this historical parallelism as an occasion to unearth a tighter connection, we took it as an invitation to read these two spaces together. The consequence for our reading of canonical texts of political theory was to resist reading them as instantiations of a fully articulated systems of thought, but as also sites where these concepts are worked over and contested. Like the plantation itself, these texts of political theory were scenes of conceptual instability, rhetorical effects, and theoretical generativity.

    In my view our class was less concerned with reading for a theory of the plantation than reading around the plantation. What I mean by this is that we were really interested in maintaining the plantation as a concrete form while attending to the set of theoretical conundrums and possibilities it opened. At its core, the plantation as a concrete form is an institution for the large-scale production of agricultural commodities. But beginning from this, the plantation emerged from the first day of class as a complex politico-economic unit. Reading around was a strategy of taking up one dimension of the plantation say the ways it structures labor and thinking through how this reframes or reorients out conceptualization of the plantation. The upshot of reading around was to be theoretical promiscuous, to draw from a variety of genres, disciplines and historical moments in ways that helped us theorize its place in the development of the modern world and the specific kinds of political conundrums and possibilities it makes visible. With regards to the canonical texts of political theory, viewing them as one set of resources that are enabling in certain respects and require supplementation in other ways is a refreshing and I think liberating approach to the study of the history of political thought.

    I don’t mean to suggest that this strategy was very stable or fully realized in the course. At its center was this effort to simultaneously maintain concretion and theoretical abstraction. I should pause and say that insisting on the plantation as a concrete institution was an effort to avoid a tendency to read it as a metaphor or metonym for racialized enclosure. At the same we turned to the plantation for its theoretical generativity, for the ways that it could offer new ways of conceiving property, sovereignty or labor.

    Perhaps the instability of this exercise or the limits of a “reading around” contributed to our falling back on to the figure of slave—a figure that perhaps due to its omnipresence in political theory makes the encounter between concretion and abstraction less like an encounter. (Though that too might generate its own dilemmas.) In our course this reversion back to the figure of the slave took a couple of forms. First many of our texts were drawn from the Anglophone Atlantic world of the late 17th to the early 19th century. Second, within this focus the plantation itself often dissolved as the object of analysis. Our most productive conversations centered on texts like Maria Stewart’s “A Lecture on African Rights and Liberty” and David Walker’s Appeal, article IV, John Jea’s The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea and James Williams’s A Narrative of Events and Robert Wedderburn’s Axe Laid to the Root. To varying degrees, but in all of these texts, the plantation itself is not the site of extended reflection or critique.

    Beyond the question of text selection, the way in which the plantation collapses into the slave raises two questions. The first is about the relationship historical and otherwise between the plantation and chattel slavery. On the one hand, the plantation lives on well after the abolition of chattel slavery. At the same time, there is perhaps ways in which its emergence with chattel slavery in the Americas structures the plantation in ways that we are constantly drawn to this historical instantiation. Second, I wonder about the conceptual incoherence or instability of the plantation itself. Does falling back to the slave index the theoretical slipperiness of the plantation?

    One place though where this displacement didn’t occur is our engagement with the New World Group. Our mutual interest in the work of figures like Lloyd Best, George Beckford, and Kari Polanyi Levitt prompted the course and our ongoing conversations. In their work you find a very explicit effort to theorize the plantation and you find often a recourse to Weberian ideal type theorization. (You see this earlier too in Edgar Thompson’s The Plantation.) I find the parsimonious conceptualization really attractive. It trains us to stay with the plantation itself, to think concretion and abstraction simultaneously. I take one of the central aims of their project to be building social and economic theory that can be generalizable from specific experiences and trajectories of the plantation economies of the Caribbean. This work comes out of a 1960 critique of the limits of development economics and so much of their work stays within the frame of economics. But as Best himself, notes at the end of his 1968 essay “Outlines of a Pure Plantation Economy,” theorizing plantation societies requires not only a reconsideration of the economics, but a “drastic lowering” of the disciplinary boundaries between sociology, economic history, political science, economics, anthropology. What do you make of the New World Group’s commitment to producing a theory of the plantation, to generating conceptual coherence? What do you find productive and limiting in their approach to the study of the plantation? What kinds of questions does the humanistic study of the plantation elevate or make available that might otherwise be occluded?

    Look forward to hearing your thoughts,

    Adom

    **

    Dear Adom,

    Please excuse my delayed reply. I want to pause on a phrasing you used to describe how we tried to read: We weren’t “reading for a theory of the plantation” so much as we were “reading around the plantation.” I think this is right on, and I guess my recourse to perhaps dead-end questions of canon or disciplinary formation owes to my excitement over and frustration with the necessity of reading-around. Reading-around might be something like an ecological hermeneutic, a way of thinking about what happens to political-theoretical or politico-economic concepts when they are environed within the uncited scene of the plantation. This doesn’t require assumptions about logical or chronological priority: e.g., the plantation provides the paradigm of sovereignty, the plantation developed the modern regime of property, and so on. The idea was rather more like: What happens to a particular conceptualization of X when planted in this soil? The work of this interpretive mode is, as you say, much different than reading through concepts for the plantation, or some component of the plantation world. Reading-for is, I think, fated to a methodology that is by turns hyper-historicist and allegorical. Hegel was reading this newspaper through these dates; “Lord and Bondsman” should thus be read as an abstracted encoding of the Haitian Revolution. Locke was writing chapter five of the second treatise in the summer of 1682, when he was also at work on the constitution of the Carolinas; his theory of property is thus always already a colonial theory of property. It’s not that I think such arguments are wrong, or that such endeavors are valueless. My issue is that this method or mode always risks reproducing a still-entrenched division of labor wherein (post)colonial worlds acquire epistemic value only upon mediation or filtration through the pen of a European Master Thinker—a situation of metropolitan value-addition that Lloyd Best called the “Muscovado Bias.” Reading-around creates space for thought to happen elsewhere, even if our thinking with or recomposition of this thinking is almost irreducibly speculative.

    There’s something else I want to emphasize and open up in your account of reading-around, and the way the mode wants to conjugate the concrete and the abstract. You want to “insist” on the plantation as a concrete institution,” and this insistence on the concrete entails a definitional insistence, too. “At its core,” you write, the plantation “is an institution for the large-scale production of agricultural commodities.” You make these two points—that the plantation is a concrete institution, and that its purposive priority is extensive agricultural commodity production—“to avoid a tendency to read it as a metaphor or metonym for racialized enclosure.” This stood out to me for a couple of reasons. Part of what you’re marking, I think, is a hiatus between politico-moral uses of history and the study of it. I’m thinking here, in part, of the lowkey debate between Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, with the former seeing the prisoner as metaphorically and materially continuous with the slave and the latter refusing that identification, for various compelling reasons. Gilmore refuses the identification because it risks obfuscating the local, quite recent developments that spurred mass incarceration; at the same time, she wants us to see the prison as the punitive institution of non-work, as a kind of warehousing of human surplus. To an extent, then, Gilmore’s strategy is to relinquish the moral and affective charge the comes through the metaphorical identification or metonymic re-placement of slave and prisoner, and she wants to do this so that we may better specify the institutional dynamics and meta-institutional logics that produce and reproduce the golden gulag. What’s at stake for you in holding onto the plantation in its concreteness, as an institution oriented toward mass commodity production undertaken by racialized and generally bonded laborers? What’s at stake for you in differentiating this institutional form from the other kinds of racialized enclosure for which it might serve as a metaphorical figure or metonymical antecedent?

    I’m asking this question to get at another that you raised. We wanted to read around the plantation, to stay within its concrete space, but we really wound up spending a lot of time theorizing (through) slavery. I’m not sure if this classroom recourse indexes anything about the conceptual coherence or stability of the plantation, to be honest. Most people in a US seminar room will have a repertoire of images, ideas, and thoughts about slavery, whatever the adequacy of this repertoire to histories of slavery. The representational repertoire around the plantation is much smaller, and likely to be tethered to slavery anyhow. Shifting from classroom expedients to just knowing things, though, I don’t think that the plantation is a slippery analytic object, provided that one doesn’t take it as an object susceptible to simple indicative predications. It becomes slippery, I think, the moment one wants to say something like, “The plantation is a unit of enterprise that produces primary agricultural goods for a foreign market with coerced labor and low levels of technical investment.” I think confusion becomes inevitable at that point; the is is too static. The world system moves, and the plantation moves with it—at least, that’s what I read Tomich as arguing. And, yeah, in this regard, the New World Group is indispensable. As you put it in your forthcoming essay on the New World Group and Walter Rodney, the NWG group worked with two methodological aims in mind: specification (of the Caribbean plantation economy) and comparativity (to non-Euro-American, Third World sites and histories). Like you, I tend to find the ideal-type constructions limiting, but I get it: the desire is to stabilize the outlines of an analytic object in time. When we did Best’s “Outline of a Pure Plantation Model,” I think all of us in the room tacitly maintained a compact that we would not even try with the symbolic logic stuff. But, you know, at the end of the essay Best self-mockingly—but for me productively—restates his text’s method of presentation: “The foregoing statement has been cast roughly and with some inconsistency and repetition, in histoire raisonnée, in an accounting formulation and then in slightly more formal economics.” That is, he more or less serializes three forms of representation in order to specify the shifting constraints, imperatives, and dynamics that compose the plantation (and a broader plantation economy) through time. I think what we get here is an image of the plantation as an institution that’s continuously transforming, whether from immanent or world-systemic pressures, and rarely in directions of its own choosing. The representational schema might seem abstracted (at least, to me), but they illuminate moments in the concrete life of the plantation, how it grows with (concrescere) and decomposes within the world-system due to various forces it can’t control.

    One of the things that I love about their mode of theorizing is the extent to which the NWG displaces the decades-old scholarly problem regarding the capitalist character of the plantation. In Best’s hands, I think, one sees that the plantation economy is installed within a broader capitalist world-system but is unable to operate within that world-system as other firms or regional economic blocs might. So, I think the ideal-typical thrust of their modeling allows us to see the law-like regularities that shaped the dynamics of an institution central to the life of capitalism in the “hinterlands” of the world-system–which is to say that it allows us to see the plantation as structurally subordinated to the global law of value but structurally precluded from adapting to it as either imperial/national economies or individual firms in the core might, would, or could. For me, this clears a great deal of epistemic space, and allows us to think about how capitalism’s mode of appearance shifts in the plantation world without altering the capitalist character of the plantation. For instance, as I argue in Empire of Neglect, the fantasy of the chivalrous, hospitable, paternalistic planter was not in any way antithetical to capitalism; the supplementary presence of the planter was required to offset the conditions of incalculability (per Hall) that made a mess of any attempt to generate a rational accountancy of the plantation. Planter paternalism (an ideology that wasn’t nearly as developed in the British West Indies as it would be in the US) is a thin moral corollary to a far more robustly articulated planter hyper-empiricism, which was itself just the epistemological transcription of a managerial and accountancy problematic: for a variety of reasons, planters couldn’t rationally plan, couldn’t systematize things, and so someone had to be there to embody flexible authority and responsiveness. Pulling back, the NWG offers humanists a structural but dynamic account of the weird, dual character that plantations inhabit in the works of planters, pro-slavery ideologues, and abolitionists alike. I think of it as the planter’s two bodies: unfailingly sovereign, irreducibly precarious.

    Let me end by going back to the conclusion of Best’s essay. Like you, I love his insistence that the plantation requires an interdisciplinary approach. Part of his writ for this claim is that the plantation scrambles scales: “the distinction between macro and micro dissolves. The firm incorporates into its behaviour the properties of the general institutional framework and the resource situation, etc.; and the relations of the typical firm with the outside world describe the market form. Thus, for the Caribbean, at any rate, the theory of the firm, the theory of international economy and the theory of growth and development seem to require a single cogent statement. Related to this, the barriers between sociology, political science, economic history, anthropology and economics, as such, need a drastic lowering.”

    This strikes me as a singularly important insight. Tethered to it is his demand that academic economics be rethought on the pedagogical level; economic history and the history of economic thought, he insists, needs to acquire a greater prominence in postcolonial economics classrooms. So, there are two things at work here. First, Best wants–or plantation economy requires–a genuinely political economy. Second, the capacity to articulate this theory requires a refamiliarization with economic history and, as he will continue, with the history of economic thought. Within our institution, I don’t think either of us has the fantasy that the econ department is going to really turn to history any time soon. But we both work with economic history and the history of economic thought. How are you thinking about and with the plantation in the new research you are conducting? How does it draw upon or depart from the NWG’s aspiration toward a cohering account of The Plantation?

    looking forward!

    Chris

    **

    Hi Chris,

    Thanks for pushing on the discussion of concretion, especially through the debate between Davis and Gilmore. Partly at stake for me too is holding open a space between, as you put it, the “politico-moral uses of history and the study of it,” especially in the context of the classroom. Many of our students came to the class with an interest and investment in the ways the plantation can be thought as an antecedent or metonym for racialized enclosure more broadly and the contemporary carceral state, in particular. I don’t think this is necessarily wrong and I certainly identity with the political project it seeks to ground, but two things worry me about the move. First, when viewed primarily as the ur-form of racialized enclosure, the kinds of politically and theoretically generative tensions that Best and others open are harder to make visible and take up. Against their effort to stay (analytically) with the plantation, to specify the object in time, the metaphoric invocation of the plantation tends to draw us to the task of mapping various forms of exit from the plantation. In staying with the plantation, we can better track the simultaneous sovereignty and precarity the total institution of the plantation engenders or the combination of its being embedded in a global economy, while relying on demonetized subsistence farming, which open up ways to read the plantation beyond enclosure. The thing I have learned most from your work, especially your article, “The Plantation Road to Socialism,” is that attending to the competing and conflictual dimensions of the plantation illuminates modes of black futurity that exceed the idioms of escape and exit. I will come back to this. Second, I worry that when framed as an antecedent or metaphor for the carceral, its contemporaneity and co-presence disappear. A couple of months before we started teaching the class, In these Times reported on labor struggles in Honduran plantations where workers demanded union rights and compliance with domestic and international labor standards.[2] The worry here is that the plantation’s persistence as a site of a particular regime of labor process is occluded when the carceral is posited as its current iteration or instantiation. I think this also grounds my questions around the relationship between the plantation and chattel slavery as least as taken up in our class. Our mutual interests and orientations gravitated the course toward the Anglo-Atlantic world and we were clear we didn’t want to do an area studies inflected approach where the ‘global’ of our title would mean tracking as many geographic and historical iterations of the plantation as possible. Still, I wonder how we might have better captured or incorporated the durability of the plantation and its labor processes.

    Embedded in the Davis and Gilmore debate, as I read it, is not only a distinction between the study of history from its moral-political invocation but also a question about what forms of narration and what choices of historical rendering might best serve their shared political project of abolition. I take Gilmore to be pointing not just to the disanalogies between slave and prisoner, but also arguing that however morally powerful such an analogy might be, it comes at the expense of distorting the specific political and economic conundrums that attend the carceral state (especially the problem of institutional “non-work”). In other words, the concern here is that the analogy constrains our political imaginaries by obscuring what the moral and political problem of the carceral is. This is just to say I am not wedded to a strict separation between moral-political use and the study of history as such. I think ultimately such a strict separation is not really possible so the question then is how to think about the relationship between the two. I think what opening space between them offers is an occasion to consider more systematically and explicitly the imaginative and strategic choices involved in the emplotment of history and its mobilization.

