Author: boundary2

by Kenneth Gross

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

Angus Fletcher. The Topological Imagination:  Edges, Spheres, and Islands. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

The Topological Imagination:  Edges, Spheres, and Islands appeared in April of 2016, just half a year before Angus Fletcher’s death.  Topology is, in his view, principally “a theory of edges”—the edge being, like the horizon, something the mind invents and plays with, translates, dissolves, and hardens, rather than something merely found in nature.  Like all of Fletcher’s books, starting with Allegory:  The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964), this last book is centrally about the shape of our imagining, in this case our imagining of the earth and our own life on earth, the radicality of our place here.  It is in this “an essay in praise of the most unusual sphere ever imagined,” as he says at the close.  He means the earth, of course, but also our minds of earth, our earthly minds.  Indeed, the book asks us to re-imagine our imagining, to see better its shapes and stakes.  Fletcher wants to consider how the imagination takes in the nature of change and stability in change, also the imagination’s ambitions toward wholeness.  He wants to educate our imaginations in the need to embrace adaptive, emergent patterns of thought that yet honor the “bass note” of terrestrial existence, our ties to diurnal cycles.   It is, he writes, about “diurnal thinking,” a redeemed journalism such as he finds in the poetry of Walt Whitman, master of waveforms and lists, the “middle voice.”

The book is complex, often daunting in its compression and rapid leaps of association.  Old preoccupations come into play throughout:  Giambattista Vico on the primitive poetry that shapes law, history, and culture (forms shaped as much by fear as desire); Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the haunted nature of thresholds and crossing thresholds; I. A. Richards (Fletcher’s cherished thesis advisor at Harvard) on the “disparity action” of metaphor, its way of marking strange difference as much as similarity.  You also can see the book’s continuities with the account of horizons and the nature of descriptive poetry that Fletcher develops in A New Theory for American Poetry (2004), especially in his analyses of John Clare—the feeling Clare gives us, as John Ashbery puts in “For John Clare,” “that the sky may be at the back of someone’s mind.”  The Topological Imagination also shows an ever-deepening engagement with scientific and mathematical thought.  Fletcher dwells at length, for instance, on the eighteenth century mathematician Leopold Euler’s invention of “the edge,” basic to his founding of what was only later named “topology”—that branch of mathematics which studies shape and place, particularly (as opposed to geometry) those aspects of natural or made form which survive despite that form’s being bent, deformed, or stretched.  Playing out these pre-occupations, Fletcher explores Rachel Carson’s dark reflections about life and death at the shoreline, the living edge between sea and land.  He further considers the quantum theorist David Bohm’s work on the “implicate order” of the physical and mental world, on James Lovelock’s controversial “Gaia hypothesis,” on Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky’s posit of the “biosphere.”

There are also many instances of what Kenneth Burke calls “representative anecdotes.”  At one point, to illustrate the mysterious yet pragmatic implications of topology, Fletcher describes what it meant when astronauts on the damaged Apollo 13 were challenged with making (or re-making), out of the few available materials, a shaped tool by which to breathe in their capsuled environment circling the terrestrial sphere.   (The sculpturally arranged rolls of duct tape on the book-cover allude this event.)  Looking to his own life, Fletcher makes vivid what is involved in the policing of borders, and the misunderstanding, madness, and even comedy this can provoke on all sides, in a story of driving back and forth into the Eastern Bloc, during a trip to an academic conference in Russia in the 1960s.

Trying to cross or build bridges between realms of thought too often separated, the book broods on what it means for us “to be inside a world that is also inside us,” a situation that marks for Fletcher “the mysterious dimensionality of our existence.”  The Topological Imagination is a book that includes a complex meditation on the many boundaries, edges, cuts, walls, thresholds, and horizons that shape our experience.  Fiercely skeptical as it is, the book also asks us to take seriously a model for a kind of idealism that doesn’t slander time, or the life of earth, by banking on violent, rigid models of truth, narrowly framed (and hence destructive) explanations or maps of cause.

by Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari

I.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of a peculiar cinematic genre: plant horror. This somewhat embarrassing product of post-war Hollywood proliferated throughout the century and soon went global, although without much critical fanfare. Its ascension has its origins in the burgeoning consumer culture of the 1950s, which cultivated an audience for low-budget sci fi and horror, and in the onset of the Cold War, which provided a fertile environment for fears of invading aliens, vegetal or otherwise. Yet the genealogy of plant horror is multiple. Defining influences include both developments in plant science and changing literary and visual representations of an animate natural world. At least in the North American context, its genesis can be traced as far back as Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and the latter’s fascination with the disturbing effects of “the sentience of all vegetable things.”[1]

The Duffer Brothers’ television series Stranger Things (2016-present) can lay claim to plant horror as part of its pedigree, although initially it does so almost discreetly, with fleeting references to classic entries in the plant horror tradition either evoked in passing or positioned in the background of various shots, such as a poster from Sam Raimi’s 1981 The Evil Dead. As the series develops, these references multiply and eventually move more consistently into the foreground. A tree serves as a portal to another dimension; a monster resembles an animate, blood-thirsty flower; forests provide not just greenery and escape but also a means by which the dark terrain of the Upside Down can take hold of reality; and a blighted field of pumpkins leads to the discovery of a kind of supernatural root system undergirding the small town in which the series is set.

Stranger Things tells the story, often from the perspective of children on the cusp of adolescence, of the gradual interpenetration of two worlds: the “normal” world of Hawkins, Indiana and the alternative dimension of the Upside Down. This second world, connected by portals to Hawkins, is a horrifying, indeed apocalyptic, zone into which various characters stumble or are thrust. The specifically vegetal qualities of the Upside Down are initially less striking than the humanoid shape and animalistic thirst for blood of the first season’s central monster: the Demogorgon, named after the Dungeons and Dragons character known as the Prince of Demons. Yet this figure, which roams the Upside Down in search of prey and eventually moves into the space of reality as it is represented in the series, has a face in the shape of a monstrous carnivorous plant—which is to say no face at all, but only a mouth, exposed by fleshy petals that open to reveal a central orifice filled with teeth. In another nod to the plant horror tradition, the Upside Down, described in terms borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons as the “shadow material plane of necromancy and evil magic,” is overwhelmed by vegetal matter, albeit decaying and often intermixed with animal qualities or organs.

The Upside Down dimension is at once horrifyingly in touch with the human world, invading and penetrating it at inopportune times and in many different forms, and this world’s uncanny and alien bad copy—its disgusting and disturbing duplicate. In this double operation the Upside Down is reminiscent of the pods from the 1956 and 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers films, in which plants serve as replicas of the humans whose bodies they take over. The thematic preoccupation with “fake” vegetal copies of “real” human beings or worlds is underscored not just by the vegetal attributes of the Upside Down generally but in an early scene from the first season of Stranger Things in which cotton is being pulled from the counterfeit corpse of the young Will Byers (played by Noah Schnapp). Will is the first human to be lost, as far as the viewer knows, in the alternate dimension. In short, the aesthetic forms and tropes of plant horror structure and inform the series, although they are not always its most obvious focus.

At the same time, the Duffer Brothers (Matt and Russ Duffer) famously borrow heavily from the defining features of well-known 1980s genre films, including perhaps most prominently the oeuvre of Steven Spielberg.[2] As a master of the contemporary melodrama, Spielberg updates the genre by mixing it with speculative or fantastic elements. Stranger Things is set in the early 1980s—the first season begins in 1983—in a more or less middle-class housing development that strongly evokes the Southern Californian suburban settings of films like Spielberg’s E.T. (1982), although it does not fully replicate these settings. The series gestures with care and a certain obsessive love toward experiences and cultural artifacts from the “real” 1980s as well as the most memorable episodes from those of Spielberg’s (and, to a certain extent George Lucas’s) films that appeared during this same period. The Duffer Brothers’ portrayal of Hawkins also emphasizes, in a highly Spielbergian mode, the experience of children who are profoundly and in a sense irretrievably alienated from their parents, whose bourgeois domesticity covers over pervasive trauma. The invading alien force of the Upside Down exposes the hypocrisy and power dynamics that structure private life, as parents are forced to confront their own inability to care for their children, and children are obliged to bear witness to the stupidity, witless desires, and empty conformity of their parents.

Hawkins is also in thrall to an institutionalized, government-sponsored scientific agency—supposedly a branch of the Energy Department—that not only has unleashed the monster to begin with but has been engaged for some time in a series of sinister and family-destroying experiments.[3] Here we are reminded of the paranoia around “big government” fostered in the Reagan 80s, and indeed the series contains direct references to the election of 1984, with the display of yard signs (Reagan/Bush in the home of the Wheelers, the most self-consciously bourgeois household in the film, and Mondale/Ferraro in the yard of the Henderson family, consisting of a single mother and her quirky son Dustin).

The various tropes drawn from films of the period are gradually resituated in vegetal contexts, so that the Energy Department turns out to be engaged in a kind of strange harvesting operation, which involves culling and pruning the invading tendrils of the plant life from the Upside Down. The characters’ familial traumas and divisions are themselves not only infected by but restaged within the vegetal world of the Upside Down. Moreover, the wide streets down which groups of kids ride their bikes, and other archetypal “small town” attributes of Hawkins, are repeated within the Upside Down, this time covered in vines, branches, and strange floating spores, as if not just the human characters but the space itself had been consumed by rapacious vegetality. The Upside Down and Hawkins turn out to be connected to one another by root systems that allow passage both between dimensions and across any given zone.