    This leads me in a roundabout way to the New World Group. Largely situated within development economics and writing at a moment when the developmental postcolonial state is already in crisis, their intervention is in part an effort to disrupt a set of analogies that grounded the developmental model. Whether in the anti-communist, Cold War rendering of W.W. Rostow’s Theories of Economic Growth or in Arthur Lewis’s more considered “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” the developmental model located the postcolonial world as an antecedent to the North Atlantic, on the path to replicating a universal model of development. What the NWG offers in this context is a specification of the emergence of plantation economies that undoes this historical modeling. This to be sure is a project they share with the interventions of dependency and world systems theorists. But through an exploration of the plantation, they show us how one specific vector of unequal integration in the world system generates divergent trajectories from the North Atlantic as well as for plantation societies across the Third World. Key to this move, as you note, is that they point us toward a view of “the plantation as structurally subordinated to the global law of value but structurally precluded from adapting to it as either imperial/national economies or individual firms in the core might, would, or could.”

    I am drawn to the NWG for their commitment to building social and political theory from the postcolonial world. Their journal, New World Quarterly, which was published between 1963 and 1972, exemplifies this commitment. Though concerned primarily with the Caribbean, it featured articles from across the Americas and Africa. In its pages, they strove to simultaneously take up the shared predicaments of decolonization and they did so in the model of interdisciplinarity that Best recommends at the end of his essay.

    Working within political theory, the idea of political theory from the postcolonial world is still a much-needed intervention. The discipline tends to take its categories of analysis as universal and imagines the global preponderance of its terms (sovereignty, for example) and institutions (the state) are proof of that universality. But this misses the imperial process that produced an uneven and differentiated integration into the world system, the ways for instance that the historical development of the postcolonial state disrupts our assumptions about the relationship between domestic and international. When imperial entanglements are more squarely examined as they have been over the last two decades, the field still takes it primary referent or addressee to be European political thought. You have already pointed to the limits of approaches that tend toward the historicist or allegorical. But even where Caribbean thought is brought to bear, for instance in the invocation of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery or C.L.R James’s Black Jacobins in the new histories of capitalism, the central question remains explicating the colonial origins of British/European industrialization and modernity.

    To some extent, my first book, Worldmaking after Empire, exemplifies the pitfalls of this strategy. It employs anticolonial thought and a recasting of the history of decolonization to primarily engage contemporary normative theorists of international order. There were a variety of theoretical, political and professional reasons that led me to this set of choices, but as I now contend with the ways the book has been taken up, I wonder about the costs of such an approach. Namely, I think that what got lost was an effort to grapple with the legacies and afterlives of decolonization for the postcolonial world itself. I encountered the New World Group as I was finishing the book and what they modeled for me was an effort to conceptualize on their own terms the processes that have given rise to the political predicaments of the postcolonial world. Just as Best writes he has “taken the view that economic theory in the underdeveloped region at any rate, can profit by relaxing its unwitting pre-occupation with the special case of the North Atlantic countries,” I wonder what political-theoretic question might be opened for me if I were to forgo my unwitting preoccupation with speaking back to the field of political theory.

    I think of the NWG as part of a broader project of mid-twentieth century Third World social science, which includes institutions like the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, based in Dakar. In each of these contexts, social theorists grappled with the limits of inherited categories and sought to develop a theoretical vocabulary adequate to the distinctive trajectories of the postcolonial world. The neoliberal counterrevolution that marked the collapse of radical social and political projects in the Third World would also have devastating consequences for these emerging efforts to outline a new social and political theory. This cartography of mid-century Third World social science—its nodes of convergence, networks of circulation, and theoretical insights—has yet to be mapped. Ultimately, I think recovering these intellectual genealogies allows us to reimagine what a global political theory requires. Rather than a debate about the expansion of canon to include non-Western thinkers or to locate the global/imperial within the history of political thought (both important debates in their own right), the example of the NWG orients us toward the aim of theorizing the specific histories and trajectories of non-Western politics.

    As I turn to a new project, I am interested in following the NWG’s lead on this question of specifying the processes, institutions and ideology by which the unequal integration of the postcolonial world in a global economy was effected. In Worldmaking, I argued that we should understand empire as less a question of alien rule than a structure of unequal integration that produces a racialized form of international hierarchy. Yet, I squarely focused on sovereignty as the primary site on which the structure of unequal integration is enacted. I want to turn in future work to the terrain of political economy and especially to the labor question. Picking up an under-explored thread, an anticolonial argument that labor conditions in African colonies amounted to an extension of slavery, I want to return to the nineteenth century to excavate the emergence of the colonial labor regimes that would be the object of this anticolonial critique. Specifically, I want to think with the chronological overlap between emancipation in the Americas and imperial expansion in Africa in order to examine the distinctive form of empire that emancipation engendered. I start with the justification of British imperial expansion in Africa as an anti-slavery and humanitarian project. Rather than focus on the false or flawed universalism of this justification, I am interested in thinking through its effects—a position you also take in Empire of Neglect. At this early stage, I think this will involve tracing how ideologies and strategies from the transition to free labor in the Americas were appropriated and taken up for the project of fashioning African colonial subjects as productive laborers. One vector of this transmission was the transposition of the plantation in new colonial contexts. Writing about colonial Tanzania, Rodney writes, “plantation production of sisal, rubber and cotton constituted the earliest and most important of the colonial economic activities of German East Africa.” The post-emancipation global life of the plantation, as reconstructed in an essay by Kris Manjapra, is, I think, a key component to understanding the political economy of unequal integration. But, this project will also require attending to contexts where plantations did not take root. For instance, unlike in German (and later British) East Africa, the colonial state and private corporations were never able to establish plantations in British west African colonies like the Gold Coast where peasant production of cocoa remained dominant. Still even here, the NWG models a way of examining peripheral economies as sites that are subsumed in the global economy while also containing competing and alternative trajectories.

    If I am focused on the structures of conscription to a global economy that the plantation engenders, I read you as trying to work out how the plantation’s uneven relationship to the world system also makes it a fruitful terrain to trace radical and subaltern alternatives to capitalism. You have developed this line of argument in the “The Plantation Road to Socialism” and in “The Refusal of Work.” How did you come to see political possibility in the plantation? What’s at stake for you in recovering these possibilities? And how do you think about something like the plantation road to socialism in relation to the renewed attention to visions of black freedom centered on flight and marronage?

    Adom

    **

    Hi Adom,

    I so want that mid-century cartography of Third World social science to be mapped, and then the map to be disseminated. You know, I was trying to quickly recall what George Beckford’s BA was in, only to quickly encounter the fact that he doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. (A different set of Beckfords with a much different set of ties to Jamaica, however, do.) Epistemic loss—or maybe episticide, really—is such a weirdly compounding phenomenon.

    My interest in thinking about the political possibilities of the plantation comes from two problematics, I think. As I noted previously, I am drawn to the NWG for the ways that their work displaces or suspends the historico-theoretical desire to specify the genetic relationship between capitalism and slavery. This is a personal shorthand for the fact that I am increasingly frustrated with the scholarship grouped under the brand of “the new history of capitalism.” My frustration owes in part to the very claim to novelty, which Peter Hudson has blisteringly addressed. But I’ve come to realize that the real source of my frustration is that I have a hard time figuring out the political aim or uptake of this work. These genetic accounts of capitalism are, in so many ways, reproducing the various kinds of transition debates that have flared up throughout the global intellectual history of Marxism and that are, really, coextensive with the development of Marxism. These debates, as scholastically Marxological as they might have been, were almost always oriented toward practical political questions that various Marxist and socialist and communist parties confronted in determining paths forward, coalitions to build across sectors and classes, strategies for national or regional linking or delinking, and so on. It is hard for me to emplot the new histories of capitalism within a similar field of political contention or ambition. Of course, that owes in part to the absence of anything like a robust, power-wielding commie left in the US, and it’s symptomatic that the sole political demand that can come out of this work is that of state-backed reparations. I am entirely for reparations, but I don’t think such a measure is in any way dependent upon tethering capitalism’s origins to slavery. In a kind of flat, silly way, my desire to think the plantation and its once-possible socialist futures is a desire to recall the actual political stakes of previous transition debates: to identify capitalism’s trajectories in order to develop strategies for dismantling it. Capitalism might be a narrative endpoint in left historiography, but it should never be the epistemological or political terminus of the story one tells.

    The second source of my interest in thinking through the political possibilities of the plantation comes from my weird reading of a long line of anthropologists, economic historians, and theorists who take up the topos of enslaved people’s provision grounds or plots. Sylvia Wynter’s “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” has always been one of my favorite essays, and, for Wynter, the figures of plot and plantation mark an agon between use value and exchange value, between relatively autonomous labor and racial-capitalist domination. Wynter describes the plot as fostering a use value-centered “folk culture,” one that “became a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system.” I think that’s probably the standard way of thinking about the function of the plot: it’s a space of fugitive independence, of self-direction. What I find interesting, though, is that, for Wynter, this agon between plot and plantation cannot assemble itself into a perfect opposition. Describing plot and plantation as “two poles which originate in a single historical process,” Wynter inscribes the enslaved or the emancipated agricultural prole in a space of ambivalence: “Since he worked on the plantation and was in fact the Labour, land and capital, he was ambivalent between the two.” Ken Post (another woefully under-appreciated thinker) makes a similar point. For Post, the slave plantation “in fact articulated two complementary (but antagonistic) modes of production,” planter-directed cash-crop production and enslaved-directed provision production. In the wake of emancipation, and on the basis of the provision ground system, “a free peasantry came into existence before any fully-articulated capitalist social formation had replaced that of slavery,” “a non-capitalist element within a capitalist articulation.”

    I find all of this brilliant; and it’s on the basis of this brilliance that I think the plantation should be rethought. The plot, as Wynter and Post both suggest, cannot simply be opposed to the plantation because 1) it was posited by the plantation as the latter’s means of demonetizing subsistence and because 2) it provided the material scaffolding of the plantation. This is to say, then, that the plantation, as an ordinary part of its functioning, as a necessary part of its reproduction, immanently generated “a non-capitalist element.” We don’t normally think of the plantation in these terms—especially when the critical emphasis of the new history of capitalism is on North Atlantic capital formation and accumulation through the plantation. Meanwhile, the currency of keywords like “marronage” and “fugivitity” tend to presume that black political thought begins with the negation of the plantation, in a spatial and cognitive elsewhere. And that is absolutely a fair presumption. But I found myself drawn to a question: Is there a tradition of black political thought that strives to expand and generalize the non-capitalist elements immanently generated within the plantation system? Is there a tradition of black communist or anarchist thought that refuses the sequence of plantation slave to peasant producer to agrarian proletariat to some communist society to come, one that wants to leap from the plantation to the commune?

    In a certain sense, then, I’m wondering if it is possible to think the plantation, or the plantation/plot assemblage, in ways similar to that of the late Marx on the Russian peasant commune or Mariategui on the Incan allyu—as a material and social form that contains immanent potentials, different than those of a world subsumed into liberal property relations, for communization. Robert Wedderburn is the punchiest pre-emancipation thinker on this, I think: he imagines emancipation as the scaling up of the provision plot, but also as the abolition of private property, the wage-form, and, in general, the mediation of access to goods through labor time. Wedderburn was a Spencean socialist (even as he radicalizes Spence), but I think one can also glean the existence of a plantation imaginary in post-emancipation subalterns as well. In my “Plantation Road to Socialism” piece, for instance, I look back at the petition from the peasants of St Ann’s Parish in Jamaica, the one that prompted the disastrous “Queen’s Advice” missive that in turn helped catalyze the Morant Bay Rebellion. I first returned to the petition after many years, as I was considering opening Empire of Neglect with what I remembered as the petition’s staging of empire loyalism. The loyalism is absolutely there, but the substance of the petition kind of shocked me: What the petitioners more or less requested was land and capital to form a plantation, one that would be collectively labored upon and collectively run. So, I’ve found myself becoming more and more interested in black collectivization movements in the post-emancipation world, trying to think about how this tendency toward collectivization sublated and sought to repurpose elements of the plantation order. Katherine’s Franke’s Repair is quite solid on this, and she lets us think about the post-emancipation order as heavily marked by the state’s active interdiction of black movements toward collectivizing land holding—which might be to say, the state’s active interdiction of the black counter-plantation.

    Part of what’s at stake for me here is my desire to build a genealogy of black refusals of the equation of freedom with “free labor,” waged labor, market-mediated exchange, and even smallholding. I’m hardly the first to do this, and I won’t be the last, but I think recalling that possessive individualism was not the sole horizon of enslaved and freed people’s expectations of freedom is a good thing to do regularly. Moreover, I’m interested in building a genealogy of black refusals of possessive individualism in a way that is neither voluntarist nor mystical but is rather articulated to a different political-economic ordering, or at least a vision of a different political-economic ordering. Part of this vision, I’m suggesting, drew upon and repurposed elements of the plantation. This is most visible in the kinds of collectivization efforts I discussed above, but it also percolates through various strata of post-emancipation history. Consider, for instance, the kinds of plantation nostalgia that get articulated with what seems like a strange frequency in the WPA slave narratives. A lot of this nostalgia is tethered to the plantation’s recollected satisfaction of subsistence needs and desires. It doesn’t really matter to me if any given plantation in fact provided the alimentary satisfactions that, say, Henry Barnes of Alabama recalls when he wistfully declares, “Sometimes I wishes dat I could be back to de ol’ place, ‘coze us did hab plenty to eat[.]” Rather, what I see here is the figure of the plantation being invested as an alternative moral and distributive order—one that strongly and starkly contrast to the New Deal state’s exclusion of agricultural laborers from its redistributive remit.

    My new work on the plantation is weird in part because I’m holding onto the term and thinking about the institution’s imbrication in freedom imaginaries in the Americas–even as, per Tomich, and really almost anyone, the coercion of labor is the “lowest common denominator of all plantation labor.” Your new work is shifting, conceptually, from concerns of sovereignty and state autonomy to labor and coercion, which, for me, puts the conceptual problem of freedom on the table. What happens to the freedom concept as colonial agents attempt to world African colonial space through post-emancipation American institutions? Is freedom a meaningful concept for you here? At the same time, I’m wondering where your thinking is on the plantation, unequal integration, and racial formation. How does thinking about the plantation’s transnational diffusion as a mechanism of colonial governance shift our understanding of the processes of racialization–regionally, nationally, globally?

    **

    Hi there,

    This is really great. The idea that the plantation “immanently generated ‘a non-capitalist element’” helps me think beyond earlier debates about the capitalist or non-capitalist character of the plantation (Laclau, Mandle, etc) and the recent return to the concept of primitive accumulation in which some of those earlier debates are restaged. Stuart Hall, partly responding to Laclau and others, argues for reading colonial and postcolonial context as “an articulation between two modes of production structured in some relation of dominance.” I find articulation a helpful way to think about the co-constitution and co-dependence of capitalist social relations and non-capitalist social forms but this formulation still suggests an exteriority usefully overcome in your reading of Post and Wynter where the non-capitalist element is not only internal to the plantation but also generated by it. I think this view can only really hold in the New World and the Caribbean in particular which Lloyd Best characterizes as a pure-plantation model. This might not hold in South Asian and African societies where the plantation did not fully displace existing social relations but was parasitic on them. This potential difference indicates what could productive about a genealogy of Third World social science. Beyond overcoming episticide, it can offer conceptual resources to trace the multiple trajectories of an institution like the plantation across the global south.

    One of my aspirations in turning to the plantation’s global diffusion and working through labor instead of sovereignty is to rethink the history of race and racialization. As you know I have been teaching Equiano regularly for the last couple of years and I am always struck by the moment he first names blackness. It occurs when he encounters the Atlantic Ocean for the first time and is brought on to a slave ship. Equiano describes being “filled with astonishment” at the sight of the sea and the ship. Reversing the tropes of colonial discourse, he worries that “those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair” might be cannibals. And he comes to understand himself as part of the “multitude of black people of every description chained together.” Hazel Carby offers a great reading of this scene as complex account of racialization and racial consciousness in a 2009 essay “Becoming Racialized Subjects.”