Stranger Things thus references not only vegetal monsters—which act to a certain extent as individuals and share characteristics with animals—but also forests and fields where plant life maintains a less individuated presence. Unlike the suburbs of Southern California that often serve as a privileged setting for the 80s films referenced in the series,[4] Hawkins is notable for its vegetation: forests, hanging vines, fields full of pumpkins and houses that are framed by plants of many kinds, both wild (or “feral”[5]) and domesticated.[6] The camera lingers over images of vine and root systems to evoke a more explicitly rhizomatic vegetality: in these contexts, plants appear as networks, rather than as animal-like desiring individuals. In episode six of season one, the iconic red letters of the title fade into an image of dark forests framed by the outlines of the words, suggesting that the strange, speculative elements of the series reside within these collective plant bodies. This de-individuated vegetal mode is visible both in Hawkins and in the Upside Down. In fact, it seems to be the connection, on the visual plane of the film, between the two realms. For example, the portal that appears in the forest outside Steve Harrington’s (Joe Keery) house takes the form of membranous, decaying vegetal matter which opens a cut in the bark of a tree; this opening is later sutured and solidified into bark as soon as Steve’s  girlfriend Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) is rescued from the Upside Down and comes back out through the portal. In this scene, the individual tree is a point of entry into a space where plants appear not as individuals so much as masses, groups, bunches, and lines, but the tree itself is part of the forest, which represents its own kind of rhizomatic multitude.

Stranger Things’ extensive citations of 1980s middle-brow cinema and culture come across as much more poignant and, paradoxically, more authentic than the somewhat generic images from plant horror. Indeed the former are what the films are probably best known and appreciated for. Yet the many evocations of plant horror nonetheless remain worthy of consideration in the series even though, or precisely because, they are not invested with as intense a nostalgia as some of the other pop culture references. In fact, taken as mere throwbacks to an earlier moment in U.S. culture and politics, the references to specific plant horror films might be considered a red herring. It is not so much the recollection of a particular time—in this case, the 1980s—in its minute details that matters where the plants are concerned, but the way in which the tropes drawn from this era are subtly reconfigured by Stranger Things to invest the memory of the decade with a vegetal quality. The lingering vegetal presence in the series draws the past closer to our own, more ecologically-focused moment. In other words, where the plants are concerned, the 80s nostalgia of Stranger Things points toward the future. But it does so not just by (re)writing the earlier period as infested by plants but by invoking the structuring force of this particular decade on our present.

The increasingly marked vegetality of the series is situated in the context of a general reflection on the relationship of the 1980s to consumption and commodification. Stranger Things stresses the attachment of this period to cultural artifacts as sources of affect and identity formation, a dynamic that has arguably grown only more intense over time. The series lingers lovingly over images of the ambivalent commodification of culture, including narratives and “souvenirs” of 1960s rebellion, that is one of the hallmarks of the 1980s, as Jeffrey T. Nealon has explored in his book Post-Postmodernism.[7] Economically, as Nealon points out, the decade was shaped by the ongoing deterritorialization of capital, “floating flexibly free from production processes,”[8] and the rise of the finance sector and financial speculation, which brought with it increasing concentrations of wealth and heightened social, economic, and political inequality. At the same time, the consumption of particular cultural products began to work as a form of biopolitics, which allowed for identities to be formed and defined. As Nealon puts it, “The rock n’ roll style of rebellious, existential individuality, largely unassimilable under the mass-production dictates of midcentury Fordism, has become the engine of post-Fordist, niche-market consumption capitalism. Authenticity is these days wholly territorialized on choice, rebellion, being yourself, freedom, fun . . . .”[9] The series plays with this tension throughout, with its images of bands of children working hard to outrun the adults who seek to control them. Yet these images themselves inevitably evoke not just the pleasures of childhood resistance to adult authority but Spielberg’s own representations of such bands, which continue to circulate as highly successful (nigh iconic) commodities.

B-grade horror, which takes on cult-like status in and around the 1980s, particularly in the films of Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, and Wes Craven, is likewise caught in the contradictions symptomatic of an era that is nostalgic for earlier moments of social and political critique and activism. This is true of plant horror as well as of other entries in the genre. Is the vegetal Upside Down the figuration, in fleshy, pulpy terms, of the invisible, speculative agency of capital that invades the lives of so-called ordinary Americans without always being acknowledged, at least in the suburban context of the series? Is Stranger Things an Invasion for the twenty-first century? Plant horror has often delighted in lending capitalism a particularly vegetal power. For instance, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (set in San Francisco) protests the globalization of U.S. cinema that arrives, a year earlier, with the Star Wars franchise. But Kaufman’s film also reveals the power of this globalization to interpellate audiences in ways they find appealing. Here the global economy is shown to function along vegetal lines; plants both attract and replace the humans who are drawn to them. Kaufman’s Invasion rewrites the 1956 pods as the figures of a standardized globalized culture, while also making them seductive or at least fascinating envoys from an active alternative reality.

Stranger Things suggests that there are new pleasures and dangers to be found in the strange, niche appeal of plant-themed horror and its critical take on globalization. The decentered operations of the plant-like forces inherent in the Upside Down (both monstrous and rhizomatic) contribute to but also upend and destabilize the work done by the evil government agency, itself in thrall to a Cold War project. The first portal to the Upside Down is opened in a misguided attempt to make contact with a Soviet agent; the Upside Down works as a zone of global connectivity even before it is fully vegetalized. As the series develops, conspiracy theories generated out of an older Cold War paranoia meet those of the globalized free markets, and both are reconfigured as the networked vines and tunnels of the Upside Down, doing their invisible work. From this vantage Stranger Things becomes a pessimistic reflection on the 1980s as a moment to which we remain sadly, even monstrously, indebted—economically even more so than culturally—a period when we might come to realize the rhizomatic power of capital both to sustain us and to destroy the world as we know it. Plants serve as the privileged figures of this ambivalently double operation. But their action is at the same time something other than figural, as Stranger Things suggests. They also generate a range of affective transformations, particularly in the Upside Down, where speculative capitalism might be said to meet speculative fiction.

II.

In the larger context of their reflection on capitalism as a mode of affective entanglement—from which we struggle and fail to extricate ourselves—we can read the Duffer Brothers’ work as a revision of the Spielbergian canon. This rewriting may be consciously connoted by the comparative form “stranger” in the title of the series: stranger than what, the audience is obliged to ask? In his 80s corpus, Spielberg arguably brings a speculative dimension to a genre, that of melodrama, strongly associated with interiority and the domestic sphere. His films situate a melodramatic preoccupation with familial relationships in narrative contexts that draw from science fiction, the “creature feature,” and the thriller, thereby theoretically enhancing what might be called the speculative potential of the family romance as the latter is portrayed in middle-brow cinema. In films like Jaws (1975), E.T. (1982), and even Close Encounters of Third Kind (1977), however, this nominally speculative or explicitly fantastic dimension tends to be recuperated by a therapeutic mode, which emphasizes the power of alien forces not to disturb or disrupt familial ties—for this disturbance has already happened prior to the arrival of the extraterrestrial or creature—but to re-consolidate them. For instance, E.T. may at first destabilize the human world he accidentally inhabits but eventually serves to reaffirm and solidify family bonds that have been frayed by divorce. E.T.—the best therapy that money cannot buy!

Thus, aliens, undersea creatures, and various other monsters and strangers to our human world work in Spielberg’s oeuvre not necessarily to expand our sense of what is possible or even thinkable but to revitalize our attachments to family life and bourgeois domesticity. E.T. heals the trauma of the family wrenched apart; in Jaws, the struggle with the shark allows the hero to re-establish order and dominance over nature in his small town; even the extraterrestrials of Close Encounters confirm our sense of the beauty of the world and a cosmos not necessarily made by humans but harmonically in tune with them (the ending of the film notwithstanding).[10]

The Duffer Brothers preserve Spielberg’s thematic emphasis on moments of trauma and therapeutic healing even as they expand the speculative dimension of Stranger Things to render the world of the Upside Down less reparative than is typically the case with Spielberg. In this sense they move this key influence closer to a kind of open-ended horror, as we will discuss in the third section of this essay. One reason for this shift may be formal.[11] The Duffer Brothers are working in a serialized form, which lends itself to the stoking of plot tensions and the evasion of definitive resolution. Spielberg, on the other hand, does not typically operate in a serialized mode (with one notable exception to this rule being the Indiana Jones series).[12] But the Duffer Brothers are also clearly inspired by a Spielbergian emphasis on the power of what seems alien and strange to reaffirm that which is most familiar—to become a source of comfort in an uncomfortable world. This is the case even if their monsters just do not leave Hawkins alone at the conclusion of any given episode. The telekinetic girl Eleven (known as “El” and portrayed by Millie Bobby Brown) seems to serve this function; she is both otherworldly and, at times, the source of an empathy and love that parents in the series do not (or cannot) generally provide.[13]

But the Upside Down itself also becomes the source of a strange intimacy, although not one that reliably serves to heal or make whole the characters who find themselves trapped within it. This is part of what constitutes the comparative strangeness of the Upside Down: it generates affects that cannot be fully realized in a “normal” world, since they are unacceptable to or impeded by the bourgeois community that the films portray. Take for instance the scene at the end of the first season, when Will Byers is reunited with his mother Joyce, played by Winona Ryder, and the good-hearted but gruff town sheriff Jim Hopper (David Barbour), in a kind of uncanny family tableau. The placement of a crying Joyce holding Will’s supine body in her arms even evokes the Pietà, with Jim augmenting the scene of a mother holding the limp body of her child, into whom later life is breathed by the efforts of the two adults to perform CPR. This visual evocation of the Biblical holy family is later reinforced with the first season ending at Christmas, which brings with it a number of reconciliations.  As Jim and Joyce attempt to reanimate Will’s lifeless body, a scene from the past, with Jim and his now estranged ex-wife helplessly watching while doctors in a hospital attempt and fail to resuscitate their daughter Sarah, is intercut with the images of Will, Joyce, and Jim in the Upside Down. This flashback suggests that the second moment of trauma, despair, and (possible) death is either a resolution to or repetition of the first. But Will, unlike Sarah, emerges alive, albeit inhabited by a monster. The scene in the Upside Down thus presents to viewers the possibility of a family made “whole” through the power of love. It stands in contrast to the many images of the families of Hawkins, Jim’s included, which are splintered by trauma and the failure to empathize. Still, this moment of healing can only take place within the apocalyptic frame provided by the Upside Down. The “broken” family is in a sense momentarily repaired, but the entire world around them has been destroyed.