    But influenced by Jemima Pierre’s work, I wonder about the ways in which this scene and its various iterations in black letters sutures race and blackness in particular to the site of the ship and the moment of diaspora. Not in an effort to displace this moment, but rather to expand the sites of racial formation, I want to think about the ways the plantation functions as a race-making institution. I want to follow Equiano back to the African continent to the brief moment where he imagines the colonization scheme in Sierra Leone and the deployment of “free” African labor on plantations as a possible alternative to new world slavery.

    In thinking this question through the collusion of emancipation and imperial expansion, I am deeply influenced by the work of Thomas Holt, Saidiya Hartman, Andrew Zimmerman and others who have, in different ways, examined the remaking of race and racialized coercion after the end of slavery. As Hartman puts it in Scenes of Subjection, black labor is produced through modes of coercion that “exceeded the coercion immanent in capital labor relations.” For imperial administrators and international civil servants between the late 19th and mid-twentieth centuries, the deployment of extra-economic coercion was both justified as necessary in the tropics and rhetorically distanced from chattel slavery. I am interested in the ways that race emerges from the structures of coercion and also serves to stabilize them. I also want to return to the what where anticolonial critics like W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore and others tried to name this specificity of black labor by returning to and rewriting the history of slavery. I am struck by chapter 1 of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction—the Black Worker where he grasps to name what made black labor a distinctive form. Asking “What did it mean to be a slave?” he finds “its analogues today in the yellow, brown, and black laborer in China and India, in Africa, in the forests of the Amazon…” He makes this connection even more explicit in Darkwater where he writes, “Today instead of removing laborers from Africa to distant slavery, industry built on a new slavery approaches Africa to deprive the natives of their land, to force them to toil, and to reap all the profit for the white world.” The “Negro Worker” of Padmore’s journal would in this come to name discrepant and raced categories of labor that could not full assimilated to the figure of proletariat.

    Though I am not sure exactly where it will lead, I want to think through how one might plot different visions of freedom from the subject position of the Negro Worker. I hope to pursue the question with three guiding orientations in mind. First, having left the terrain of formal international politics and state sovereignty, I hope to be more attuned to freedom projects that are articulated on “a lower frequency” that might not take the form of organized and institutional politics, that while ephemeral and fleeting offer conceptual resources for reimagining freedom. If in Worldmaking, I charted how critique of colonial labor as slavery grounded project of postcolonial statehood, this project opens up space to consider the alternative trajectories of such a critique and to offer a critical vantage point on the ways the postcolonial states deployed and reinforced the coercive logics it inherited. Second, I want to attend more closely to the erasures and lapses that made available the category of Negro Worker. I want to attend more closely to the underlying assumption about politics and economic transformation that underwrite the projects of Du Bois and Padmore. This too informed by Hartman who illustrates that the heroic vision in Du Bois’s general strike obscures black women’s sexual and reproductive labors. Finally, after rereading Andrew Sartori’s Liberalism in Empire in our class, I want to try and hold at bay my own desires to find certain kinds of resistance among my subjects, to be open to the multiple ways colonized people secured something akin to freedom even if compromised and limited.

    I hope this gives you a sense of the questions and framing I am thinking with even if the substance of the project has yet to be fill. Ultimately, I would like this examination of colonial labor and its legacies to inform the on-going debates about the contemporary transformation of work. By provincializing the proletariat as the primary or dominant figure of labor, it attunes us less to the decline and crisis of the wage laborer than to the prior problem of dispossession and thereby makes it possible to chart the multiple ways that that dispossession is lived.

    That’s all from me for now. Look forward to picking up the threads here in person soon.

    Adom

    Adom Getachew is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.

    Chris Taylor is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, and the author of Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism. Taylor is currently working on a book project entitled: The Voluntary Slave: Atlantic Modernity’s Impossible Subject.”

    [1] The study of empire now forms a rich subfield of political theory. Early texts in this field include Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

    [2] See: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/21743/honduras_farmworkers_plantations_fruit_fyffes_labor_irish_fair_trade

  • Christian Thorne — Immanuel Kant’s Manifesto for Dad Rock (Review of Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism)

    Christian Thorne — Immanuel Kant’s Manifesto for Dad Rock (Review of Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism)

    This article is part of a forthcoming special issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, dedicated to Nicholas Brown’s book, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism, edited by Mathias Nilges.

    By Christian Thorne

    Review of Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke, 2019)

    If there is one point that should be reasonably clear to anyone who has read “The Culture Industry” (1947/2002), it is that Adorno and Horkheimer do not reject popular culture. That essay, it’s true, gives us reasons to question any number of things that we typically hold dear: free time (for being unfree time, nearly as programmed as the work from which it nominally releases us) (104), laughter (for being the consolation prize you get for not having a life worth living) (112), style (for funneling all social and historical content into a pre-arranged matrix or inflexible scheme of aesthetic quirks and twitches; for holding out the promise of artistic individualism—the personal signature in literature or music—and then transposing this into its opposite, the iterative, unresponsive art-machine) (100ff). Most of us remember “The Culture Industry” as anti-pop’s cahier de doléance, its encyclopedia of anathema, the night in which all bêtes sont noires. But alongside the essay’s admittedly austere bill of grievances, it is easy enough to compile a second list, an inventory of things that Adorno and Horkheimer say they like and suggest we might admire: Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers (109), Greta Garbo (106), the circus (114), old cartoons, Felix the Cat (maybe), Gertie the Dinosaur (perhaps), Betty Boop (for sure, because they name her) (106). Just to be clear: “The Culture Industry,” Exhibit A in any case against critical theory’s Left elitism, is also the essay in which Adorno attacks Mozart while praising “stunt films,” which we might more idiomatically translate as “Jackie Chan.” One can thus cite authentically Adornian precedence for an attitude that distrusts classical music and celebrates kung fu movies, and this will be hard to believe only if you prefer a critical theory shorn of its dialectics, stripped of the contradictory judgments that thought renders upon contradictory material—only, that is, if you prefer the Adorno of joke Twitter feeds and scowling author photos: bald, moon-faced, a Central European frown emoji inexplicably mad at his own piano. One suspects that readers have generally refused to take seriously the essay’s central category. For the culture industry is neither an epithet nor a gratuitously Marxist synonym for popular culture, but rather a different concept, distorted every time we paraphrase it in that other, more comfortable idiom, as a calumny upon pop culture or pop. There is plenty of evidence, in the essay itself, that Adorno and Horkheimer were drawing distinctions between forms of popular culture, and not just pitting the Glenn Miller Orchestra against Alban Berg.

    Such, then, is one way of taking the measure of Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy (2019). This is one of those books that you might have thought no-one could write anymore: four chapters that mean to restate the old, left-wing case for art, unapologetically named as such, as the artwork—and not as text or culture or cultural production—the idea being that art represents the survival of independent human activity under conditions hostile to such a thing. No longer homogenized under those master terms, art can again take as its rival entertainment, a word whose German equivalent derives from the verb unterhalten, which even English speakers can tell means “to hold under,” as though movies and TV shows existed to keep us down, as though R&B were a ducking or a swirlie. That the English word borrows the same roots from the French only confirms the point: entre + tenir, to keep amidst or hold in position. Entertain used to mean “to hire, as a servant.”

    Autonomy is also the book in which a next-generation American Marxist out-Mandarins Adorno, who, after all, begins his essay by insisting that the cultural conservatives are wrong. There has been no decline of standards, no cultural anarchy let loose by the weakening of the churches and the vanishing of the old, agrarian societies, hence no permissive culture in which anything goes. Just the contrary: Magazines and radio and Hollywood form a system with its own rigidly enforced standards, a highly regulated domain in which almost nothing goes. Adorno’s way of saying this is that there is no “cultural chaos.” But Nicholas Brown prefers the chaos thesis, endorsing the position that Adorno has preemptively rejected as both reactionary and implausible: “The culture industry,” Brown writes, couching in Frankfurtese his not-at-all Adornian point, is “the confusion in which everything worth saving is lost” (135).

    Similarly, readers are usually surprised to find Adorno writing in defense of “mindlessness.” His hunch is that Kantian aesthetics might find its niche among the lowest art forms and not, as we more commonly expect, among the most elevated. Sometimes I encounter an object and find it beautiful, and in that moment of wonderment, my attitude towards the object is adjusted. I stop trying to discern what the thing is for or how to use it. Where a moment ago, I was still scanning its instruction manual, I am now glad for the thing just so. Perhaps I am even moved to disenroll the beautiful thing from the inventory of useful objects, or find myself doting on it even having ascertained that it’s not good for much. But then sometimes this purposiveness without a purpose is going to strike me not as beautiful, but as stupid, and Adorno’s point is that the stupid can do the work of the beautiful, that the beaux arts are If anything outmatched by the imbecile kind. The activities that we do for their own sake, for the idiot joy of our own capacities, are the ones that our pragmatic selves are likely to dismiss as dopey: someone you know can pay two recorders at once with her nose; a guy you once met could burp louder than a riding mower; you’ve heard about people who can vomit at will and recreationally. Kantian Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck enters the vernacular every time we mutter “That was pointless.” It is in this spirit that Adorno sticks up for “entertainment free of all restraint,” “pure entertainment,” “stubbornly purposeless expertise,” and “mindless artistry.” His claim, in fact, is that the culture industry is hostile to such “meaninglessness,” that Hollywood is “making meaninglessness disappear” (114). It might be enough here to recall the difficulties that the major studios have in making comedies that are funny all the way through, preferring as they do to recruit their clowns from improv clubs and sketch shows, to promote them to the rank of movie star, and then to impound them in the regularities of the well-made plot, complete with third-act twists and character arcs, gracelessly telegraphed in the film’s final twenty-five minutes, to make up for all the time squandered on jokes, and tending to position the buffo’s comic persona as a pathology to be cured, scripting a return to normalcy whose hallmark is a neutralized mirthlessness. Hollywood’s comic plots model the supersession of comedy and not its vindication.

    But Nicholas Brown is not on the side of meaninglessness. “In commercial culture,” he writes, “there are no works to critique and no meanings to be found”—and he does not mean this as praise (10). In Autonomy, there is no liberating nonsense, but only the English professor’s compulsion to discern meaning, his impatience with any art for which one could not readily devise an essay prompt. Whatever independence the book’s title is offering us, it is not the freedom to stop making sense. It feels bracing, in fact, to read a book so willing to discard the institutionalized anti-elitism of cultural studies and 200-level seminars offering to “introduce” 20-year-olds to horror movies. When Brown rolls his eyes over Avatar because of some dumb thing its director once said in an interview, or when he calls off a wholly promising reading of True Detective by announcing that it is “nothing more than an entertainment,” we need to see him as turning his back on the aging pseudo-Gramscians of the contemporary academy, all those populists without a movement, the media-studies scholars who imagine themselves as part of a Cultural Front that no-one else can see, a two-term alliance consisting entirely of Beyoncé fans and themselves; the shopping-mall Maoists of the 1990s who couldn’t tell the difference between aller au peuple and aller au cinema (71). Adorno, of course, was concerned that the desires and tastes of ordinary audiences could be manipulated or even in some sense produced. “The Culture Industry” prompts in its readers the still Kantian project to figure out which of the many pleasures they experience are authentically their own. Which are the pleasures that will survive your reflection upon them, and which are the ones that you might reject for having made you more object-like, for having come to you as mere stimulation or conditioning? The autonomy that Adorno is trying to imagine is therefore ours, in opposition to a mass media that muscles in to tell us what we want before we have had a chance to consider what else there is to want or how a person might want differently, to work out not just different objects of desire, but different modes of desiring and of seeking satisfaction. Brown, by contrast, complains repeatedly that artists more than ever have to make things that people like. The autonomy that he is after is thus not our autonomy from an insinuating system but the artist’s autonomy from us. It is no longer surprising for a tenured literature professor to disclose, in writing, that he’s been listening to early Bruno Mars records. The unusual bit comes when Brown says he doesn’t think they’re any good (24).

    *

    Rather than summarize Brown’s findings, it might be more instructive to think of his book as having been constructed, modularly, out of four blocks:

    1) A Marxist problem: The problem that drives Brown’s thinking arrives as a question: What is the condition of art in the era of the universal market? The very concept of art promises that there exists a special class of objects, objects that we intuitively set apart, that are exempt from our ordinary calculi, that indeed activate one of the mind’s more recondite and less Newtonian faculties. But it is the premise of the universal market that there exist no such objects. Art might thus seem to be one of the things that a cyclically expanding capitalism has had to eliminate, as rival and incompatibility, like late medieval guilds or Yugoslavia. And yet art plainly still exists. I swear I saw some last Sunday. What, then, is the status of art when it can no longer dwell, nor even pretend to dwell, outside of the market, when its claim to distinction can no longer plausibly be voiced, when we’ve all come to suspect that the work of art is just another luxury good? One way of thinking about Autonomy, then, is to read it as refurbishing the theory of postmodernism, thirty-five years after Jameson first put that theory in place.

    2) A Kantian solution: Maybe “refurbish” is the wrong word, though. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Brown means to call off the theory of postmodernism, to soothe readers steeped in Jameson by explaining how art survives even once, in the latter’s words, “aesthetic production … has become integrated into commodity production generally” (1991: 4). Autonomy amounts to a set of reassurances that aesthetic autonomy remains possible even within the market; that artworks can come to us with ISBN numbers and still elude the constraints of the commodity form. Brown’s book amounts to a list of the techniques available to contemporary artists for performing this feat. This is an argument that can be broadcast in different frequencies. Most often, it arrives in Kantian form, to the effect that there still exist non-instrumental objects, objects that, in some sense yet to be defined, display an anomalous relationship to purpose or use. At the same time, the argument can be modulated to carry a certain Marxist content. It was Marx’s claim, after all, that capitalism was bound to produce its own enemies, that bosses and investors were fated to produce a class of persons who would simultaneously serve and oppose them. One way of engineering the splice between Marxism and Kantian aesthetics is just to swap in the word objects where the last sentence had “persons.” Marx held that labor power was the commodity that did not behave like all the others. –Perhaps art is a second such. –And maybe work is the word that holds the two together. If we grant this point, postmodernism might reveal itself to have been a false problem all along. For which faithful Marxist ever thought we had to look outside of market society for solutions? Not Jameson, at any rate, whose mantra in the 1980s was that there was no advantage in opposing postmodernism, that the task for an emancipatory aesthetics was to pick its way through postmodernism and out the other side. Nicholas Brown, meanwhile, is more interested in what came before postmodernism than in what might come after it. In literary-historical terms, his argument is best understood as vouching for the survival of modernism within its successor form. Indeed, Brown is such a partisan of early twentieth-century art that he writes a chapter on The Wire, hailed by all and sundry as the great reinvention of Victorian social realism for the twenty-first century, and calls it “Modernism on TV” (152). The theorist’s attachment to the old modern is easiest to sense whenever the book’s readings reach their anti-utilitarian and aestheticist apotheoses. Brown thinks he can explain why, when presented with two versions of the same photograph, we should prefer the one with the class conflict left out (58-9). He also praises one white, Bush-era guitar band for negating the politics implicit in its blues rock, for achieving a pop formalism so pristine that it successfully brackets the question of race (145).