Here the Spielbergian move toward a kind of reparative normativity is obviously in tension with the use of the Upside Down as a source of more destabilizing and unfamiliar affects—a tension that is heightened by the camera’s willingness to linger on the scene as well as by the soundtrack, Moby’s moody “When It’s Cold I Would Like To Die.” Is the series, we may ask, presenting us with an image of death followed by a birth? If so, as we have suggested earlier, it also commits to repeating the cycle ad infinitum, for the characters have to keep returning to the Upside Down to survive the traumas that in the “normal” world seem hardly bearable. The Upside Down is in this sense that place where, as Jim puts it, painful experiences are “shut up” in the mind—the site of the unconscious where both suffering and its cure are to be found. In a sense, then, the Duffer Brothers deploy the Upside Down as an affective zone that supplements and structures reality. It is a world in which families and connections might be briefly reformed, and thus not only the source of horror for the viewer and the characters but of different kinds of feelings, sensations, and connections than those sanctioned by the normal world (including, perhaps, queer sympathies that are otherwise unexpressed in the context of Hawkins, as we will suggest). The Upside Down thus allows the characters to survive the very destruction of the world against which they seem to be struggling, but to do so momentarily transformed: it engenders a mode of survival otherwise.

If Stranger Things has an ambivalent relationship to the tensions and contradictions structuring 80s popular culture, then, it also has an ambivalent relationship to Spielberg and the psychological narratives that he both popularizes and revises. It offers us images of trauma endured and assuaged only in the dark terrain of the Upside Down, and then only to reinitiate the cycle of violence. The presence of vegetal elements serves to distill and heighten this double ambivalence. The motifs drawn from 80s plant horror point to the nostalgic consumption of culture as a means by which capitalism invades and takes over the social body. But they also suggest the power of capitalism to maintain this body and to stimulate desire. More pointedly, the visual emphasis on plants as inhabitants of the Upside Down brings a latently ecological dimension to bear on what might otherwise be a set of throw-away references. In the Upside Down, plants overtake humans, whose sensitivity becomes a form of vulnerability and exposure.[14] Plant horror from the 80s invades and infects the world more generally.

The vegetalization of Spielberg’s universe makes it difficult, on the one hand, to see the plants as fully alien, in the sense that plant life inhabits both Hawkins and the Upside Down from the outset. When we do view plants in this way, as in the case of the monstrous Demogorgon, they notably fail to provide a satisfying or even viable resolution to the forms of alienation and trauma that mark family life. The animal-vegetal inhabitants of the Upside Down cannot hold the kind of therapeutic value that a character like E.T. so richly embodies. (We might note in this context that E.T. is a botanist: he loves, cultivates, collects, and heals plants, and eventually humans too. He does not become a plant!) A case in point is the baby Demogorgon lovingly baptized “Dart” (for “D’Artagnan”) by Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo). This creature is both enlisted as an alien other in need of care (in this sense functioning somewhat as El does for Mike Wheeler, played by Finn Wolfhard) and turns out to not quite fit the bill, even if Dustin continues to recognize their mutual attachment and to elicit acknowledgement from Dart when encountering him again in the Upside Down. Where the attachment to E.T. represents a kind of alternative nurturing—one which the mother in the film is incapable of fully providing—the connection to Dart seems both a product of parental lack of involvement and a repetition of this failure to care.

A similar ambivalence may be visible in El’s ventures into the Upside Down in obedience to the demands of the man whom she thinks of as her father (Dr. Martin Brenner, played by Matthew Modine), the head of the laboratory who in fact abducted her from her mother. El moves in and out of the Upside Down, initially in the mode of the dutiful daughter, and later, after she has escaped the laboratory, in service to her friends. Her forays into the alternate dimension suggest a kind of horrific shock therapy, but of course the outcome of these explorations is not healing but the repetition of the initial traumas of abandonment and abuse. El’s destruction of the Demogorgon in the first season is visually linked to the destruction of Brenner himself. But it does not resolve her alienation from the human world.

While season one ends on the ambivalent theme of death and resurrection, season two concludes on a more directly upbeat note, since the children seem to have momentarily remedied the many dysfunctions rampant in their social and familial circles. As we pass from the first to the second season, the psychodynamics linking the characters to one another seem to become more and more formulaic, and perhaps more and more “postmodern,” often self-consciously so.[15] The family life of the characters circles around the same set of tensions and challenges, which can never fully be overcome or even set aside. At the same time, the landscape in which these dramas are set becomes more interesting, more penetrative and more engaging. The series returns again and again to the therapeutic trope, while also revealing that the structures or affects of attachment and care have no hold over plants or the Upside Down generally, thereby enabling the series to continue.

In season two, strange things happen not only in the forest but also in the fields and in the soil under the town, which is mined by a gigantic system of tunnels filled with fleshy roots. According to the logic of seriality established thus far, season three promises another eruption of the Upside Down into the temporarily restored normal life of the town rather than proffering resolution to the traumas and lost attachments that have so far proliferated in the series and will, no doubt, continue to multiply. What will be yet stranger in season three? As critics and as viewers, we might hope that the next season will bring some more consistent intermingling or interpenetration of the two dimensions, in which Hawkins becomes the Upside Down (or vice versa), thus giving up the investment in the therapeutic mode. However, the series is also clearly invested in maintaining the separation between the two worlds, since this separation is key to drawing out the plot: the two are never allowed quite to meet or combine, even as the one becomes more and more infested by the other. The therapeutic dimension of Stranger Things is its own kind of dead end, since it holds out hope for a resolution of the conflicts structuring the series but can never allow for an encounter with the alien on its own terms. It is a mechanism that turns around itself. At the end of the second season, we can thus ask: what is the function of those vines, spores, and monsters from the Upside Down? Are they simply kept at bay to provide more catharsis for the characters, even as they also serve to repeat, again and again, the trauma of a formative loss?

III.

Alternately, we can claim that the series does occasionally allow us to imagine a fruitful expansion of its own speculative dimension in the references to plant horror, but it does so with hesitation and, again, ambivalence. Plants are admittedly monstrous, dangerous figures, but they are also systems that structure and connect characters, places, and even memories. In this capacity, they once again open up affective possibilities that the characters are loath to acknowledge, especially insofar as both seasons labor to reach an ending in which the normalcy of the human world is reaffirmed after the invasion from the Upside Down is momentarily kept at bay. However, alongside yet apart from this return to the normal, as the vines and spores gradually take over Hawkins and are allowed to proliferate in the visual landscape of an “ordinary” small town, the series hints at the idea that the invasion makes a new, “weird” intimacy available to viewers and characters alike.

One of the most powerful visual and cinematic tools used in Stranger Things is the intercutting of scenes from the two dimensions, so that the action appears to be taking place simultaneously in reality and in the Upside Down. This technique is used not so much to show parallel events in two different places as actions that happen at the same place and time but are experienced in different modalities or according to different rules. For example, in a scene from episode three (season one), in which Nancy is having sex with Steve, shots of their sexual encounter are intercut with images of a more properly monstrous relation, itself an intimate one, in which Nancy’s best friend Barbara “Barb” Holland (Shannon Purser) is attacked by the Demogorgon. This cinematic rendering of two dimensions as intimately linked in time and space, although they remain irreconcilable, makes possible the invention of alternate affects linking the characters. In this scene in and around Steve’s house, two distinct filmic locations (outside the house and inside the bedroom) are interlinked, with the former repeating, in disturbing ways, some of the gestures of affection and desire from the first. Here the cinematography of Stranger Things opens onto non-normative intimacies, and, perhaps tellingly, fan appreciation has grown over time for Barb as a queer character. The initial episodes of the first season indeed allude to a mutual affection connecting Nancy and Barb (in an implicit departure from the otherwise heteronormative plot), even if only to all but ignore this affection after Barb’s exit from the series.

The other character lost to the Upside Down, Will, is also described as “queer” by his mother, in a comment attributed to Will’s rigidly authoritarian father, and as “gay” by some of his bullying classmates. But this allusion is only made in the context of the oppressive and coercive social forces exerted against non-normative sexualities. A more tacit, visual acknowledgment of queerness occurs in the violent scenes when both Barb and Will are coopted, in very physical ways, into the fleshy and pulpy regions of the Upside Down.