    3) A high-middlebrow canon:  That the band in question is The White Stripes lights up the next important feature of Autonomy, which is that it has assembled a canon of high-middlebrow art from the last forty years: Caetano Veloso, Jeff Wall, Alejandro Iñarritu, Ben Lerner, David Simon, Jennifer Egan, Richard Linklater, Cindy Sherman. That Brown shares the last-named with Jameson’s postmodernism book is a reminder that this set of objects could be variously named. The mind swoops in to say that the high-middlebrow is nothing but postmodernism itself (EL Doctorow, Andy Warhol, Blade Runner)—that the book’s dexterity is therefore to redescribe as neo-modernist what we had previously known only as pomo—but then pauses. If we follow the classic account, then one of the foremost characteristics of postmodern art—the first box to tick if you’re in a museum carrying the checklist—is  the collapsing of high and low, or what Jameson often identifies as elite art’s unwonted interest in its downmarket rival, its willingness to mimic trash, pulp, schlock, or kitsch. But it’s never been obvious that the latter really and truly triggered the former—that the mere quoting of popular media was enough to abolish the class-boundedness of art or even to weaken our habituated sense that cultural goods sort out into a hierarchy of distinction. If I am sitting in a concert hall listening to a string quartet, then this setting alone will be enough to frame the music as high even when the composer briefly assigns the cello the bassline from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” One wishes to say, then, that the middlebrow—and not the citational—is the mode of art in which the distinction between high and low most fully collapses, which should make of Midcult the form of a perfected postmodernism, except that the doubling of the concept will now raise some puzzles of its own. For didn’t the middlebrow precede the postmodern? Wasn’t there middlebrow art before there was postmodern art? And if yes, then why wasn’t such art postmodern when it combined high and low in 1940? Were high and low commingling differently in 1980 than they had in The Old Man and the Sea? And doesn’t middlebrow art have its own, more or less direct way of reaching the median, its own styles and forms, without having to assemble itself afresh every time from pieces borrowed from high and low? So perhaps we would need after all to distinguish the middlebrow from the splicing-of-pop-and-art, for which we would continue to reserve the word postmodernism. At this point, watching those terms grow unwieldy, one casts about for new ones, and looking back over Brown’s list of autonomous artists, discerns the outlines of what until recently we were calling indie culture or alternative: small-label rock albums and small-studio features, supplemented by New Yorker fiction and the more accessible reaches of gallery art. If you are persuaded by Autonomy, you’re going to say that it is a thoughtful Gen X’ers riposte to Jameson, thirty-five years his senior, a careful explanation of why he has never experienced the art of his generation as all that broken. If you are unpersuaded by the book, you’re going to say that it is Immanuel Kant’s manifesto for dad rock.

    4) The methods of the literature seminar: At this point, it becomes important to identify the first of two ways that Brown has modified the Kantian arguments that he makes often and by name. The third Critique is at pains to explain that you are doing something unusual every time you call something beautiful. First of all, you are judging without interest; when you experience something as beautiful, you stop caring what it is for, or what it can do for you, or what it is worth. And if you are judging without interest, then it follows directly that your judgment should hold universally, since all other people equally capable of bracketing their interests should judge as you do. And yet the universality in question will be a fractured one even so. When I call this painting beautiful, I demand that everyone agree with me while knowing in practice that not everyone will. My claim is thus universalizing but not genuinely universal. Beauty is the occasion for what Kant (1790/1987) innocuously names our “subjective universality”—our failed and spectral commonality, which is, of course, the fate of all universalisms thus far, unusual here only because raised to consciousness (see especially section 8).

    Brown follows this argument closely, but has nothing at all to say about beauty, which is the term one might have thought a Kantian aesthetics could not forego. His revision goes like this: I know I am in the presence of art not when I experience an object as beautiful, but when I know it to be meaningful, and I discern its meanings even having admitted that I can never know what it was that the artist meant. Deliberating about art, Brown says, has to involve the “public ascription of intention,” and it’s worth taking the time to extract the Kantian structure of this claim (13). Intention is merely ascribed, something that I have to posit. But this ascription is necessarily public; I posit meaning while expecting others to co-posit it alongside me. Meaning is subjective but not private and in this sense the successor to Kant’s beauty. Brown’s niftiest trick is thus to get meaning to do the work of the beautiful, and we can accordingly read Autonomy both as the making-hermeneutic of the philosophy of art and as the making-aesthetic of meaning, hence as philosophical aesthetics’ revenge upon semiotics for having once taught us to talk about art in de-aestheticized ways.

    “The public ascription of meaning” is also Brown’s big proposal for authenticating an object as real art even when it comes to as us as commodity. It’s his bite test and dropper of nitric acid. Can I generate public meanings around x (Alison Bechdel, Gus Van Sant, Yeah Yeah Yeahs)? In practice, this is bound to mean: Can I teach a class on x (St. Vincent, Wes Anderson, Cormac McCarthy)? Will it work in seminar? We know something to be art, Brown says, when it “solicits close interpretative attention,” and Autonomy is most convincing when modeling such attention (22). Brown is a first-rate exegete, and his book tosses off one illuminating reading after another, repeatedly vindicating the program of an older criticism: why Boyhood isn’t really a coming-of-age movie; why the second season of The Wire is Greek rather than Shakespearean tragedy (and why that distinction matters); the particular way in which bossa nova bridges the divide between popular and art musics (and what this has to do with developmentalist politics in the global South). Readers might nonetheless be disappointed to learn that postmodern art’s paths to autonomy are the ones they already knew about. The book’s point, in fact, seems to be that the old paths still work, that new ones aren’t needed. Brown likes art when it displays a degree of self-consciousness about its own procedures and historical situation, and especially when an artwork includes a version of itself which it then subjects to critique. Simple self-referentiality is his most basic requirement: that art not reproduce without comment the inherited imperatives of its genre or medium, always glossed as market imperatives. He sticks up for “framing” and “citation” because of the meta-questions that these provoke; some guitars don’t just play rock songs, but get you to reflect on the condition of rock songs. All three of the novels he recommends are thus Künstlerromane, or at least readable as such, but these are only the clearest instance of Autonomy’s fundamentally didactic preference for literature when it interrupts our naïve attitude to fiction and instead makes us think afresh about same. The White Stripes are congratulated for having turned “fun” into an “inquiry” (149).

    This position is no more perspicuous than it has ever been. A person might finish Autonomy still wondering how it is that irony in this accustomed mode is able to “suspend the logic of the commodity” (34). The question is difficult: When irony comes to us in the form of the commodity, can we be sure that the commodity always loses? What keeps the self-ironizing commodity from functioning as commodified irony? In order to be convinced of Brown’s position, do I have to believe first that irony is the one uncommodifiable thing? Or that a work that confesses its dependence on the market has thereby neutralized that dependence? In Autonomy, autonomy sometimes withers back to my ability to name my subordination. Brown, moreover, is altogether inured to one version of clientage, which is the continued dependence of art upon the critic, who, after all, is the only one who can ratify it as art, via that public ascription of meaning. Artists forward works to the marketplace without knowing whether they will even count as art, generating instead a kind of proto-art, obliged to wait for the critics who produce the aftermarket meanings that classify some works as not-just-commodities. If you are an artist, then  autonomy apparently means marking time until somebody else certifies that you have successfully described your heteronomy.

    *

    A Marxist quandary, a Kantian path out—that’s Autonomy. If I say now that the path out is poorly blazed, and maybe even a trick, then you needn’t be disappointed, because it will also turn out that the quandary wasn’t one and that it didn’t need solving. You needn’t worry, I mean, that Brown’s account of art is unconvincing, and indeed disheartening, because the situation to which this art putatively responds is a non-problem. I’ll explain each in turn:

    The non-problem: “The work of art is not like a commodity,” Brown writes. “It is one” (34). That sentence is admirably hard-headed—but is it also correct? Are music and film and such available to us only as commodities? Do we never encounter art without having bought it first? It will be enough to consult your own experience to see that you are, in fact, surrounded by non-commodified art. Works of art are the only items that governments still routinely take out of the marketplace, amassing large collections of books, movies, and symphonies that citizens can access for free. Public libraries make of the arts the only remaining occasion for the otherwise atrophied traditions of municipal socialism. But when we start surveying our contemporary reserves of non-commodified art, we are talking about rather more than some picturesque Fabian survival. There was a period around the year 2000 when the new technologies more or less destroyed the market for recorded music. Even neoliberals concede that markets are not natural or spontaneous—that they have to be created and politically sustained. For the market in recorded music to have survived the rise of digital media, the governments of the capitalist states would have had to intervene massively to counter the wave of illegal downloading—the Moment of the MP3—when in fact they were largely content to let that market stop functioning. Brown is telling a story about the ever-intensifying logic of commodification, even though he has lived through the near decommodification of an entire art form, its remaking as a free good. If we are no longer talking much about media piracy, then this is only because filesharing has since been nudged back into a drastically redesigned marketplace, in the form of streaming and subscription services, which are the Aufhebung of the commodity form and its opposite: the non-market of free goods, available for a fee: Napster + the reassurance that you won’t get sued. But then is the Spotify playlist a commodity? It might be, though it seems wrong to say that I have bought such a thing, and we still lack a proper account of the new political economy of culture and its retailoring of the commodity form: Art in the Age of the Platform and the Deep Catalog. There is, of course, one position on the Left that has become totally contemptuous of the new technologies and especially of social media. The claim here is that we are gullibly creating free content for the new monopolies; we are writers and filmmakers and photographers—and we upload our work: our labor! our creativity!—and the companies make money (via advertising and the hawking of our data), and we don’t get a cut.[1] We are thus all in the position of the ‘90s-era pop star who has seen her royalties tank; against every expectation, Shania Twain has become the representative figure of our universal exploitation. This argument is worth hearing out, but it remains important even so to recall the situation that gives rise to this misgiving in the first place, which is that the creative Internet involves much more than people Instagramming their dinners. It produces Twitter essays, Ivy League professors anatomizing authoritarianism, lots of short movies, 15-second TikTok masterpieces, and song—everywhere song. To the anti-corporate line that calls me a chump for posting a video of myself playing Weezer’s “Hash Pipe” on the ukulele, the necessary Marxist rejoinder is that an arts communism is already in view—or at least that we have all the evidence we will ever need that people given the opportunity will gather without pay to fashion a culture together. Our snowballing insights into surveillance capitalism co-exist with the unforeclosed possibility that social media is the opening to socialist media. But then one wonders how new any of this is—wonders, indeed, whether the culture industry was ever tethered to the commodity form, since network television and pop radio in their canonical, postwar incarnations were already free goods, generating one of the great unremarked contradictions of twentieth-century arts commentary. Already in 1980, the art forms that a Left criticism excoriated under names like “corporate rock” and “consumer culture” were the ones that you could readily watch or hear without buying them. Before the advent of the full-scale Internet, it was alternative culture that existed only as a commodity, like that Sonic Youth CD I was once desperate to buy because I knew I was never going to hear it during morning drive time. (Only as a commodity? Almost only? Surely a friend might have hooked me up with a dub. Was I nowhere near a college radio station?) Indie used to be our name for music more-than-ordinarily dependent on the market, for art that one encountered mostly as commodity.

    That’s one way of understanding why Autonomy is trying, in vain, to solve a non-problem: The commodification of art is by no means complete. The relation of music, image, and story to the commodity form remains inconsistent and contradictory. But there’s a second way of getting at this point, and it goes back to the book’s fundamental misunderstanding of Marx and the commodity form. Brown’s promise, again, is that even in an era when we can no longer posit a distinction between the commodity and the non-commodity, we can still learn the subtler business of telling the mere commodity from the commodity-plus. Contemporary art might be a commodity, but it isn’t just a commodity. But in Marx, there is no such thing as the mere commodity. The very first point that Marx makes in Capital Volume 1 (1867/1992) is that commodities have a dual character; it is, in fact, this dualness that makes them commodities: Objects “are only commodities because they have a dual nature” (138)—they are simultaneously objects of use and objects of exchange, themselves as well as their fungible selves. Brown seems to hold that this condition is the special accomplishment of the neo-modernist artwork—its ability to escape commodification by being twofold. But that simply is the structure of the commodity. A Thomas McCarthy novel has no advantages in this regard over a tube sock or a travel mug, and Brown can only believe that it does by arguing repeatedly, contra Marx, that it is usefulness, and not doubleness, that makes something a commodity: “An experience is immediately a use value, and therefore in a society such as ours immediately entails the logic of the commodity…” (49). “Since the display value of a picture is a use value, there is nothing in the picture as an object that separates it from its being as a commodity” (68). This error is baffling, since twenty minutes spent reading Capital would have been enough to correct it, but it is also the predictable outcome of trying to get Marx and Kant to speak in the same voice. Marx’s argument has two steps: 1) It is exchange that makes something a commodity, and not use; useful objects obviously predated market society and will outlive it. 2) But then equally, use is not negated by exchange; the exchangeability of the object coexists with its usability, even though these require contradictory standpoints. It is thus impossible to understand why Brown thinks that art would stop functioning as art just because it’s for sale. Brown’s way of claiming this is to say that “the structure of the commodity excludes the attribute of interpretability” (22). If a movie comes to me as a commodity, I shouldn’t be able to interpret it, and if I am against all expectation able to discern meaning in it, I can congratulate it for having slipped free of its commodity shackles. But why would that be the case? A commodified rice cooker doesn’t stop functioning as a rice cooker. Commodified soap doesn’t stop cleaning your face. Why would artworks alone lose their particular qualities when commodified, such that we would wish to solemnize those putatively rare examples that achieve the doubleness that is in fact the commodity’s universal form?

    The fake solution: Brown’s argument gets itself into trouble by superimposing Kant on top of Marx, and yet its Kantianism is itself a mess. I should explain first why this matters. A critical theorist spots on the new arrivals shelf a book called Autonomy and can’t know at a glance what it is about, since its title exists in two registers at once. She might expect to find a book about the autonomy of art—a book, in other words, that belongs in the tradition of Gautier, Pater, Greenberg, and Rancière. But she might equally expect a book about the autonomy of workers, a book about autonomia, about the ability of workers to direct their own activity and set their own political goals without the superintendence of political parties and big trade unions. Anyone who notices that the book’s author is carrying a Duke-Literature PhD has got to expect this second autonomy, an Englishing of Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua; one might well be grateful for such a thing, since American Marxists still require the help of the Italians to make militant the cozily Jeffersonian program of “participatory democracy.” That Nicholas Brown holds no brief for the Italian Marxists is thus one of the book’s bigger surprises; if anything, the baldness of the book’s title seems designed to wrest the word autonomy away from the autonomists and to deliver it back to the aestheticism that historically predated Tronti and Virno. But the matter is more complicated than that. A certain workerism continues to inform Brown’s writing even so, if only because he so often makes about artworks arguments that we are used to hearing about proletarians. His biggest claim is that the artwork is wholly inserted into capitalism while also opposing it. “Art as such does not preexist capitalism and will not survive it; instead, art presents an unemphatic alterity to capitalism; art is not the before or after of capitalism but the deliberate suspension of its logic, its determinate other” (88-9). Or again: “The artwork is not an archaic holdover but the internal, unemphatic other to capitalist society (9). No Marxist should be surprised by this figure, though one might well marvel that it has taken the aesthetes so long to come round to it. It was the modernists, in this respect like the Third Worldists, who thought that the struggle against capitalism would have to come from some uncontaminated outside, from people who had wrenched free of the market or managed to avoid entering it in the first place. Brown’s project is to correct this bit of modernist doctrine by borrowing from Marxism its most basic dialectical motif, and in the process to get artworks to play the role formerly assigned to the working class. Brown’s artwork accordingly rumbles with otherwise diminished proletarian energies, and this has contradictory effects, for it is unclear in this scenario whether autonomous art comes to us as the ally of working people or as their rival. Brown is nowhere closer to a conventional Marxism than in his discussion of The Wire, where he offers some cogent remarks on the disappearance of the American working class, on casualization, the vanishing of jobs hitherto thought immune to mechanization, and the persistence of the category worker, as quasi-ethnic identity, even after work has disappeared. In this context, he has earmarked one line from the second season: “Modern robotics do much of the work” (qtd 174). But this last is a historical development that Brown’s argument emulates in the process of opposing, as his book palpably assigns to objects a set of historical tasks that were once thought proper for workers. Autonomy is accordingly stalked by automation, with the position of the working class—its superseded position? its only ever putative position?—now filled by quality television and smart novels. Robots do the work of capitalism; art does the work of “suspending” capitalism and is to that extent a second robot, the robot of negation: the nay-robot.