Perhaps we can view the disturbing encounters between Barb and the Demogorgon, or Will and the creatures of the Upside Down, as moments of what Timothy Morton has termed “dark” ecology, in an allusion both to the gloomy aesthetics of such scenes and to their ability to challenge social norms and boundaries. In The Ecological Thought, Morton affirms, reflecting both on what he calls the “mesh” of evolution and the aesthetics of creature horror: “That’s the disturbing thing about ‘animals’—at bottom they are vegetables” (68). Dark ecology thus sets us in relation with things that are unavoidably real but also announce the receding of the familiar parameters defining  our world and ourselves. Morton conceives this dark aesthetics as a non-individualist form of counter-culture, if not rebellion, one that operates nonetheless from within capitalism and the entertainment industry. Morton’s vegetables do not so much solicit connection as they allow us to stare down the holes that puncture our seemingly seamless reality. In the cases of both Will and Barb, however, Stranger Things seems to pose the question of the non-normative intimacies available in the Upside Down, perhaps its own space of rebellion or departure from normalcy, even as these intimacies are relegated to an apocalyptic zone and dropped from further narrative development. In this context, the vegetal is thus not given its own agency as a disruptor of the main plot. Barb and Will are abducted into the Upside Down; they do not enter it willingly. In Barb’s case, the initial encounter with the Demogorgon resembles an act of rape, and both Will and Barb are later shown to have been violently penetrated by the tendrils and tentacles of the Upside Down. The suggestion that this intimacy could be sought out is aggressively dismissed, then, in both instances. Here we should recall that the most famous plant horror scene in The Evil Dead is one of rape by a tree. The latent queerness of the Upside Down is clearly presented as a menace. As Jonathan’s father aptly remarks, pointing to the poster of the movie in his estranged son’s room: “Take it down! It is inappropriate.”

In the second season, however, the nature of the monster changes. At this point Stranger Things moves closer to imagining a threat—and a set of relations—that are more ecological than individual, more rhizomatic than merely monstrous. We discover that the Upside Down contains not one Demogorgon but a pack of “Demodogs” (a portmanteau word coined by Dustin), which are controlled by the elusive Mind Flayer (also called the Shadow Monster)—a force of nature that is itself not a single, centralized agent (although it does get visualized in the form of a giant spider) but a hive mind. Appearing as a ghostly presence only thanks to various now out-of-date technologies (most spectacularly a videotape played on a television set), the Mind Flayer evokes the evolution not of biological bodies but of electronic media, especially television, as these media come to inhabit and infest family life.[16] But the Mind Flayer is of course even stranger and more immediately horrifying than this sometimes frightening human intimacy[17] with electronic media, often seen as an intrusion into domestic and family life. U.S. popular film and television have long had a proclivity for capitalizing on the image of the “hive mind” to cultivate anxiety about collective identity early on associated with communist and socialist political and economic organizations—or simply with anything that seemed to threaten capitalist individualism. This is to a large extent the fear that Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers exploits quite effectively—the horror of losing one’s individual and authentic identity to an authoritative and de-individualizing social regime. The Mind Flayer not only cites this cultural trope but complicates it, in part by admitting this hive mind to be more American than has been generally or traditionally recognized, at least in the context of horror.

Tellingly, the Mind Flayer becomes another instance of the intersection of nature and technology that has been staged by the Upside Down all along. Critics like Akira Mizuta Lippit and Jussi Parikka have described the rich history of the entanglement of media with animals, with Parikka in particular zooming in on the use of insects for imagining new technological and mediatic possibilities including that of artificial intelligence.[18] Plant biologists Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, who have recently claimed that the existence of a “plant intelligence” opens up sci-fi-worthy possibilities for technological development, similarly characterize this intelligence as networked in a way akin to the insect hive mind or the behavior of human crowds.[19] The presence of the Mind Flayer draws out these intersections (between plant-animal and human, between ecologies and media, between outside and inside) thanks to its technological affinities and through its engagement with the children of Hawkins, who operate in swarms or decentered networks. Spielberg’s roving child bands take on a more ecological but also more technologically-informed cast.

Indeed, the “pack” of children who roam Hawkins is shadowed by the pack of  Demodogs, a veritable army of adolescent plant-animal creatures. In Parikka’s terms, the children’s encounters with the Upside Down “reveal . . .  a whole new world of sensations, perceptions, movements, stratagems, and patterns of organization that work much beyond the confines of the human world.”[20] It is the Upside Down that enables these new mediated experiences; in this respect it is a stand-in for the power that the intersection of the physical and the technological world has in shaping experience. The Upside Down is a hybrid zone where nature, body, affect, technology, and representation meet; it is more powerful than any board game, television program, or film can hope to be, because it supplements, intensifies, modifies, and outdoes the current configurations of techno-culture. This mixture of nature and technology is animate, agential, and actively intervening in our lives. In other words, media no longer haunts us but comes to live with us. As a life form, it is at once fleshy, rhizomatic, and machinic. An animal that is a vegetable, perhaps? From this perspective, we might begin to understand the effect of the Upside Down on the electrical grid—the first sign that something is wrong in Hawkins—as a symptom not just of the power of plant life but of the intertwining of vegetal and technological forces.

The Upside Down is not a figure of the excluded and exploited natural other or a cipher for the environment; it has a pulsating, vibrating materiality that is not human but swarming and spore-like, and it does not bring resolution to the social and psychological problems the characters face, or, when it does, it tends to affirm human exceptionalism. For all its aporia and hesitations, then, Stranger Things participates in the proliferation of a more intensely ecological mode of horror, one that privileges the plant not as a central character but as the end of character in the onset of the rhizomatic swarm. Moreover, the series underlines the links between the organic realm of the plant and the inorganic domain of the machine, troubling the divide between the two. At the same time, the series oscillates between exposing some of the traumas of American life—its submission to decentered flows of capital and to technologies that are marketed to individuals but operate by aggregating data and algorithms—and reverting to a therapeutic resolution to these traumas, however fleeting. Maybe we find here another inheritance from the 1980s, with its tentative attempts to organize a counter-culture from the elements presented to consumers in the service of corporate profiteering and the liberal marketplace, but in the guise of emancipation. Stranger Things offers us not so much a zone of outright rebellion as a mode of decisively weird bricolage.

Notes

[1] A small bibliography on plant horror has begun to emerge in recent years. See Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s edited collection, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016); T.S. Miller’s “Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies,” in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.3 (2012): 460-479; and our own “From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants: Plant Horror, Politics, and Vegetal Ontology,” in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media 34.1 (2012), 32-58. We note that a poster featuring Poe briefly appears in a high school classroom in Stranger Things.

[2] The influences on Stranger Things are obviously not only filmic. In interviews and discussions, the Duffer Brothers are explicit about the debt they owe to Stephen King as an author of horror fiction. Moreover, Spielberg is not the only important director cited by the series, which includes both direct and indirect references to the B-movie horror genre more generally, including the work of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and the aforementioned Sam Raimi.

[3] This reference inspired a wonderful blog post hosted on the Energy Department site: https://energy.gov/articles/what-stranger-things-didn-t-get-quite-so-right-about-energy-department.

[4] Spielberg’s 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, is set in Muncie, Indiana.

[5] See Matthew Battles’ Tree (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017) for an illuminating discussion of feral plants.

[6] The two film versions of The Invasion of Body Snatchers also make use of the de-individuating power of the plant trope, especially in the 1978 film, which highlights botanical references including the “grex” (a hybrid cultivar) and the vines that appear in the famous final scene. In Stranger Things, the defaced and defacing flowers, the dark forests, the fields, and the rhizomatic root systems are similarly invested with a defamiliarizing power.

[7] Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford, 2012), 2, 12.

[8] Ibid., 20.

[9] Ibid., 56-57. Stranger Things pays a kind of homage to this process with the character of Jonathan (played by Charlie Heaton), the big brother of Will Byers, whose fondness for The Clash is symptomatic of consumers who sought out narratives of rebellion while often remaining oblivious to the inefficacy of this consumption as a response to the economic processes that structured the decade. Jonathan Byers’s love for The Clash suggests the ability of free-market capitalism to harness the individualism of rebellion as a mode of consumption (even though Jonathan himself, the child of a working-class single mother, is marginalized and denigrated by the more well-to-do kids in the town). Of course, The Clash are aware of and sing elsewhere about precisely this paradox.

[10] Of course, the ending of Close Encounters, in which the hero leaves earth and his family behind, seems to entail an embrace of the alien and a rejection of the terrestrial life. Critics have remarked that this film is unusual in the context of an oeuvre that returns again and again to the primacy and psychological significance of the family.

[11]  Another may be the effect of the Duffer Brothers’ attachment to Stephen King, whose horror fiction is typically less reparative than Spielberg’s work. Often, the trauma that both induces and is caused by the horror, in King, cannot be or fails to be resolved.

[12] We are indebted to David Tomkins for these observations.

[13]  On the other hand, El is not consistently a benevolent or benign force (unlike, say, E.T.); the series remains ambivalent about her ability to heal, rather than generate, trauma.

[14] For an investigation of exposure as both theory and practice, see Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

[15] Here we once again seem to be in the domain of the intensification of the post-modern identified by Nealon as “post-postmodernism.”

[16] In Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce describes the perception of television as “alive” (to the extent that people treated their television sets as living entities, often as intruders). Sconce’s focus is on the 1950s, but the prominent role of the television set in 80s family life is also underscored by the Duffer Brothers. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke, 2000).

[17] “Variously described by critics as ‘presence,’ ‘simultaneity,’ instantaneity,’ ‘immediacy,’ ‘now-ness,’ ‘present-ness,’ ‘intimacy,’ ‘the time of the now,’ or, as Mary Ann Doane has dubbed it, ‘a This-is-going-on’ rather than a ‘This-has-been…,’ this animating, at times occult, sense of ‘liveness’ is clearly an important component in understanding electronic media’s technological, textual, and critical histories.” Sconce, 6.

[18] Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 2010).

[19] Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Benham (Island Press, 2015), 157.

[20] In Insect Media, Parikka thus describes “swarm intelligence” as a vital term for media theory, ix.

by Daniel Villegas Vélez

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective.

We listen before awakening. How could a sound—Agamemnon’s voice in Racine’s Iphigénie, for example—wake us up, if we were not listening in our sleep? This reflection opens Michel Chion’s Sound, an Acoulogical Treatise, suggesting that sound comes before everything else, yet is hardly grasped in the instant. Elaborating on the relation between sound and awakening, Chion reads a short text by Victor Hugo that begins “I hear some voices. Glimmers through my eyelid” (3). The poet goes on to describe a multiplicity of sonorous fragments from the waking world, including “a bell,” “shouts of swimmers,” “A trowel/[scraping] a roof,” “Impacts. Murmurs,” “Military music that comes in gusts,” “Hubbub on the quay. French voices. Merci,” and finally “A fly [that] enters. Immense breath of the sea.” (4) Through this opening acoustic tableau, Chion introduces sounds as unsettling and unstable events; with determinate and indeterminate sources: animal, mechanical, spoken, musical, and noisy; sounds that evoke directions, distance, the passing of time, and the wandering attention of the waking ear. The interest of Hugo’s privileged piece—the opening nine pages of Sound are devoted to a close reading of its sixteen verses—lies in the French poet’s attention to language’s capacity to qualify sounds as vague, definite, punctual, or transient.^[1] For Chion, sound is always in passing, often vaguely heard and only occasionally preserved, never without alteration. As he argues, it is in the nature of sound “to be often associated with something lost—with something that fails at the same time it is captured, and yet is always there” (3). In Sound, Chion follows the traces of this fleeting event across various media—literature, cinema, music—offering a renewed vocabulary to engage with sound’s distributed ontology and technological transformations.

The present book is not a history of sound, but it assumes that sound has a historical character, which is inseparable from both the types of questions we ask about its nature and its forms of production, mediation, and reception. As an object of study, the notion of sound is coetaneous with that of the modern subject: both arguably emerged together around Descartes’ Compendium Musicae (Descartes 1618). Written as a private gift for Isaac Beeckman and published later in 1650, the short text opens with the statement that “the object of this musical treatise is sound,” (huius objectum est sonus). Here, Descartes conceives of sound as resulting from vibrating strings of different lengths, perceived by a listener aware that her perception of sound differs from sound’s existence in itself (1618, 89). This opuscule, the first work on music to take the hearer as its starting point, ended a long tradition of speculative music theory focused on pure proportions—the microcosmic manifestations of a macrocosmic sonorous universe. In this tradition, sound as heard (and in this case only pure musical proportion or consonance) was the secondary manifestation of the immutable ratios that organized the cosmos. After this Copernican revolution, sound depends on the relation between subject and object in acts of perception in which the subject emerges as a self-grounded locus of cognition (Moreno 2004, 52). As a result, sound became either the object of acoustics as a branch of physics and later psychoacoustics, or was reduced to the musical entities—the triad, the tone—that came to dominate music theory in the West by the end of the nineteenth century; yet these entities, abstracted from their sounding context, are not necessarily audible—in some cases, they are necessarily not audible (Rehding 2000).

Like Descartes, Chion is concerned with the relation between sound as a physical occurrence and its human perception and cognition. Yet the object of Sound is of an entirely different kind: for Chion, sound is an event. Inextricable from its human audition, conditions of observation, and linguistic mediation, sound has an ambiguous status between a sign and an object. As he writes towards the end of the book, “that the question of sound as an object should remain problematic, contradictory even, means that sound is this contradiction” (210). Similarly, this contradiction is the object of his “acoulogical” treatise, which offers an account of how sound—a fleeting event—will have become the object of analysis and manipulation of contemporary musical practice, theory, and cinema.

Indeed, Chion has focused on exploring sound’s productive contradictions in diverse settings: as a composer of musique concrète, a musicologist, and a scholar of sound theory. Chion is best known in Anglo-American contexts by his work on film sound, most importantly through his books Audio-Vision and Film: A Sound Art, where he convincingly argues that cinema must be understood as an audiovisual medium; any approach that fails to rigorously account for the complex relations between sound and vision on the screen remains theoretically limited (2009, 2010). Chion has also published on the role of the voice in cinema (1999) in addition to numerous monographs on filmmakers including David Lynch (2006).^[2]

Sound, as published by Duke University Press, is a translation of the 2010 revised edition of Le Son: Traité d’acuologie (Chion 1998). The excellent English translation by James A. Steintrager contains 12 chapters divided into five sections. The first two sections explore sound in its multifariousness and ambiguity. Chapter 1 concludes with a psychoanalytical account of the ontogeny of listening to argue that language and listening emerge coextensively through the imitation of external sounds (15). Chapter 2 offers a critique of mechanicist models of listening, distinguishing between sound as a physical event and sound as heard/felt. Chion offers the word verberation to refer to sound as it exists in the physical world, as a wave composed solely of frequencies and amplitudes. Towards the end of the book, he opposes verberation to auditum—sound as perceived—as the main object of his newly defined acoulogy (192). Chion further explores sound in relation to time (chapter 3); the voice and language (chapter 4); and the distinction between musical sound and noise (chapter 5). These chapters are less argumentative in tone and aim, often reading more like an “omnium-gatherum”—or a collection of miscellanea—than a treatise proper. In fact, Chion remarks on how books on sound and listening (R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape [1977] and his own included) tend towards the rhapsodic, since sound does not belong strictly in a single field and cannot be exhausted from one privileged perspective. Sound, Chion writes, “is torn, like the body of Orpheus, between disparate disciplines” (195). The main effect of this disciplinary dispersion, as Chion approaches it, is to decenter traditional notions of the ear, the voice, and music as the privileged sites of theorization of sound, thus opening the book—and thought about sound in general—to wide ranging considerations that include literature, psychoanalysis, and cinema studies.

Having traced sound across temporal, disciplinary, and sensorial boundaries, Chion devotes the three argumentative sections that follow (chapters 6-12) to recover theoretically what the first part disseminated. In chapter 9, Chion argues that the possibility of capturing, transmitting, amplifying, fixing, and modifying the traces of all kinds of sonorous events has transformed sound at an ontological level—or perhaps what changed is how we conceive of what sound is (132). Through these technological transformations, we can listen to a sound repeatedly, and this possibility makes sound into a permanent, analyzable object that exceeds its function as a sonorous index interpreted as the effect of a given cause (149). In this respect, Sound is an exposition (with important revisions), of the work of Pierre Schaeffer (2017). A radio technician-turned-composer and amateur phenomenologist, Schaeffer questions the naive attitude that identifies a sound with its “cause,” reducing auditory experience to visual prejudice. During the 1960s, Schaeffer reflected on the experience—which he dubbed acousmatic—of listening to music on the radio without visual access to performing instruments and bodies, seeking to develop a musical practice of “concrete music,” that took advantage of this “pure” listening situation. A canonical figure in the history of music for his work on “found sound” composition or musique concrète, Schaeffer was a musician who considered the gramophone, tape recorder, and the cutting board as his instruments, proposed that the infinite repeatability of sounds afforded by phonography yields an entity with an independent, objective reality: a “sound object” (2017, 15).  The incessant repetition of a given sound—the paradigmatic broken record or “closed loop,” as Schaeffer called it—might transform our understanding of sound’s ontology. Schaeffer then developed a vocabulary and a philosophical approach, couched in Husserl’s phenomenology and Jakobson’s linguistics, to theorize sound as an object: a semi-stable, intentional entity different from its source or signal, dependent on, but irreducible to its “support” in a given recording medium, and disclosed by a mode of listening called “reduced listening.”

While Schaeffer makes his first appearance early in the treatise, Chion gives him most attention in Chapters 6-8. Chion has already produced a workable presentation of Schaeffer’s thought in his Guide to Sound Objects (Chion 1997).^[3] The present book, subtitled An Acoulogical Treatise, is again a lucid, encompassing exploration of listening that helps broadening our understanding of the sound object beyond its status as an acousmatic event. In fact, one of Chion’s most important contributions in this book is to demonstrate that the notion of acousmaticity is actually superfluous for a post-Schaefferian conception of sound. If acousmatic sound à la Schaeffer is sound listened to without regard to its cause, so as to provide new sonorous materials for vanguardist musical practice, then Chion’s redefined acoulogy—a term he borrows from Schaeffer himself—re-inscribes the sound object onto an expanded field beyond strictly musical applications (210). To this end, Chion overhauls “reduced listening”—which attends to sound as such, without regard to causes or effects—with several other helpful notions. For example, Chion introduces the term figurative listening to supplement Schaeffer’s distinction between causal listening (which treats sound as indexical) and semantic listening (which treats sound as a medium for the transmission of a coded meaning).^[4] While reduced listening attends to sound “in itself,” Chion remains interested in the ways the myriad other sounds enmeshed in daily life might also become an object of theoretical concern. Not every mode of listening that seeks to relate a sound to something beyond itself is naive, as Schaeffer’s account seems to imply. To be sure, there are “causalist” accounts that limit or “lock up sound…within a spatially delimited cause” (105), but there are other modes of listening in which causes or meanings need not—or must not—be banished to access what matters in a given sound. As it happens, it is almost impossible not to posit a cause for sounds or, in Chion’s paradigmatic example—the mother in Hitchcock’s Psycho—not to fold the voice back into the body (Chion 1999, 21). Disembodied voices (and by extension all acousmatic sound) carry an uncanny affect—often an obstacle for electroacoustic music, yet well exploited in cinema and literature—that propels us to posit the existence of a body as their source. In other words, there is no purely acousmatic sound.