    At the same time, however, the artwork will continue to serve as the anticipatory figure for a free and self-determining humanity. If I can’t figure out how to be autonomous, I can delegate art to be autonomous in my stead. This is the not-so-secret use of those special objects to which we do not assign uses. The autonomy that we ascribe to the artwork will therefore say a lot about the independence that we wish for ourselves, and it is for this reason that the book’s explanation of Kant’s aesthetics matters, since it is from his third Critique—and not from his moral philosophy, nor from his overtly political essays—that we are expected to extract this political criterion and aim.

    The problem, then, is that Brown parses Kant’s theory of aesthetic autonomy in at least three different and incompatible ways.

    1) Sometimes, though not often, Brown cites Kant’s most distinctive formulation. Some objects strike me as manifestly designed—organized, patterned, not random—even though I can’t tell what they are for or, indeed, whether they are for anything at all. This Autonomy knows to call “purposiveness without purpose,” design without function (12, 179). Anyone aspiring to this condition is aiming for a kind of idleness, or at least an un-work, a kind of busy leisure. If lack of purpose is how we recognize autonomy, then we will ourselves only gain independence once we have resolved never to achieve anything—to swear off goals and undertakings and weekend to-do lists.

    2) But then Brown also praises some detective fiction for its ability to produce cognitive maps—for its “making connections” across “multiple milieux and classes,” and at that point one notices that he isn’t hostile to purpose after all (70). He has violated the Kantian stricture by assigning a purpose to Raymond Chandler and endorsing that purpose as worthy. The Big Sleep doesn’t just hum with needless pattern; it provides us with a service for which we might feel grateful (and for which we might pay Random House). What stands out at this point is that Brown has proposed a formulation of his own, which he prefers to “purposiveness without purpose”—namely, “immanent purposiveness,” a refusal, that is, of imposed or extrinsic ends (13). Sometimes he refers in this regard to “the self-legislating work”: “A work’s assertion of autonomy is the claim that its form is self-legislating. Nothing more” (182). For any Kantian, of course, autonomy is precisely something more—a rejection of all ends, and not just of “external” ones (31)—though the phrase “self-legislating” has a Kantian ring of its own, and we might soon conclude that Brown is silently correcting the third Critique by smuggling in a key concept from the second, in order to re-introduce purpose into a landscape forbiddingly devoid of it. He is putting the self-legislating subjects of Kantian moral philosophy in the place of the aimless objects of Kantian aesthetics.

    3) But when is an end “immanent” to a work of art? And when is it “external”? Are we confident that we know the difference between inside and out? Early in Autonomy, Brown lists among his goals a defense of the category of “intention” (10-11): We won’t even be able to regard artworks as intelligible if we treat them as non-intentional—if, that is, we stop conceiving of them as somebody’s attempt to say something. This claim is plainly incompatible with a rigorous Kantianism, since whatever intention I ascribe to the artwork will be a purpose, and Kant’s whole point is that artworks have no such purposes. But Brown’s retrieval of intention is no less damaging to the loose Kantianism he prefers. He instructs us to think of autonomy as “self-legislating,” but he also wants us to consider the intentions that activate a work of art, and the latter generates all sorts of ambiguity around the former, simply by introducing the problems of authors and artists. Where before we had one term, the artwork, now we have two, the artwork and its intender, and now we have to wonder which of them gets to be self-legislating. If we allow the artist to give herself the law, then the artwork will presumably be secondary, the vehicle and working-out of the poet’s self-chosen code, the telegram of her intention. Sometimes, however, Brown sidelines the artist and lets the movies choose their own ends: It is the job of the viewer, he writes, “to figure out what [the artwork] is trying to do” (31). And from this second perspective, one is compelled to distrust the artist’s intention as an externality—just another imposed demand: The artwork, if it is to be autonomous, should get to do what it wants, where this desire is usually understood as an inherited formal project, requiring that all new artists solve hitherto unsolved formal problems or that they re-do old aesthetic experiments in radicalized form. But in this second scenario, the autonomy of the artwork plainly comes at the expense of my autonomy. The artwork that I had hoped would secure my independence instead ends up bossing me around. It was Adorno (1970/1997: 36-37) who observed that modernism, which we typically describe to undergraduates as an emancipated anti-traditionalism, a discarding of the old conventions, an experimental drive to make art otherwise, actually amounted to a “canon of prohibitions”: an ever-expanding list of Things You Could Not Do: paint figurally, compose with triads, end your novel with a marriage.[2]

    But then do artworks really get to choose their own ends or give themselves the law? Brown sometimes writes as though they did, but mostly confesses that they don’t, preferring the following, thrice-repeated hedge:

    • “The novel presents itself as simply following a logic that is already present in the material, as though the novel were not written by an author” (99).
    • In the domain of art, all legitimate politics must “appear to emerge as if unbidden from the material on which these artists work” (38).
    • For an artist, one important skill is “the capacity to produce the conviction that what we are seeing belongs to the logic of the material rather than to some external, contingent compulsion” (59).

    This last sentence makes Brown’s point with special force: The artwork cannot, in fact, achieve autonomy; its glory is not to negate command, but merely to mask it, to produce in us a belief that the artwork was self-generating even when it wasn’t. Autonomy begins by recommending to us art as the undiminished paradigm of self-determination and free activity, and ends up enrolling it in that list of calculated things we misapprehend as spontaneous—consumer choice, electoral democracy, Spinozist consciousness—and this it does without ever admitting how dolefully it has dickered down its offer: We search art for the possibility of our freedom and walk away persuaded only that some things expertly disguise their subservience. They step forward “as though” unbidden. Autonomy … as if.

     

    Christian Thorne is a professor of English at Williams College.

    References

    Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. 1970/1997. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Brown, Nicholas. 2019. Autonomy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. 1790/ 1987. Translated by Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

     

    [1] See for instance the writings of Cracker’s Davd Lowery, collected at The Trichordist, a collective of “artists for an ethical and sustainable Internet.” thetrichordist.com, last accessed November 12, 2019.

  • Martin Woessner — The Pedagogy of Rage: Teaching Working Students During a Pandemic

    Martin Woessner — The Pedagogy of Rage: Teaching Working Students During a Pandemic

    This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff. 

    by Martin Woessner

    It was Tuesday, March 24th, not two weeks into the transition to “distance learning,” and I was moderating a discussion of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children on Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, a web-based videoconferencing technology I had been blissfully ignorant of just weeks prior. Between awkward silences and recurrent screen-freezes—Brechtian reminders of just how surreal a space the virtual classroom really is—I kept remembering a line somewhere in act four or five. “I’m right and you know it,” Mother Courage tells a young soldier, “your fury’s just a lightning bolt that splits the air, bright, noisy, then BANG!—all over. It was short-lived anger, when what you needed was long-burning rage, but where would you get something like that?”[1]

    Mother Courage and Her Children is a play about a camp follower in the Thirty Year’s War. The term “camp follower” is a euphemism: it describes civilians—usually women—who trail behind armies providing things without which no war could ever be waged: food, drink, supplies, and services—some essential, some less so. War has always been a gendered economy and Mother Courage personifies it. Feeding soldiers allows her to feed her own children. “War!” she exclaims at one point, “A great way to make a living!”[2]

    Most readers see Mother Courage as a heartless capitalist, a war profiteer. But some of my students, with whom I was now interacting solely online, found her far more sympathetic: tragic, but relatable, a victim of circumstance more than a villain. Indeed, many of my students believed Mother Courage had no choice: they saw her as yet another marginalized woman doing what she had to do to take care of her family and survive.

    “MC is a strong figure,” Elvia wrote on the class blog. “She becomes a businesswoman due to necessity. She must support her children, and this is the way that she found to make money.”  Sandy said something similar: “She is a single mother protecting and providing for her children.”  At the very least, another student wrote, Mother Courage was “a complex character.”  “When you live amongst catastrophe,” she argued, “I imagine that you become desensitized to it all.”

    Reading such perceptive comments, I realized Mother Courage was what we now call an “essential worker.”  In the same way that soldiers are thoughtlessly sacrificed by greedy generals, our selfish, me-first society sacrifices the essential worker to a market economy that simultaneously relies upon and demeans her. The first to be deemed essential and applauded, the last to be supported or even protected. I had a painful epiphany that day: my students could relate to the plight of Mother Courage because they knew it all too well. They were living it. The realization hit me in a lightning-bolt-that-splits-the-air kind of way.

    Essential workers are women. Mostly, they are women of color.[3]  And women of color make up the majority of my students. I teach at The City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education, an interdisciplinary division dedicated to educating working adults. My students work in hospitals and medical offices, in public agencies and social services, in grocery stores and bodegas. They work in public transportation, in community centers, and in shelters. They have continued working these past few months so the rest of us could retreat into our socially distanced bubbles. Like Mother Courage—who got her name because she once drove her food-laden cart straight through “cannon fire” to reach her customers—their work entails serving others while risking their own personal safety. Necessity puts them in this position. “I didn’t see that I had a choice,” says Mother Courage.[4]

    On the theme of necessity, Brecht is merciless, more so than Marx, more so than Hegel, who famously likened history to a “slaughter-bench.”  “Necessity trumps the commandments,” is the message of Mother Courage.[5]  The Threepenny Opera, the play that made Brecht famous, is even blunter: “first comes food, then comes morals.”  For Brecht, material inequality determines everything. Looking at the way the pandemic has affected marginalized communities more than affluent ones, it is hard not to think he is right. New York City may be the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, but the boroughs and neighborhoods where the “essential workers” live—where my students live—are the epicenter of the epicenter. They are the neighborhoods of necessity.

    When I first started teaching at CWE, a working student was somebody slightly older, usually somebody whose first foray into higher education had been delayed for financial reasons or family obligations. Increasingly, our students are younger. One effect of rising rates of national inequality is that just about every student attending a public institution of higher learning is now a working student.[6]  To be a full-time student these days is an uncommon luxury, one my students do not enjoy. The responsibilities they juggle are tremendous. Many are the first in their families to pursue a college degree. Many are first-generation immigrants. Most of them hold down jobs while also caring for others: children, spouses and partners, parents, even grandparents. They do the work that keeps extended families together.

    I have always tried to imagine my classroom as a space of freedom, someplace where daily responsibilities can be put on hold for a little while my students and I think about ideas they may not have encountered before. Ideas from long ago or even far away. There are times, though, when current events just cannot be kept out of the classroom. Like the semester I taught a course called “Capitalism and Anti-capitalism” while the Occupy Movement took over Zuccotti Park just two blocks north of where we were discussing Adam Smith. Or that time in 2016 when, in the middle of a lecture about how totalitarian rhetoric demonized outsiders, one of my students told me that Donald Trump (demonizer of Mexicans, Muslims, and the “mainstream media”) was pulling ahead of Hillary Clinton in the exit polls. My Mother Courage moment, as I have started to think of it, is another example of how the present occasionally grabs hold of the past and refuses to let go.

    The pandemic upended my pedagogy. I found myself looking at everything through the lens of Covid-19. Each week, I scrambled to make the past into a tool that might pick the lock of the locked-down present. I failed, but I took heart in the idea that it could be done. After all, Brecht did it. He often used history to confront the injustices of his day. Mother Courage decries the devastation of the Second World War, but it documents the plight of a woman in the seventeenth century. Similarly, Life of Galileo contemplates the moral responsibilities of scientists in the age of atomic bomb, but it is set during the Scientific Revolution. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a satire of National Socialist racketeering, is temporally closer to its true subject, but is geographically displaced to the gangster underworld of Chicago.[7]

    This blurring of the lines between the historical and the contemporary, the far-off and the close-at-hand, is a powerfully generative artistic trick. But I worry, as a teacher, that it can produce a sense of defeatism, a feeling that nothing ever improves, that the gangsters always win in the end. Times of crisis compress the chronological continuum, pressing everything into a presentist purgatory, where everything seems the same as it ever was. They leave one feeling trapped.

    We historians take it as our duty to explain the phenomenon of change over time. But what happens when nothing changes: when the same problems, the same tragedies, the same injustices, persist? What happens when the terrible past becomes, again and again, the terrifying present? When fascism goes from being the subject of history books to the stuff of the nightly news?

    I had assigned Tony Kushner’s translation of Mother Courage. Kushner is, most famously, the author of Angels in America, which bears witness to another viral pandemic, namely the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Kushner’s version of Mother Courage premiered in New York in 2006, at the height of the violence of the Iraq War, with Meryl Streep in the lead. I encouraged my students to watch John W. Walter’s documentary about the production, Theater of War, which highlights the connections between Brecht’s play and the American wars in the Middle East. I also encouraged them to watch the Frontline documentary For Sama, directed by Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, which offers a harrowing account the more recent siege of Aleppo, Syria.

    All this frantic searching for contemporary points of reference was unnecessary, though. My students got Mother Courage and Her Children just fine. Every essential worker today understands the bind Mother Courage is in. They know what it is like to sacrifice one’s health and safety because there is no other choice. They know what it is like to be stuck between choices that are not really choices. Get sick or starve. Get sick or get evicted.

    “Necessity trumps the commandments.”  Mother Courage did what she had to do to survive: no wonder my students recognized this before I did. Like her, they are working—still working—in the middle of a catastrophe. Like her, they are providing for their families. Like her, they are running straight through the cannon fire. Those who would fault Mother Courage for making a buck off of an endless war, those who would deem her actions dubious at best, immoral at worst, are those who have the luxury of judging from afar, from the comfort of their work-from-home jobs, which ensure a steady stream of paychecks and all the packages you desire, delivered right to your door. But who does the delivering? Who does the shipping? Who does the sorting and selecting and packaging?

    My students have been unwittingly conscripted into a form of service that is potentially lethal. But they are unlike like Mother Courage in one incredibly significant way. They are not callous, dismissive, or cruel. They are not selfish. Just the opposite: my students brim with warmth and generosity. They exude positivity and solidarity, even when I test their patience with onerous texts about how awful the world was and continues to be. This even though some of them have been exposed to the virus, even though some of them have gotten sick, even though many of them have lost family members, friends, or co-workers. I keep asking myself: “How is it possible to bear such enormous physical, psychological, and emotional strain?”

    Why do my students have to be “on the front lines”? The militaristic metaphors are everywhere these days and I hate them, even and especially as I continue to use them. Anders Engberg-Pedersen is right: “the American mind needs to be demilitarized.”[8]  I am sick of being told, by a supposedly wartime president, that we must fight a silent enemy; that we are in the midst of a struggle unlike anything the nation has seen since the Second World War. All of this is nonsense. Cynthia Enloe called out such lazy rhetoric in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books.[9]  Since my students had read one of her essays earlier in the term—an essay about camp followers, in fact—I posted a link to the piece.[10]  I think I was trying to prove, despite everything, the ongoing relevance of our class. But honestly, I think I was also trying to justify the paycheck I was still receiving while working, non-essentially, from home. I was trying to justify my privilege.

    Let’s face it: in the face of a global pandemic, humanities professors are not much help. My colleagues working in the medical and social sciences are surely better equipped than I to lend a hand. But eventually, the humanities can still play role, if only belatedly, retroactively, imperfectly, as we always seem to do. This essay is a case in point. I have written it as an attempt to transform my own lightning bolt of fury concerning the dangers my students are weathering into something like a long-burning rage, the kind of rage that might actually make a difference. It is an idea I would not have considered had it not been for how my students taught me to read Brecht.

    Brecht composed Mother Courage and Her Children in exile. It was performed once during the war, in Switzerland, but it was the 1949 production of the play in war-torn Berlin that made its reputation. I have been thinking about that production, and what it must have meant for the people of that city. Whenever the people of New York City can begin to rebuild this fractured, unequal metropolis, which Covid-19 has both ravaged and revealed to us, they will need art like Mother Courage to challenge them, unnerve them, and enrage them. They will need a play—if I may be so professorial and didactic—to mobilize them. They will need a story about the injustice of a society that simultaneously relies upon and demeans “the common people who do the sweaty work.”[11]

    Who out there is writing the new Mother Courage and Her Children? I hope it is one of my students. I cannot wait to see it, to read it, to think about it. Better yet, I cannot wait to teach it, in a classroom, face to face. With students.

     

    For comments and feedback, I thank George Cotkin, Eduardo Mendieta, Serene Hayes, Arne De Boever, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Roy Scranton, Robert Valgenti, and Andrew Hartman. Most of all, I thank my students.

     

    Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History & Society at The City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education (CUNY).  He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge UP, 2011).

     

    [1] Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Tony Kushner (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), 54.

    [2] Ibid., 69.

    [3] Campbell Robertson and Robert Gebeloff, “How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers in America,” New York Times, 18 April 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/coronavirus-women-essential-workers.html?referringSource=articleShare

    [4] Mother Courage and Her Children, 9.

    [5] Ibid., 23.

    [6] See, for example, Madeline St. Amour, “Working College Students,” Inside Higher Ed, November 18, 2019: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/18/most-college-students-work-and-thats-both-good-and-bad.

    [7] For more on the contemporary relevance of Arturo Ui, see Martin Jay’s recent essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Trump, Scorsese, and the Frankfurt School’s Theory of Racket Society,” April 5, 2020: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-scorsese-and-the-frankfurt-schools-theory-of-racket-society/.

    [8] Anders Engberg-Pedersen, “Covid-19 and War as Metaphor,” b2o, April 22, 2020: https://www.boundary2.org/2020/04/anders-engberg-pedersen-covid-19-and-war-as-metaphor/?

    [9] https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/quarantine-files-thinkers-self-isolation/#_ftn4.

    [10] Cynthia Enloe, “The Laundress, the Soldier, and the State,” Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 35-48.

    [11] Mother Courage and Her Children, 62.

  • Adrian Parr — Pandemic Urbanism

    Adrian Parr — Pandemic Urbanism

    This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff. 

    by Adrian Parr

    On December 31, 2019 an unknown case of the flu that had infected a group of people in Wuhan, China was first reported to the World Health Organization. The source was traced back to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Seven days later the Chinese identified the virus as a novel form of coronavirus, the same kind of virus that triggered Sars and Mers. On January 11, 2020 the first person died from Covid-19 in China. The first cases of Covid-19 in both South Korea and the United States were both confirmed on January 20, 2020. By the end of that month the entire city of Wuhan was placed under quarantine. On January 30, 2020 the World Health Organization announced Covid-19 to be a global health emergency; by 11 March it had moved to the status of a global pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020). Unlike an epidemic, which refers to a disease impacting a community or region, a pandemic is a disease that has spread across several countries and continents. Scientists now believe the virus was transmitted to humans from bats through an intermediary species, perhaps pangolins. As of April 15, 2020 there were 2,034,887 confirmed cases of the virus in the world, with 129,960 deaths spread out over 210 countries and territories (Worldometer, 2020).

    The rapid spread of the coronavirus throughout the world has dramatically changed the use of public and private spaces, as well as the way everyday life is understood and practiced. With the spread of Covid-19 urban space is being produced through a variety of contradictory forces working in tandem. The city is both a weapon to be wielded in the “war” on Covid-19 and the casualty of viral ubiquity; it is the real and imaginary threat urbanity presents; and it has splintered into a multiplicity of socially contained spaces that simultaneously depend upon widespread social cooperation to come into effect. This essay will articulate a concept of pandemic urbanism in an effort to study the production of urban space under Covid-19. How, under pandemic urbanism are people inhabiting spaces, navigating other bodies, and adapting to the restrictions being placed on the movement of people? How in turn does the rise of pandemic urbanism expose imbalances of power and reinforce asymmetrical urban spatial systems?

    Pandemic urbanism transforms the everyday physical proximity of people into an existential threat. There exists both the very real threat of contamination, as well as an imagined threat of an invisible enemy pervading all social life and public space. Physical distancing enforces very real separation barriers and imposes invisible barriers of containment. When combined, these real and imagined threats intensify covert inequities and racisms. In what follows I begin by describing the spatial and temporal production of zoonoses conditioning pandemic urbanism. I then examine the urban response to the current pandemic, highlighting the biopolitical production of space. I conclude by presenting the paradox of pandemic urbanism: it poses both a threat to and an opportunity for the realization of inclusive and equitable urban futures. Arriving at either outcome all depends on how pandemic urbanism is put to work.

    Zoonotic Territories

    Zoonosis refers to the movement of diseases, or infections, from non-human vertebrate animals to humans. Approximately 60% of emerging infectious diseases from 1940 to 2004 came from animals, with the majority of zoonoses deriving from wildlife (Jones, Patel, Levy et al., 2008). There are several reasons why infectious diseases transfer from animals to humans, but regardless of the specific epidemiological conditions, all cases involve spatial proximity. Whether we are speaking of humans living in close quarters to domestic or agricultural animals such as dogs or pigs, or more recently the growing trade and consumption of wild animals as wilderness zones decline, all amplify the epidemiologic conditions for the rate of animal borne infectious diseases in humans to increase.

    There is nothing new about zoonoses impacting human health. The bubonic plague that struck Europe and Western Asia back in the early 1300s, killing approximately 50 million people, was originally transmitted to humans from rats, fleas, and ticks. The uniqueness of the current pandemic situation is that zoonoses are increasing. This situation is directly connected to human land use patterns. Human population growth and urbanization, resource extraction, the demand for more agricultural land, and infrastructure developments such as the building of roads and dams, have resulted in greater human access into, and activity in remote natural landscapes. From 1990 to 2015 over 129 million hectares of the world’s forests were lost leading to greater soil degradation, drought, flooding, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the disappearance of natural habitats (World Bank, 2016: 32).

    Whilst reducing global deforestation is an important ingredient in curbing global warming, it can also assist in slowing the growing number of zoonotic pandemics (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018: 70). In so far as deforestation contributes to water scarcity and climate change, it presents an indirect danger to human beings. That said, wildlife habitat degradation and disappearance also pose a more immediate threat to human health because these result in people coming into closer contact with zoonotic hosts, amplifying pandemics such as severe acute respiratory virus, HIV, Ebola, bird flu, and more. As David Quammen cautions in his magnificent study of spillover diseases the “recent outbreaks of new zoonotic diseases, as well as the recurrence and spread of old ones, are part of a larger pattern … we should recognize that they reflect things we’re doing, not just thing that are happening to us” (Quammen, 2012 515).

    Despite their obvious differences, wilderness, rural, and urban landscapes are inextricably imbricated in each other. Simply put, in the context of global capitalism the boundaries between urbanity and its non-urban “Others” is not so sharp. Indeed, zoonotic territories are a symptom of global capitalism. A landscape in the way that I am using the term refers to the economic and cultural production of the earth. A landscape is both a pragmatic resource with a use value and an aesthetic representation of inherent value. Both treat the earth as an object involving human management and consumption. On the other hand, a territory is a relation formed through the connection of forces, matter, and bodies. It is both a spatial and temporal production that generates striated – the State, a sovereign, property ownership, and the hierarchies of order and fixed social organizations – and smooth spaces – nomadic, open, and fluid (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 474-500).

    Within this conceptual schema, a zoonotic territory is formed through the epidemiological forces of animal to human spillover; the economic forces of deforestation; the political forces of social inequity leading to the capture and consumption of wild animals from informal food markets (Wuhan’s wet markets) and the exploitation of wild bodies in the growing international market of exotic animal trade; the materiality of viral shedding and the circulation of infectious excretions; along with the ever increasing proximity of human bodies with other than human animals. This assemblage of forces, matter, and bodies combine to form zoonotic territories that extend throughout wild, rural, and urban landscapes. When a zoonotic territory proliferates throughout urbanity, as is currently the case with Covid-19, the public health crisis this prompts in the urban centers around the world catalyzes into a new form of urbanism: pandemic urbanism.

    Pandemic Urbanism

    Covid-19 is a respiratory virus and as such it spreads from an infected person through respiratory droplets, such as coughing and sneezing (Center for Disease Control). A person can catch the disease by touching an infected surface and by inhaling coronavirus contaminated mucus. Urban areas, where people come into close contact with each other and a variety of shared surfaces on a regular basis, present a very real and high threat of contamination. Unsurprisingly then, Covid-19 has impacted how people use and view the urban environment.

    Suffice it to say everyday urbanity under the conditions of a global public health crisis, such as Covid-19, has dramatically changed. In an effort to contain the spread of the virus, shelter-in-place orders have brought urban economic and social life to a near standstill. Bars, cafes, restaurants, and gyms have temporarily closed. People are working from home. They no longer gather in large numbers. Learning has moved online, as schools and universities close. The use of shared forms of transportation, such as taxis, trains, buses, and airplanes have significantly decreased and almost halted altogether. Public movement for the purposes of conducting essential activities – purchasing food, medical supplies, visiting a doctor, or those who are working as part an essential activity are exempt.

    People have begun using the empty streets to move throughout the city by walking, biking, and roller blading. Social life for the healthy has shifted from in-person modalities to video chats, texting, or telephone calls. As the pace of urbanity has slowed, wildlife ventures more and more into metropolitan areas. There are reports of bobcats visiting the front porches of homes in Dallas; marine life, never seen before in Venice, now swim through the pristine waters of the canals; deer are nudging their way into the urban core; urban parks and gardens are home to many more rabbits, birds, and ducks. Highways and bridges once bustling with cars, trucks, and motorcycles are near empty. Urban life has become quieter as the drone of peak hour traffic has vanished, the air is cleaner, and the skies appear bluer than before. Pandemic urbanism has certainly been great for the environment, providing much needed relief from escalating global greenhouse gas emissions.

    Emergency management and preparedness measures have led to the erection of new urban physical borders. To ensure people keep their distance at supermarkets lines placed at 6 feet intervals on the ground at grocery store entry points are spatial markers used to both control the space between people waiting outside the store and the number of people shopping inside. The elderly are allocated specific days and times to shop to help ensure their medical safety. People move through urban areas dressed in protective gear wearing masks and surgical gloves to further stop transmission in shared spaces. As people try to stay active, streets and parks have become important public spaces for walking pets, taking a stroll, and exercise. With the six feet physical distancing rule, these spaces have quickly reached a tipping point. Police are fining people who break the order to not gather and stay inside and checkpoints at state border crossings survey travelers, administering quarantine orders for potential cases of disease transmission.

    The spaces of pandemic urbanism are reorganized to maximize the distribution of public health services across multiple scales in both actual and virtual space. At the individual level more hand sanitizing stations are provided. At a larger collective level, pop-up medical centers are quickly infilling empty spaces. The image of healthcare workers in hazmat suits is the prevailing symbol of pandemic urbanism. Hotels in New York City in close proximity to treatment facilities are converting empty guest rooms to house medical staff. Telemedicine platforms are being used to diagnose the healthy and sick. Hospital emergency rooms are reconfigured to separate suspected Covid-19 patients from other patients into spaces exhausted from the outside so that air from infected spaces does not mingle with air in other parts of the hospital. As hospitals begin to overflow, many cities around the world have taken to converting stadiums, parks, closed factories, and convention centers into makeshift hospitals. In London the National Health Services and armed forces transformed an exhibition and convention center into a makeshift hospital in a few weeks. China built new hospitals in a matter of days to treat patients with Covid-19, going so far as to use robots in place of humans to treat the sick. Clinics have been converted to treat the sick, drive through testing stations have started, and ambulance bays are being converted into triage areas.

    Pandemic urbanism is organized around three distinctive extraterritorial spatial practices: social distancing, quarantine, and isolation. Social distancing, which would more appropriately be coined “physical distancing”, is a matter of maintaining a six-foot distance from another person when in common spaces. The irony is, the mandate requiring individual behavioral changes to keep society as a whole safe, rests upon extensive social cooperation to work. A two-week quarantine period conducted in a person’s home is recommended practice, and sometimes enforced, if a person has travelled to a highly infected area or has been in contact with an infected person. Anyone who becomes sick from the virus is ordered to isolate and to go to the nearest emergency room if they experience difficulty breathing. All are premised upon interrupting the collective sensory experience of the city, placing the inter-connectivity and experimental play constitutive of urban life on hold.

    The bodies of Covid-19 patients and the spaces they are isolated to and treated in are extra territorial urban islands fracturing the continuity of urban infrastructure, neighborhoods, and economic life. Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman describe extra territorial spaces as ones where the “old political order has splintered into discontinuous territorial fragments set apart and fortified by makeshift barriers, temporary boundaries, or invisible security apparatuses” that are “externally alienated and internally homogenized” (Franke and Weizman, 2003).

    In addition to the new spatial relations and configurations that the islands of Covid-19 testing and treatment sites have instituted the pandemic is exacerbating prevailing socioeconomic disparities. It is now common knowledge that health insurance inequities in the US intersect with racial and ethnic disparities creating a differentiated experience of disease and contamination (Coleman, 1982; Rosenberg, 1962; and Sohn, 2017). A shelter in place mandate places a prohibition on venturing outdoors unless absolutely necessary. It therefore assumes all urban residents have a permanent home they can stay indoors at. In the US, millions of people, many without the financial means to weather the economic storm suddenly lost their jobs as restaurants and other non-essential businesses were forced to close when stay at home orders were issued. During the early stages of the pandemic in the US the nearly 30 million uninsured encountered challenges in gaining access to testing and treatment. At the same time, large numbers of those uninsured tend to work in the service and construction industries; all environments that carry a higher risk of exposure to the virus (Berchick, Barnett, and Upton, 2019). Uninsured people also find it harder to navigate the complexities of the US medical system, presenting further challenges to medical access. The pandemic accentuates sociospatial inequities between rural and urban spaces. Rural residents have fewer doctors and medical treatment options and they have to travel much farther for treatment than their urban counterparts.

    As the global economy begins to tank, businesses are forced to close, unemployment lines grow, and governments dip into their reserves to prop up national economies, the economics of global health re-enter political discourse as both a political subject and the object of political strategizing. Just as much as the rapid spread of the pandemic around the world marks an instance of biological life escaping management techniques of the state and private sector, power returns and is reasserted biopolitically. To paraphrase Foucault, pandemic urbanism does this by reintegrating life back into “techniques that govern and administer it”, becoming a “regulatory and corrective mechanism” that participates in the distribution of “the living in the domain of value and utility” (Foucault, 1978: 143-144). People are dying alone in hospitals from Covid-19 as the risk of contagion is too high to allow family and loved one’s to say their goodbyes in person. In Italy, as the state’s medical system is overrun doctors are forced to choose between who is given intensive care and who is not. The mounting number of unclaimed bodies in New York are unceremoniously buried at mass burial sites on Hart Island outside New York.