Departing from Schaeffer, Chion sees causal listening as the unavoidable attempt to attribute a definite source to a given sound by extrapolating the source’s material characteristics from the sound’s perceived qualities (Chion calls these telling qualities “materializing sound indices” (103). However, one can distinguish between the real cause (the totality of interacting bodies, media, and spaces that produce a given sound) and the attributed cause (the element in this assemblage we deem most relevant when a describing a given sound), which might differ from the real cause but makes a sound meaningful in a specific context. In fact, a sound does not have a single real cause: sound is a distributed phenomenon involving bodies in contact, resonance spaces, transmitting media, physiological and psychoacoustic listening mechanisms, and so on. Chion suggests we use the phrase “the sound of a piano” to refer to the real cause, and “piano sound” to refer to the attributed cause—where, for example, a synthesizer produces the piano sound (115). In opposition to these two forms of causal listening, figurative listening is not concerned with a sound’s real or attributed causes. Instead, it describes what the sound suggests or represents. Chion’s new mode of listening reincorporates into sound everything that Schaeffer’s bracketing left behind in its attempt to produce a “pure” sounding material that could be used in musique concrète. Through figurative listening, we can approach sound as a sign that is not exhausted by its function as index, icon, or symbol, but which does not give up these functions either. Instead, it preserves both material and figural dimensions, much like the written word is suspended between its textual form and its reference.

Most readers interested in sound can profit from Chion’s exposition and development of Schaeffer, whether they are already familiar with the theory of the sound object but also if they are hesitant to engage Schaeffer’s notoriously arcane—and until recently, untranslated—prose. Moreover, in taking Schaeffer’s theory beyond its purely musical concerns, Chion transforms sound in general into a critical term—akin to the literary notion of text—that holds great promises for interdisciplinary research. Through this transformation, critics can reincorporate causes, meanings, contexts, and non-musical uses of sound into theoretical concerns without returning to the naive notion sound as index, while expanding the applications of the theory of the sound object to musicology, literary theory, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and film studies. Conspicuously missing from this enumeration is the emerging field of sound studies. For the latter, Chion offers not only possible applications, but also a formalized, general theory of sound still lacking in the field.

If the Guide to Sound Objects sought to synthesize Schaeffer’s thought into a manageable and utilitarian form, Sound takes the opposite approach, preserving only a selection of Schaeffer’s key terms, while complicating them and thus enlarging their scope and applicability. Yet, as the heading of one section puts it, “there is no getting around Schaeffer” (188). In the penultimate chapter, Chion offers a succinct presentation of Schaeffer’s vocabulary for describing a sound object’s perceived characteristics, as disclosed through reduced listening. Already in the Treatise, Schaeffer called for abandoning the notion of timbre, for him a confused category that subsumed many distinguishable features under what Chion calls “a fundamentally causalist notion” (174).[5] Where timbre can only name a source or at best a texture, Schaeffer approaches sound as composed of two dimensions: mass (how a sound occupies the field of pitch) and sustainment (how a sound extends or not in terms of duration) (175). In turn, these two aspects yield nine categories (in Chion’s simplified typology) that allow organizing almost every kind of sound, from “continuous tonic” sounds to “varied iterative” sounds (176). Once the typology is established, one can describe a sound’s morphological qualities in terms of mass, dynamic profile, harmonic timbre, grain, bearing (or allure in French), melodic profile, and mass profile (178). This basic scheme is less a rigorous classificatory system than a heuristic model to describe sounds. It has the potential to become a shared language for sound students from all disciplines if taught as part of introductory sound courses that might supplement or even replace the standard music theory sequence.

Chion follows this helpful exposition with a discussion of common objections to the theory of the sound object. He swiftly dispatches critics who claim that Schaeffer’s system fails to accommodate all sounds, particularly those with ambiguous typological or morphological criteria that seem to exceed the given parameters. Chion defends Schaeffer here, explaining that unlike the differential system of language described by Saussure, the “meaning” of the sound object does not reside in either/or decisions (182). The descriptive approach, instead, seeks to disclose aspects of sound that we often subsume under broad oppositions, like tone/noise, for example. For Chion, however, Schaeffer’s real shortcoming is that he gives too little attention to the sound object’s behavior in space, like the distance from the real or imaginary sound source, or the presence of reverberations that might alter or entirely change a sound’s morphology. Sounds change depending on the space and conditions of listening. By disregarding these transformations, Chion argues, Schaeffer ends up defining the sound object “as outside of space” (186).

Chion ascribes Schaeffer’s disregard for these spatial considerations to his attempt to conceptualize the sound object as, precisely, a self-same object with defined limits and boundaries. Chion’s objections are thus, first, that Schaeffer’s sound object conforms to “an ideal of ‘good form,’” and second, that it is still “defined from a naturalistic perspective” (186). “In other words,” Chion continues, Schaeffer

leaves aside the fact that the object is only repeatable, observable, and definable by dint of a recording medium and that it thus exists by being fixed. In fact, Schaeffer’s sound object is supposed to correspond to the laws of a logical and total acoustic unfolding; it is supposed to be born or burst forth, then unfold and decay “naturally,” in accordance with an acoustic model whereas in fact it is only accessible as an object of observation insofar as the technical conditions, by which it is fixed, make it escape these acoustic laws and allow for the generation, by a simple process of sampling, of an object like any other. (186)

Brian Kane (2016) has leveraged a similar critique of the theory of the sound object in Sound Unseen, a book that might stand next to Sound as one of the best accounts of Schaeffer’s theory in English. Kane argues that Schaeffer’s theory of the sound object is “mythological” and “phantasmagoric,” since it conceives of acousmaticity and reduced listening in a way that leads to the occultation of production, thus committing itself “to an ahistorical view about the nature of musical material” (Kane 2016, 37). Schaeffer’s sound object—an object different from its source, which can be studied, analyzed, and worked upon—turns out to be a reified, ideal entity, not unlike the tone and the triad we invoked earlier. As Kane puts it, the sound object “is heard in sounds, but must also be distinguishable from the actual sonorousness of sounds. The sound object is not in itself sonorous” (Kane 2016, 34). Kane indicts Schaeffer on three counts: for his reliance on phenomenology, for his “phantasmagoric view of technology,” and for his reliance on “myth”—the famous Pythagorean acousmatic veil and the reverence held by Schaeffer’s students. Together these flaws deliver the theory of the sound object to ideology (Kane 2016, 41).

Kane’s critique brings into focus the most obvious gap in Chion’s own response to Schaeffer, namely the absence of any concern with the political in a general sense. While Chion corrects Schaeffer’s dismissal of technological mediation as inseparable from the sound object’s essence, this acknowledgment does not immediately reincorporate everything the sound object had bracketed, as Kane would expect. Here, the sound object remains relatively apolitical. Chion’s study is unashamedly Eurocentric, only reaching for any hint of “cultural difference” by means of quasi-stereotypical praises of Japanese haiku or the presumed richness of “other” cultures’ vocabulary to describe sound. Its predominantly Francophone emphasis is balanced in the last chapter by Chion’s project of developing an “international lexicological database” that attempts to gather an inventory of words, in every language, that accurately designate and qualify sonic impressions (226). In Sound, the “international” aspect remains circumscribed to French and German—supplemented by Steintrager’s English, which is at its best in this section—but one expects future, less Eurocentric endeavors. In all, the emerging field of sound studies has already begun to face its ethnocentric limitations. Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes (2018) have recently called for a remapping of sound studies grounded on the Global South, questioning the field’s relationship to technology and the conception of a linear history that underpins it, and its humanist conception of the ontology of sound. At a time of rising awareness of the political stakes of ontological claims, the latter issue—whether we can think of sound independently from its human listeners—is poised to become a central point of contention in sound studies. For Steingo and Sykes, we should at once acknowledge “the ontology of sound from a posthumanist perspective (i.e., there exists an independently real or noncorrelational entity beyond human experience) and cultural differences in prehending sound” (2018). At the same time, James Lavender, Annie Goh, and Marie Thompson have called attention, in a recent issue of parallax, to how the field’s return to ontology and embrace of new materialisms risk preserving the racial and patriarchal exclusions that vitiate these new trends (Lavender 2017). An alternative approach might resemble Dominic Pettman’s invitation to “listen to the world” as if every being had a voice, to decenter the privilege we still ascribe to the human (Pettman 2017). As these authors remind us, concerns about the theoretical and political complicities between sound studies and the disciplines that inform it must be prioritized in forthcoming theories of sound and listening. Predating the turn to ontology and concerns with the Anthropocene, the first edition of Sound nonetheless rethinks traditional distributions of the senses and examines their technological mediation from an authoritative and informed perspective, making this new translation a critical contribution to a new generation of engaged sound studies.