    Conclusion

    In a globalized world the localized scale of an epidemic quickly transforms into a pandemic. Covid-19 has been one such scenario. Pandemic urbanism offers one way to understand how the urban environment is produced and in turn produces urbanity under the conditions of global disease. On one side of the equation, social behaviors in the city dramatically change as people attempt to remain six feet apart from each other to avoid contamination, sanitization stations appear, mechanized transportation grinds to a halt and is replaced by foot traffic and bicycles, the pace and sound of urbanity slows and quietens, buildings and roadways are vacated, and air quality improves. On the other side of the equation, the burdens vulnerable urban populations bear increase, infected bodies are assigned to the archipelagos of tent hospitals, the spontaneous movement of urbanity becomes a variable to be administered, other bodies are abandoned and left to be colonized by infection, and mass burial sites on the edges of urban centers dispose of the growing number of dead without ritual. The stark differences between the two form a nexus around the production and reproduction of biological life, a life that it is structured and managed by asymmetrical socio-spatial relations of power.

    What now? How might cities be designed differently to mitigate the spread of disease? This is a question that could lead to turning current provisional measures into permanent urban features. Future commercial and public buildings might have many more antimicrobial surfaces and finishes. Sanitizing stations and temperature screening zones, such as the mass temperature testing that took place at the Venice airport when Covid-19 first began to gain ground there. The design and placement of pandemic specific structures could lead to the reorganization of urban space around pandemic zones. The once popular open office environment, now viewed as a major hurdle for pandemic containment, may be replaced with collaborative and isolated working zones. In an effort to curb direct physical contact with shared surfaces, robotic and automated elements become more frequent in public and shared commercial spaces, for example, navigating urban towers using voice activated elevators.

    At the same time, those who participate in and advance the design and planning of the built environment will need to be cognizant of the darker biopolitical underbelly of producing design and policy knowledges of the built environment under pandemic scenarios. Pandemic urbanism can both legitimate and be deployed in strategies that establish population health as the ultimate end goal of urban life. Moving forward the design and planning professions and research disciplines will need to navigate these biopolitical waters with criticality and caution so as to ensure Covid-19 does not become the Trojan Horse of our common right to the city, to paraphrase David Harvey (Harvey, 2008). The moment urbanism is a tool through which states can regulate and administer the health of populations is the moment in which human agency and creativity are switched with population control, and urbanity is politicized.

    The reinterpretation and re-representation of urban form and life through the lens of health and hygiene confronts our shared understanding and collective experience of urban spaces and times. The biopolitical interpretation of urbanity that pandemic urbanism could very well end up instituting, will require deeper critical engagement because it means that treatment isn’t just administered in specific spaces, like medical centers and hospitals, it is also administered urbanistically, whereby the built environment could be turned into a means through which disease is contained.

    The manner in which design, planning, and public health policy coalesce to form a pandemic urbanism sheds new light on how urbanism can quickly become an instrument for biopolitical governmentality. Without minimizing the importance of caring for the sick and averting the further spread of a vicious virus, the shadows of biopolitical control lurking in the urban corners of overflowing and adhoc medical facilities needs to be brought into the open and honestly addressed as we recover, move forward, and plan for the next iteration of zoonotic territories. As people work together to rebuild their lives, heal from economic losses, and basically repair the serious sociopolitical deficits Covid-19 has exposed the world over, urbanism is presented with a tremendous opportunity to ultimately embrace the idea of healthy cities, not as governing the biological life of urban populations and materializing these in a series of formal elements; rather a city that welcomes different people and environmental attributes configured in dialogue with climatic conditions and topographical constraints, all materialized around imaginatively bringing people together and spurring a variety of social interactions.

     

    Adrian Parr is the Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington and a UNESCO Chair of Water and Human Settlements. In her capacity as a UNESCO water chair, Parr was selected by the European Cultural Center to curate an exhibition for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale on Watershed Urbanism where she will feature DFW and its current and future relationship to the Trinity River system. She has published extensively on environmental politics, sustainable development, and design in the public interest. She is the author of the trilogy Hijacking Sustainability (MIT Press), The Wrath of Capital (Columbia University Press), and Birth of a New Earth (Columbia University Press) in addition to other books of cultural theory. She is the producer and co-director (with Sean Hughes) of the multi-award winning documentary, The Intimate Realities of Water, that examines the water challenges women living in Nairobi’s slum face. She has been interviewed for her views on climate change by The New York Times, television news, and other media outlets, and is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.

     

    Berchick, R., Barnett, J.C., and Upton, R. D. (29019). ‘Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2018’, United States Census Bureau, November 8, Report Number P60-267 (RV). Accessed 13 April, 20200. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-267.html

    CBRA, ‘Why Are Animals Necessary in Biomedical Research?’ California Biomedical Research Association, Sacramento California. Accessed 11 April 2020 https://ca-biomed.org/CSBR/pdf/fs-whynecessary.pdf

    Center for Disease Control (2020). ‘What you need to know about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Accessed 22 April, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/2019-ncov-factsheet.pdf

    Coleman, W. (1982). Death is a Social Disease, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

    Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books.

    Franke, A., and Weizman, A. (2003). ‘Islands. The geography of extraterritoriality’, Volume, Issue 6. Accessed 3 April, 2020. http://volumeproject.org/islands-the-geography-of-extraterritoriality/

    Harvey, D. (2008). ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review 53, (September-October): 23-40.

    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018). Global Warming of 1.50C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.50C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H. O. Portner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Piarani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Pean, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds.)], page. 70. Accessed 11 April 2020. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Full_Report_Low_Res.pdf

    Jones, K., Patel, N., Levy, M. et al. ‘Global trends in emerging infectious diseases’. Nature 451, 990-993 (2008). Accessed 10 April 2020. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06536

    Kreuder Johnson, C., Hitchens, P., Smiley Evans, T. et al. (2015). ‘Spillover and pandemic properties of zoonotic viruses with high host plasticity’. Scientific Reports 5, 14830 (7 October). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14830

    Mbembe, A. (2003), ‘Necropolitics’, translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture, Volume 15, Issue 1: 11-40.

    Quammen, David (2012). Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

    Rosenberg, C. (1962). The Cholera Years 1832, 1849, and 1866, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Sohn, H. (2017). ‘Racial and ethnic disparities in Health Insurance Coverage: Dynamics of Gaining and Losing Coverage over the Life-Course.’ Population Research and Policy Review, Volume 36, Issue 2 (April): 181-201.

    World Bank Group (2016). World Development Indicators 2016. World Development Indicators. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group. Accessed 20 April, 2020. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/805371467990952829/World-development-indicators-2016

    World Health Organization (2020., ‘Report of the WHO -China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)’, 16-24 February. Accessed 5 April 2020.  https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf

    Worldometer, ‘COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic.’ Accessed 15 April 2020. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

  • Joseph Slaughter — Who Owns the Means of Expression? (Review of Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary)

    Joseph Slaughter — Who Owns the Means of Expression? (Review of Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary)

    by Joseph R. Slaughter

    Review of Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)

    The misfortune is that the forces of change are not always able to express themselves because they do not possess the means of expression.

    –Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow

    In April 1974, Houari Boumédiène, the Algerian Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement, opened a special session of the UN General Assembly with a blistering speech describing and denouncing the world system of neocolonial exploitation that continued to disadvantage and despoil the newly independent postcolonial states. “[T]he colonialist and imperialist Powers accepted the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination,” he asserted, “only when they had already succeeded in setting up the institutions and machinery that would perpetuate the system of pillage established in the colonial era” (Boumédiène 6). Sarah Brouillette’s important new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, offers a similarly searing account of Third World efforts to capture the institutional machinery of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and to redirect its work for the mass benefit of disenfranchised peoples everywhere, and of how those efforts were ultimately frustrated. Brouillette is concerned with “how cultural production emerges in relation to the real economy” (2). By “grounding the critical discourse of world literature in the political economy of global literary institutions and markets,” she places UNESCO at the center of a revealing story about the production, consolidation, and distribution of world literature in the post-war international order (2).

    Because, as Brouillette insists, the economic world system overlaps with, and to a great degree determines, the cultural world system, it seems helpful to sketch here the broader Third World legal efforts to decolonize international law and the administrative organs of the UN that provide background for Brouillette’s account of UNESCO’s historical role in shaping our current neoliberal assemblage of world literature. The 1974 UN special session that Boumédiène opened was convened to consider the problem of “raw materials and development”—namely, that “The Third World possesses 80 per cent of existing raw materials, but its share of overall industrial production is under 7 per cent” (Bedjaoui 27). The session culminated on May 1st with the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which sought to “reverse the effects of colonialism” (Anghie 199) by establishing a framework for “the economic advancement and social progress of all peoples . . . . which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices” (United Nations). The NIEO Declaration, adopted without a vote by a greatly expanded General Assembly in which the postcolonial states now constituted a substantial majority, intended to rectify the growing “gap between the developed and the developing countries” by (among other things) insisting on the “self-determination of all peoples,” “permanent sovereignty of every State over its natural resources,” the right “to restitution and full compensation” for colonial exploitation and “foreign occupation,” the “extension of active assistance to developing countries,” and guarantees for “developing countries [of] access to the achievements of modern science and technology” (United Nations).

    It is not entirely clear which specific “machinery” in the “system of pillage” Boumédiène had in mind when he suggested that old colonialist and new imperialist economic powers lay in wait for the postcolonial right of self-determination like its own doom. In 1965, however, Kwame Nkrumah had already famously recognized the trap of postcolonial self-determination conditioned by neo-colonialism: “the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is determined from outside” (ix). Boumédiène similarly implies that the nominal right to political self-determination was undermined by the economic fact that “the developed countries have virtual control of the raw materials markets and what practically amounts to a monopoly on manufactured products and capital equipment” (6). (As Brouillette’s work has consistently shown, a similar dynamic of market domination in the global publishing industries operates in our current world literary system, effectively obviating any romantic or purist idea of cultural self-determination.) In his seminal study of the centrality of colonialism to the history and development of international law, Antony Anghie describes the provisional and partial nature of what he calls “Third World sovereignty,” whose “porous character” ensures the political and economic subordination of newly-independent states and their subjection to Euro-American international law that coalesced to legitimate the continuing exploitation of non-European peoples and their resources (269).

    The doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources (PSNR), first examined at the UN in 1952 by the Commission on Human Rights in relation to a prospective declaration on the right of peoples to self-determination, was formally adopted by the General Assembly in 1962. Resolution 1803 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources declared the right of nations and peoples to explore, develop, and dispose of their natural wealth in the interest of “national development” and “the well-being of people of the State concerned.” One of the pillars of the NIEO in 1974 was the strengthening of the “[f]ull permanent sovereignty of every State over its natural resources and all economic activities” (United Nations). However, as Anghie shows, among the legal machinations by which “the West . . . negated Third World attempts to use the General Assembly as a means of transforming colonial international law” (222) was the creation of “a new legal framework, suggested by the term ‘transnational law’, to further undermine the economic [and political] sovereignty of the new states” (222-3). Indeed, as early as the 1950s Western-based multinational corporations were turning to “a complex combination of domestic law, private international law and public international law” in order to pursue (and impose) their economic interests in the emerging Third World (223). Thus, in a classic example of forum-shifting, a system of “transnational law” developed that shifted focus and force away from traditional international law and from the standard international legal forums of the United Nations system toward emerging frameworks for private arbitration between sovereign states and multinational corporate finance capital over rights and access to resources (223).

    Thus, one of the sad ironies of the Declaration of the New International Economic Order advocated by Boumédiène in 1974 is that in so many ways it, too, was too late: the newly-independent states were fighting the proverbial last war. By the early 1980s, the old and new imperial powers of Europe and the U.S. had by various means largely beaten back the radical Third World challenge that the NIEO posed to their historic hegemony. Indeed, as the postcolonial nations were claiming custody of and exercising some control over international law, the institutions and machinery of neocolonial exploitation were either already in place or were being erected elsewhere by the time of the NIEO’s declaration. In other words, the Third World’s major gambit to reverse colonial international law was in the process of being reversed by the creation of an alternative framework of “transnational” law that would itself perpetuate the system of pillage established in the colonial era by other means.

    The story of the NIEO in the 1970s, like the like the story of the hijacking of human rights that I’ve discussed elsewhere, is part of the more general history of the rise of neoliberalism and what Walden Bello has called the “rollback”: “the structural resubordination of the [Global] South within a U.S.-dominated global economy” (3). The Euro-American rollback was effectively a revanchist reversal that, among other things, undermined Third World efforts to capture the means of international legal expression. It set adrift the meaning and utility of a number of key political and legal terms in the lexicon of international affairs. Indeed, the growing pressure of decolonization through the 1970s (and reaction to it) instigated a dramatic lexical shift in some of those concepts, when a number of the most “fundamental principles of the international order . . . reversed polarity” (Slaughter 2018, 770). Among the many reversals of lexical fortune, self-determination doubled as “a neo-colonial tool for comprador elites in the Third World who colluded with Western neoliberal capital to dispossess the people of their rights and resources”; “permanent sovereignty over natural resources became a lever for multinational corporations to acquire concessions from newly independent states”; terrorism shifted from naming what states do to their own people to a label used to discredit ongoing national liberation movements; and “the Third World went from being a generative source of energy and inspiration for human rights[, a more just international order, and international law] to becoming a development problem and job opportunity for the new humanitarianism” (my emphasis 771).

    In Brouillette’s account of the “fate of the literary” under UNESCO policy, rollback and reversal also characterize the reactionary responses of the major economic powers to democratizing developments at the cultural wing of the UN. Indeed, in light of UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, it is possible to see how “cultural development” also suffered the fate of reversal of those other key principles of international affairs, shifting from being on the side of cultural nationalist agendas of newly independent states to providing the policy rationale for the globalization of predatory intellectual property law. In her book, Brouillette astutely reveals how ideological, institutional, and economic forces effectively defused and disciplined efforts at radical reform in the fields of global cultural production, intellectual cooperation, and international communications policy through the politics and programs of UNESCO. Covering seventy years of its institutional history, that story spans the eras “from liberalism through decolonizing left-liberalism to neoliberalism” (2). Brouillette’s discussion of the changing fortunes of “the literary” in the signature programs in each of those periods intends to give “a deeper sense of how the logic of instrumentalization [of literature and culture] has changed with the tides of global economic development and integration” (9). Indeed, Brouillette’s book is written not only against the old Arnoldian “sweetness and light” thesis of literary value that still circulates, more or less surreptitiously, in much world literature discourse. It also challenges what she characterizes as its heir and antithesis: “the idealization of literature as a potent site of noncommercial humanistic social formation” (7). This latter ideal, she chastisingly suggests, is the refuge of some postcolonial and marxist approaches to world literature. By contrast, Brouillette plots the story of UNESCO (and with it, the fate of “the literary”) as a tragedy—in David Scott’s, if not Aristotle’s, sense.

    Brouillette divides the history of UNESCO into three distinct “phases,” with three different policy agendas and corresponding cultural programs that she sees as typifying the prevailing ideology of the period and instantiating the power relations among the states active in UNESCO at the time. In her account, the first period, from 1945 to the 1960s, was “dominated by a liberal cosmopolitan worldview” that promoted cultural understanding among nations as an antidote to fascism and totalitarianism (10). It produced the translation project of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works that proposed to disseminate widely the world’s literary classics. The second phase, from the 1960s through the 1970s, was dominated by the economic and cultural development agendas of the newly independent postcolonial states who emphasized, through projects associated with International Book Year (1972) and proposals for a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), the role of knowledge, technology, literature, and literacy in “humanized development” and the redistribution of “cultural wealth” (16). The final phase, from the 1980s to the present, corresponds to the rise of neoliberal globalization and the rollback of the Third World agenda that I described. Literature, and culture more generally, is treated as a resource commodity requiring enhanced property protection. For Brouillette, the “Cities of Literature” program emblematizes this period and the “neoliberal governance” logic that “utterly transformed UNESCO,” which, in the third phase, began to promote “cultural programming mainly to prop up local industries and generate tourism and trade” (17).