Yet another issue arises from the metaphysics that underlie Schaeffer’s “dogged pursuit of sound as object” (188). Kane avoids the problem by abandoning the notion of “object” altogether and conceiving of sound exclusively as an event: the result of a source, a cause, and an effect, in which the latter underdetermines the former two, giving rise to a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety (Kane 2016, 147). For Chion, instead, sound remains an ambiguous entity between an event and its fixed traces. Critiques to Schaeffer notwithstanding, he insists that we ultimately cannot entirely “reify” sound into an object. According to Chion, sound lacks a self-same identity: it remains unstable, hard to isolate in time and space, given to contamination by sources, references, and the other senses (194-203). Sound, Chion argues, is unlike any other object. It is divided phenomenologically between verberation and auditum, and sensorially between hearing and touch (206); it is distributed across its multiple mediations through reproduction technologies. Most importantly, sound has a particular relation to time that distinguishes it from objects that endure: in sonic space, we perceive simultaneity in terms of succession (10). As Chion insists from the beginning of the book, the temporality of sound is tied to—and conditioned by—perception and attention, which lag behind the event of sound and have a limited “window” for grasping a sound as an individual entity. Hence, Chion writes, “we systematically listen in the past tense” (28). Paradigmatic examples of this deferred perception include situations in which we miss a word in a sentence, yet recall it seconds later (36), or the sudden awareness that a sound—an air conditioner, for example—has ceased, even if we were not conscious of it before (38). One can define many compositional, analytical, and technological tools and strategies solely as attempts to grapple with sound’s evanescent nature, as Chion does through many pages devoted to articulating how different aspects of sound are captured and forsaken in various types of notation and recording (214-222).

Yet, the fact that we can record and play back a sound—and this is perhaps Chion’s most important rebuttal to Schaeffer—does not mean that sound loses “its quality of event, ripping through the silence, surging forth.” Recording does not abolish sound’s perishability; we must replay the sound in order to hear it, “thus setting into motion a movement of loss and passing” (33). If all listening is in the past tense, then it makes little sense to distinguish between a sound and its recorded trace. The idea of a recorded sound implies the existence of a prior sonic reality captured by a medium with more or less “fidelity” (135). Moreover, listening to a recorded sound—or a “fixed sound,” in Chion’s parlance—still takes time (31). The presence of a sound in the medium that Schaeffer thought would make it into a stable object still yields further deferrals; repeated listening will never produce a stable, autonomous object. Under the banner of Husserl’s phenomenology, Schaeffer sought to capture the invariant qualities of sounds, through multiple auditions, to attain an ideal sound object. For Chion however, each iteration further defers and transforms the auditum. Even under reduced listening, all sounds are traces, recorded or not.

Much of the emphasis on sound’s constitutive perishability relies on commonplace opposition between vision and sound, where permanent, visual objects are opposed to ephemeral auditory events—what Jonathan Sterne called the “audiovisual litany,” or what Rey Chow and Steintrager called the “Romantic paradigm.” (Sterne 2003, 15; Chow and Steintrager 2011, 4). Yet, as redescribed by Chion, sound attests to the way language and signification depend on constantly producing differences and deferring their arrival. If we cannot treat sound as an object, this might be because no object is present as such. Thus, instead of being an exceptional event among a world of objects, sound’s temporality might suggest instead that we live among events, even if we insist on treating them as objects. Perhaps we might invert Schaeffer and Chion to suggest—with Jacques Derrida—that, rather than treating sound as an object, we should think of objects in general under the paradigm of sound. Perhaps this is what Jean-Luc Nancy (who is entirely absent from Sound) suggests when he speaks—preserving the middle voice of différance—of resonance (Nancy 2007).

Ironically, the only explicit mention Chion makes of Derrida is to criticize his treatment of the phenomenon of “hearing-oneself-speak.” According to Chion, Derrida fails to “investigate the oddness of this situation, which in my judgment he turns too quickly into a ‘seamless’ experience of self-presence” (94). This is by now a typical move for writers still threatened by Voice and Phenomenon, as if Derrida’s critique of Husserl were a general indictment of listening, the voice, or sound in general (Derrida 1967). Granted, Derrida does not say much about listening as such in this text. Anti-Derridean sound students tend to criticize Derrida for not thinking long enough about sound, not going deep enough, or not getting the point at all.^[6] What is more, as Chion exemplarily does here, Derrida’s critics will offer a reconstruction of his argument where Derrida is made to defend the position he is in fact in the process of deconstructing: in this case that hearing-oneself-speak is “a ‘seamless’ experience of self-presence.” Chion is right in emphasizing that the voice that we hear is never ours, that it is never immediately heard, and that this places the subject’s phantasmic identity in crisis—but this is precisely what Derrida argues. The payoff of this dismissal is that Chion can continue to examine sound from a phenomenological perspective—one closer to Don Ihde’s (2007) Listening and Voice than to Schaeffer’s Husserlian experiments. A good example is Chion’s phenomenological description of “ergo-audition,” in which one is at the same time the listener and emitter of a sound (91). Nevertheless, Chion elsewhere displays what Steintrager, in his illuminating introduction to Sound, calls a “helpful fuzziness [that] might be seen as deconstruction in action,” while also remarking that Chion cannot be easily fitted in a single theoretical shelf (xix).

Like the object it discusses, Sound is an accomplished and broad-ranging book that straddles many disciplines and remains obedient to none. This is not the author’s concession or infatuation with fashionable interdisciplinarity and its attending woes.^[7] Schaeffer had already subtitled his Traité des objets musicaux an essai interdisciplines (sic), borrowing freely from anthropology, structural linguistics, and phenomenology, as well as musicology and his practice as a composer. Chion adds literature, psychoanalysis, and cinema studies into the mix, affording sound students with multiple avenues in which to continue our research. Perhaps, most urgently, we should focus on the political gaps left in a conversation that, for the most part, has remained within a certain cultural monolingualism. Steintrager’s accomplished translation of Chion’s Sound is a formidable start, but sound students must keep their ears ever open to difference in all its resonant forms.

References

Chion, Michel. 1997. Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale. Paris: Buchet/Chastel; Institut National de l’audiovisuel.

———. 1998. Le Son: Traité d’acuologie. Cinema et Image. Paris: Nathan-Université.

———. 1999. The Voice in Cinema. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2006. David Lynch. London: BFI.

———. 2009. Film, a Sound Art. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2010. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chow, Rey, and James A. Steintrager. 2011. “In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An Introduction.” Differences 22 (2–3):1–9. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1428816.

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Descartes, René. 1618. “Compendium Musicae.” In Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, X:79–142. Paris: J. Vrin.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2015. Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Erlmann, Veit. 2010. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New York, NY: Zone Books.

Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Kane, Brian. 2016. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kramer, Lawrence. 2016. The Thought of Music. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Kramnick, Jonathan. 2017. “The Interdisciplinary Fallacy.” Representations 140 (1):67–83. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2017.140.1.67.

Lavender, James. 2017. “Introduction: Sounding / Thinking.” Parallax 23 (3):245–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339962.

Moreno, Jairo. 2004. Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Pettman, Dominic. 2017. Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rehding, Alexander. 2000. “The Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2):345–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/832011.

Schaeffer, Pierre. 2017. Treatise on Musical Objects: Essays Across Disciplines. Translated by Christine North and John Dack. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Steingo, Gavin, and Jim Sykes. 2018. “Remapping Sound Studies.” Text. Franklin Humanities Institute. February 22, 2018. https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/remapping-sound-studies/.

Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Woessner, Martin. 2017. “The Sociologists and the Squirrel — Review of ‘Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary.’” The B2o Review, July. https://www.boundary2.org/2017/07/martin-woessner-the-sociologists-and-the-squirrel-review-of-georg-simmel-and-the-disciplinary-imaginary/.

^[1] Many more writers, mostly French—Rabelais, Stendahl, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Proust, Mallarmé, but also Kafka and Rilke—populate the pages of Sound, and Chion is at his best as a collector and reader of literary attention to sound. He also draws profitably from the cinema of Jacques Tati, Francis Ford Coppola, Ingmar Bergman, and Sergio Leone among others.

^[2] Sound retakes much of this work, particularly in chapter 10, where Chion explores the various ways sound and vision interact in cinema noting, for example, that we seem to understand simultaneous punctual sonic and visual events as a single event manifesting itself aurally and visually (“synchresis”), or that sounds seem to “attach” themselves to visible causes on screen, even when they are coming from loudspeakers placed elsewhere in the room (“spatial magnetization”). The audiovisual couple, for Chion, creates a specific novel entity, “akin to a chord or interval in music” (151).

^[3] An English translation by John Dack and Christine North is available as a PDF at the EARS: ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (http://ears.pierrecouprie.fr)

^[4] In this text, Chion seems less interested in Schaeffer’s well-known account of the four modes of listening—écouter, entendre, comprendre, and ouïr (Schaeffer 2017, 74). (See Kane 2016, 26–30 for an exposition of these modes of listening,).

[5] Chion (2011) continues his attack on the notion of timbre.

^[6] See, for example, Erlmann (2010); Eidsheim (2015); Kramer (2016).

^[7] For recent critiques of interdisciplinarity, see Kramnick (2017); Woessner (2017).

by Sadia Abbas

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. It is the third in a three-part series on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. The first part was written by Jesse Oak-Taylor, and the second part was written by Ursula K. Heise. 

Less than ten pages into The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, in a passage that also explains the title of the book, Amitav Ghosh summons the judgment of people from a future in which Kolkata, New York and Bangkok are uninhabitable, and the Sundarbans have been swallowed by rising seas.[1] In this time:

When readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance?  And when they fail to find them—what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness will come to be known as the Great Derangement (Ghosh 2017: 11).