    The first phase of UNESCO’s history that Brouillette identifies is probably the most familiar from the perspective of literary studies. It is also the subject of another very insightful  book from 2019, Miriam Intrator’s Books across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951 (Palgrave / Macmillan). Under the direction of Julian Huxley, UNESCO pursued its mandate to “increase the mutual understanding of peoples” through projects such as the Collection of Representative Works, which sought to identify, translate, disseminate, and promote literary “classics.” While the project had big ambitions, as Brouillette observes, the Collection “turned out to be largely an incorporative canon. The world’s various literatures were absorbed into English and French, which were thereby solidified in their roles as the languages of expert adjudication of the merit of literary works from any region” (34). In Brouillette’s assessment, because of the institutional eurocentrism of UNESCO, the Representative Works project ultimately was part of the machinery of cultural domination, serving to “secur[e] the former imperial powers’ ongoing trusteeship and dominant position in anchoring and orchestrating [post-war] global development” (33).

    The most illuminating parts of Brouillette’s book deal with the second and third phases in her history of UNESCO cultural policy. If the first phase proceeded under a colonialist/universalist ideology of cultural diffusionism, the second phase of UNESCO programs broadly reflected the Bandung spirit of political, economic, and cultural decolonization—what might be anachronistically called “decolonial” today. In what Brouillette describes as “its most radical phase” (59), UNESCO sought to use cultural policy throughout the 1960s and 70s to “humanize development” (68), to encourage local cultural production and a sense of collective identity, and to defend against cultural imperialism (or “Americanization”) and capitalist globalization (or “commercialization”) (59). Under the rubric of “cultural development,” as Brouillette shows, the newly-independent nations that dominated this period at UNESCO (demographically and ideologically, if not financially) pushed “not just for the expansion of publishing industries but for the right to tell their own stories and be heard” (13)—what the Senegalese Director General of UNESCO, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow (1974-1987), characterized as “possess[ing] the means of expression” (M’Bow 212). M’Bow is a key figure in Brouillette’s account. Under his direction, UNESCO pursued the ideal of “a vast democratization of access to information and to the means of production of information” (91) through (among other things) its advocacy for the New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), the cultural companion to the NIEO. Even as the writing was on the wall for the aspirations of the NIEO by the late 1970s, UNESCO continued to push against the tide of globalization and against Western hegemony over information and technology—eventually, as Brouillette suggests, prompting the U.S. and the U.K. to leave the organization in the mid-1980s. That reaction of forum-shifting set the stage for the third phase in Brouillette’s history and for the reversal of the Third World agenda at UNESCO.

    In Brouillette’s story, the second phase of UNESCO’s history amounted to something like a third-world interregnum that was undone by the third phase, dating roughly from the early 1980s, when “UNESCO had to win back its major funders” (10). As Brouillette argues, under the new regime, culture is neoliberalized as a market resource, “conceived as a form of wealth that, properly husbanded, protected, and promoted, results in job creation and economic development thanks to growing visitor and creative economies” (101). For Brouillette’s history, this third period is characterized by UNESCO programs, such as “Cities of Literature,” that promote “adherence to copyright and intellectual property laws and conformity with protocols set out by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and in the General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade (GATT)” (100-101). Thus, according to Brouillette, rather than advocating for the liberalization of intellectual property rights and the redistribution of cultural wealth and the means of expression (as it had done during its first two phases), “UNESCO is now regularly concerned with enforcing intellectual property regimes and copyright. . . . World Book Day is now World Book and Copyright Day” (130).

    One of Brouillette’s important insights that deserves special emphasis is her linking of the decline of UNESCO’s more radical cultural development agenda with the tightening of intellectual property regulation globally. This is a crucial connection for understanding the cultural politics and policies of UNESCO today, and it has important ramifications for contemporary literary studies. Indeed, I have argued previously that, although there is a clear “overlap in world-literary and world-intellectual-property space,” literature scholars have largely failed to appreciate the implications of intellectual property law on the field (and formation) of world literature and literary studies today (Slaughter 2014, 43-4). UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary goes a very long way towards remedying that lack, and Brouillette’s three-phase schema of UNESCO history is immensely helpful for beginning to chart the interaction of international cultural policy and intellectual property enclosure. Even so, like all periodizations (including my own above) it necessarily overstates some aspects of an organizational agenda as complex as UNESCO’s, while overlooking others. Moreover, the disciplinary lens of “literature” (or “the literary”) in Brouillette’s study misses some important legal maneuvers that took place outside the frame of UNESCO and distorts somewhat the picture of the organization’s third phase, since the World Heritage Sites program (rather than the Cities of Literature and Creative Cities Network) has arguably been the signature project of UNESCO over the past few decades. Likewise, some of the literary texts seem to have been selected (and bent) expediently to serve the historical narrative.

    As Brouillette tells it, the economic interests of the “producer nations” (97), who also provide the largest share of UNESCO’s budget, ultimately won out over the ideals of information democracy and more global and equitable access to the “means of expression” by subaltern classes everywhere. She writes: “A powerful minority, protected by an international intellectual property regime that favored producer nations, had a clear interest in ensuring that the developing nations would continue to be net consumers of culture” (97). That trajectory seems indisputable, but I would suggest that the story of the subversion of the NWICO looks more like the subversion of the NIEO than is apparent in Brouillette’s account, because the U.S. and other “producer nations” (or, more specifically, nations with major corporate intellectual property producers) could not simply turn to existing intellectual property law for the broad monopoly protection they desired. Rather, they had to reinvent that law and then get the rest of the world to “agree” to be regulated by it.

    In the 1980s, when “the content-producing, copyright-holding nations” (110) left UNESCO, they withdrew their funding and took their business elsewhere, turning away from the cultural politics of the UN organization in part to pursue their economic interests in culture and knowledge through trade agreements and the World Trade Organization. In a forum-shifting strategy that parallels the creation of “transnational law” that helped to undermine the NIEO, the U.S. (primarily U.S.-based pharmaceutical, information technology, and media companies) worked the levers of the WTO to convert cultural production and exchange into a trade issue, as they steered the Uruguay Round of GATT toward the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that came into effect in 1995 and continues to regulate international intellectual property relations today. Thus, like the NIEO, the NWICO was not only rebuffed (by the withdrawal of funding from UNESCO); it was also undermined by forum-shifting to trade councils, where new forms of intellectual property and cultural wealth were created under a stricter legal regime of intellectual property designed to protect the monopoly interests of “developed-world producers” (110).

    Thus, by the time the major donor nations returned to UNESCO and its heritage agenda in Brouillette’s third phase, the new “system of pillage” was already in place. In fact, one effect of the shift to trade-related intellectual property rights was the reification of an old colonial binary division between tradition and modernity that largely left cultural property, traditional knowledge, and cultural identity to the minor heritage industry at UNESCO, while taking the much more lucrative intellectual property economy to the transnational offices of patent attorneys and the arbitration forums of the WTO. This division of cultural assets ultimately reflects and reinforces “one aspect of the property bias built into the [current] system of world literature: individual intellectual property for us [the West]; collective cultural property for them [the rest]” (Slaughter 2014, 54). This, in turn, has knock on effects for the fate of “the literary” that Brouillette tracks.

    My supplement to Brouillette’s discerning account of the role of copyright in undoing the second-phase dreams of UNESCO and NWICO is intended as a friendly amendment; moreover, it is testament to how productive it can be to think with her provocative new book, which spurred me to revisit some of the original UNESCO sources and to reconsider my own understanding of the role of intellectual property in the neoliberalization of world literature. Brouillette offers salutary complication to the easy affirmative (and often ahistorical) discourse around “world literature” that has dominated literary studies (especially in the U.S.) over the past two decades, which tends to treat politics, economics, law, republics, the international, and the world itself (the list goes on) as mere metaphors. For instance, Pascale Casanova refers repeatedly to “the international laws” (94) that are said to govern world literary relations, but “law” in her world is mostly a metaphor. In fact, there is, somehow, no UNESCO in the World Republic of Letters, which is perhaps especially surprising given that Paris (its mythic capital) remains the UN organization’s institutional headquarters. For Brouillette, law and economy are not easy metaphors tossed around to make the work feel important, as with so much literary criticism today. Rather, law and economy are real, which makes the work of the literary critic so much harder but also so much more rewarding and explosive when, like Brouillette’s book, it successfully draws genuine links between economics and cultural production.

    Brouillette’s book will (and should) be important and influential for contemporary literary studies, but it does have some limitations that are worth acknowledging in order to advance more fully on its best insights. For one thing, in toggling between sociological analysis and literary textual explication, Brouillette confronts the constant interdisciplinary challenge of reading between law and literature—or, more precisely, between law, policy, economics, and literature—without deciding the methodological question in favor of one over the other. Topically, the book is broadly interested in, as Brouillette says, the “logic of instrumentalization” (9) of literature in UNESCO policy. Methodologically, however, it raises tacit questions about the instrumentalization of literature in literary studies today—especially of so-called non-Western literature in contemporary literary criticism. (This problem is particularly acute in light of what I see as continuing disciplinary efforts in literary studies, parallel to those in international law and economics, to contain the third world challenge to Eurocentrism: the ongoing rollback of postcolonial studies by the expansionist fields of world literature, global modernisms, and others.) Most of Brouillette’s chapters end with readings of literary texts offered to illustrate the logic of UNESCO policies; within the framework of the book, it seems that all third world texts must necessarily be read as UNESCO policy allegories. When the text fits, the allegorical reading wears well—as with Tayeb Salih’s famous early short story, “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid.” However, if, under UNESCO cultural policy, the fate of the literary is to be instrumentalized, in literary criticism, too, it seems, the fate of literature is to be instrumentalized for other ends. Brouillette’s own analytical mode implicitly raises some basic questions that many of us in literary studies today are grappling with: not only what is literature for, but also what, in the world, is literary criticism for?

    I suppose that most readers will not be coming to Brouillette’s book for the literary readings; still, those familiar with the literary texts, especially the novels by Zakes Mda and NoViolet Bulawayo, are likely to find her textual analysis intriguing, but somewhat forced and flat. These readings might have been made richer and more robust by considering and citing some of what the many critics and specialist scholars of those books have said about them, but the flattening is also an effect of the topical pressure of Brouillette’s driving interests. For example, under allegorical reading pressure, Mda’s multilayered novel Heart of Redness is reduced to a whitepaper on cultural development policy in South Africa—an approach that not only weirdly conflates Mda’s personal experience and attitudes that Brouillette imputes to him about cultural development with those of one of his fictional characters, but also loses sight entirely of the novel’s sharp ironic sensibility. Irony does not belong to whitepapers, of course, but in Mda’s novel, the promise of economic development that is to come from commodifying a people’s historical culture for heritage tourism is one more of the likely-to-be-failed prophecies of future plenty that are the subject and theme of the novel. In other words, rather than “justif[ying] contemporary cultural policy making” (114), the novel makes cultural development policy produced by international institutions an object of its satire, intimating that it may consist of little more than false hopes and empty promises. Furthermore, in its heavy intertextual (some say plagiaristic) reliance on prior written histories of the Xhosa Cattle Killing, Mda’s novel raises interesting and relevant questions about intellectual and cultural property that are unexplored by Brouillette and that might have further complicated her reading and historical narrative.

    Like many sociological accounts of institutional systems and power relations, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary is written largely in the anonymous, hedging voice of intellectual history. So much happens outside the purview of the passive sentences that report on the action and the worldly effects of ideas and ideology. To give just one example (of many): “The new liberal internationalism and humanism, enshrined perhaps above all in the United Nations’ 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, were precisely directed against the old modes of unthinking domination and cultural erasure. Instead, the preference was to imagine a new international order built on mutual respect, individual rights, and a shared desire to preserve monuments to authentic human diversity” (41). As certain about history as the passage may be, it is by no means clear exactly who does or wants what, who directs, who unthinks and erases, who prefers, or who shares. This is a common challenge for marxist accounts of political economy, for discourse analysis, for intellectual history and ideology critique. I note it, because the passive voice seems to encourage and license overstatement and dubious claims for the purposes of polemic. For example, it is simply not true, in any categorical way, that “[t]he field of contemporary Anglophone African literature relies on private donors . . .” (125).

    In this book about institutional contests over the means of expression, I have to wonder if the passive voice does not also contribute to the irksome sense of defeatism that emerges from its pages: the sense that “Western” power is generally successful, and “non-Western” efforts inevitably fail in the face of faceless capitalism and neoliberal globalization—that resistance, third world or otherwise, is finally futile. Brouillette’s sympathies are clearly with the futile, but the narrative mode makes it seem as if cultural policy rarely, if ever, misfires or backfires. Maybe it is the case that culture actually and effectively does what cultural policy organizations and cultural theorists think it will do—whether that is “helping to discipline subjects” or, as Brouillette is inclined to see it, serving as a “de-commodifying” branch of “governance, where concerns about the needs left unmet by capitalism are articulated and worked out” (69). However, culture and its effects seem more unreliable than that, and such a view leaves little room for grasping the ways in which people and peoples maneuver within and manipulate for themselves the policy frameworks (not to mention “culture” itself) that, in Brouillette’s narrative, otherwise seem to dominate and determine everything.

    Brouillette’s book is a vital contribution to the fields of Cold War cultural studies, postcolonial studies, world literature, and a globally-minded history of print culture. She has managed to synthesize the messy business of an international political organization in a way that both paints a convincing picture of UNESCO as a central forum and force in the world economy of literature and also paves the way for deeper examination by other scholars of specific moments, movements, and actors within that literary economy. I conclude with a final observation, in order to amplify one of Brouillette’s more offhanded provocations. Reviewing some of the literature from the massive bibliography of work on “books in development,” some of which were “backed by UNESCO” (79), in the 1960s and 70s, Brouillette singles out for special commendation the huge body of scholarship by Philip Altbach. As she notes, Altbach studied (among other things) “the Western bias of the international scholarly community,” and she suggests that perhaps it was “this same bias that placed research like his on the outskirts of the field . . . [of] book history” (79). I could not agree more about the importance and underappreciated value of Altbach’s work and other like-minded “studies of the book in the developing world” (79) that were produced during the decades of development. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, too, should take its place at the center of book history. Brouillette usefully sketches an alternative route for the field, pointing us back to a path not taken, but one that is certainly worth following her down.

     

    Joseph R. Slaughter teaches postcolonial literature and theory, cultural studies, human rights, and third-world approaches to literature and international law in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is currently completing two books: New Word Orders, on intellectual/cultural property and world literature, and Hijacking Human Rights, on the rise and fall of international law, from colonialism to neoliberalism.

     

    Works Cited

    Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge UP, 2004.

    Bedjaoui, Mohammed. Towards a New International Economic Order. UNESCO, 1979.

    Bello, Walden. Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty. TNI/Pluto Press, 1994.

    Boumédiène, Houari. The Battle against Underdevelopment. Spokesman Pamphlet 42, 1974.

    Brouillette, Sarah. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford UP, 2019.

    Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Harvard UP, 2004.

    Intrator, Miriam. Books across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951. Palgrave / Macmillan, 2019.

    M’Bow, Amadou Mahtar. “North-South Dialogue: Interviewd by Altaf Gauhar.” Third World Quarterly. 4.2 (1982): 211-220.

    Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. International Publishers CO., 1966.

    Slaughter, Joseph R. “World Literature as Property.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. 34 (2014): 39-73.

    Slaughter, Joseph R. “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World.” Human Rights Quarterly. 40.4 (2018): 745-775.

    United Nations General Assembly. “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.” A/RES/S-6/3201. 1 May 1974. http://www.un-documents.net/s6r3201.htm