Ghosh’s summoning of the future enables a series of dismissals of literature, which are in turn, shakily poised on shifting claims about literary fiction.  The book is divided into three parts—”Stories,” “History,” “Politics”—each of which serves in different ways to address the crisis of climate change and the “great derangement” of our times.  Yet, despite its division into these three parts, the rather protean claims about literature, with art thrown in, frame, drive, and are symptomatic of, many of the confusions of the book.  The target keeps shifting, literature and art changes to mostly literature (art has done better it turns out), to realist literature, to literary fiction, to the gatekeepers of literary fiction.

If the book launches the attack on the failures of art and literature in our times early, it concludes with a rousing vision of their possible transformation:

The struggle for action will no doubt be difficult and hard fought, and no matter what it achieves, it is already too late to avoid some serious disruptions of the global climate.  But I would like to believe that out of this struggle will be born a generation that will be able to look upon the world with clearer eyes than those that preceded it; that they will rediscover their kinship with other beings, and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature (162).

And yet, so much has been discarded along the way, so many times has the argument stumbled and contradicted itself, that this conclusion is anything but convincing.

Assuming, for a moment, that the future would care about us, enough of what we have to say and produce would survive, that anything we produce would (or should) be intelligible to those who come long after us, and that summoning such a judgment is not merely an act of historical narcissism, one might be tempted to give counter-examples: for instance, sticking with the mostly Anglophone for now, what would this putative future audience do if the art and literature that survives is (say) a fragment or two of the David Mitchell novels, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet, Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Ceremony and memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, Andreas Gursky’s photographs of landfills, an online curated exhibition such as the Philippines-centered Center for Art and Thought’s Storm: A Typhoon Haiyan Recovery Project,[2] Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, any one of a series of Mahasweta Devi short stories, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Carpentaria, Shahzia Sikander’s reimagining of oil extraction machines as Christmas trees in her animation Parallax, any of the three novels in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s X/Self and  China Mieville’s The Scar?  As is probably evident, most of these examples are taken from Australian and American Native, Carribbean and African-American writers, many address the crisis of climate change in the context of the crisis of modernity, race, racialized gender violence, and capitalism ranging back to the sixties.  My point, of course, is that writers and artists have been addressing climate change and its relation to capitalism and modernity with subtlety, care and broad visions of social transformation for a long time.

But the structure of the book is such that the argument is, in fact, impervious to counter-example—not because the broad generalizations hold true and counter-example would be trivial and miss the point, but because Ghosh alternately spins around and hollows out his claims. He gives numerous names of people who are apparently doing some sort of acceptable or even good (Barbara Kingsolver and Liz Jensen) literary work but that turns out not to be enough. Even as much is let back in in bits and pieces, the general dismissal is never withdrawn, which makes one wonder what the function of the qualifications is.[3] How many does it take to make a trace?[4]

It is around the concept of literary fiction that most of the contradictions cluster. Ghosh tells us that, when writing The Hungry Tide, he encountered the challenges presented by the “the literary forms and conventions” that gained ascendancy in the very era during which the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was coming to reshape the future of the earth (7).  The limitations there, it turns out, were those of the realist novel. This then leads into the next section, which begins with the failures of literary fiction understood as, at least in part, failures of reception and designation by such publications as “the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Review of Books [sic]” where, when the subject of climate change comes up, it is usually in reference to non-fiction, where, moreover, the mention of the subject is enough to “relegate” a novel or a short story to the genre of sci-fiction (7)

This would seem like a great opportunity to question the very distinction between literary and genre fiction, to go, for instance, where Kazuo Ishiguro does—magnificently. Not only has Ishiguro written a powerful and profoundly ironic detective novel, When We Were Orphans, an eerie and haunting science-fiction novel, Never Let me Go, and a wonderful fantasy one, The Buried Giant, he has also refused to get drawn into the debate pitting genre against literary fiction, despite Ursula K. LeGuin’s accusation that he was denigrating fantasy in the service of lit-fict. loftiness, for which Le Guin subsequently apologized (LeGuin, 2015).

Ishiguro’s responses about both Never Let me Go and The Buried Giant are instructive.  About Never Let Me Go: “I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent. All the debate around Never Let Me Go was, ‘is it sci-fi or is it not?’”

About Le Guin’s challenge and The Buried Giant:  “I think she [Le Guin] wants me to be the new Margaret Atwood…. If there is some sort of battle line being drawn for and against ogres and pixies appearing in books, I am on the side of ogres and pixies… I had no idea this was going to be such an issue.”  By contrast, Ghosh writes: “It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel” (7).  Invoking the authority of Margaret Atwood, later in the book, he dismisses sci-fi and cli-fi to argue that they do not help as they deal with the future and not the present and the past.

So, of course, examples such as Butler, Mitchell, Mieville, Wright are of no use here, regardless of the fact that all of these writers provide imaginative and thoughtful literary engagements with precisely what it means to exist in the age of mass consumption and hubristic technological madness, what it means to encounter the non-human and attempt to co-exist, what it means also to confront the brutal cupidity and indifference to the planet that has brought us where we are today. Moreover, it would appear that “traces and portents,” including in—perhaps specially in—disaster stories and apocalyptic narratives, are precisely what speculative fiction/sci-fi/ cli-fi (choose your designation) offer.  Why, in any case, should we assume that, even if the future is interested in the mess we bequeath (assuming that there is a human future to bequeath it to), it will share our literary prejudices?

Reducing speculative fiction, sci-fi or apocalyptic fiction merely to futures, interplanetary travel and disaster, as if those themselves have no signifying capacity beyond pure plot and event, seems to suggest that allegory, metaphor, symbol, figuration itself have no role to play.  Moreover, it suggests a rather circumscribed notion of reading practices:  Can a book about the future or about the past not be about the present? Really?

There is occasion here for re-thinking the history of the novel from which the gothic, ghost stories, H.G Wells somehow fall off in the twentieth-century.  In other words, it’s an opportunity to argue that literary fiction—especially as defined by Ghosh and as practiced in the U.S.—is too truncated and accepts a profoundly evacuated genealogy.  Ghosh does this perhaps most successfully in his critique of John Updike’s dismissal of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, picking up on an argument he first made in his seminal essay, “Petrofiction,” which is frequently referred to in works in the environmental humanities. Yet again, however, the attempted account of the history of literature gets bogged down in claims about science fiction, as we’ll see a little later.

There is much at stake in Ghosh’s argument. The transformation of literature he imagines is merely a part of the larger need for the transformation of society as a whole, including the rethinking of modernity, for which many have been calling for a long time.  One iteration of this in the environmental humanities is presented in Ursula Heise’s description of her thesis for Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species:

however much individual environmentalists may be motivated by a selfless devotion to the well-being of non-human species, however much individual conservation scientists may be driven by an eagerness to expand our knowledge and understanding of the species with whom we co-habit the planet, their engagements with these species gain socio-cultural traction to the extent that they become part of the stories that human communities tell about themselves: stories about their origins, their development, their identity, and their future horizons (Heise 2010: 5).

Some of the challenges that Ghosh addresses in “Petrofiction” are taken up in The Glass Palace in the representation of the way the teak industry transforms social life and with more power and success in the Sea of Poppies, in which he undertakes the task of critically representing capitalism from below.  The novel presents the stories of a number of people who come together as coolies and indentured workers on a ship bound for Mauritius, in the context of the Opium trade.  It’s a powerful representation of the transformation of social life by the commodity. The poppy is everywhere, threaded into everyday life even as the colonial demand for its cultivation restructures society completely, forcing people into poverty and starvation.  There are many wonderful things about the novel:  the bringing together of the ensemble cast of renegades, fugitives and castaways on the symbol of capitalist modernity: the repurposed slave ship; the careful examination of caste, scenes of the growing friendship in prison between the Chinese-Parsi opium addict Ah Fatt and aristocratic Brahmin, Neel, that perform a way of “being together in brokenness” (Harney and Moten, 19),[5] the wonderful ending that doesn’t end, leaving the fugitives in the middle of the ocean, a powerful narrative correlative of Fred Moten’s and Stephen Harney’s fugitivity.

In the very different, The Hungry Tide, the novel that perhaps most explicitly resonates with the challenge Ghosh presents (or confronts) in The Great Derangement, Ghosh stages a confrontation between a technocratic secular modernity that has little understanding of the environment and an older knowledge of the earth, in a love triangle involving a marine biologist, Piya, looking for the river dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris, a fisherman, Fokir, and translator and businessman from Delhi, Kanai.  Fokir’s wife, Moyna, who desires an urbanized upward mobility is aligned with Kanai. Fokir is a particularly fine creation—a usually silent, to many: sullen, man, with a profound and largely unappreciated knowledge of the rivers and the region. The biologist needs the fisherman’s knowledge of the river and is able to recognize its value and is thus able to see him in a way that others around him cannot. Some of the most powerful scenes in the novel are on the river or on its banks.  It is an imaginative reconciliation of modern science and indigenous, older knowledge which nonetheless exposes the limitations of managerial technocracy, and my somewhat clinical and synoptic description does not do justice to the novel, which is moving and, in its engagement with nature, quite powerful, precisely because it risks sentimentality but manages not to be maudlin.

So why would a writer who can do this, who can manifest such a sympathetic imagination be so needlessly dismissive?

Perhaps the answer lies in two incidents:

In 1978 Ghosh survived a tornado.  As he describes it: “the tornado’s eye had passed directly over me. It seemed to me that there was something eerily apt about that metaphor: what had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld.”  Since then, he tells us, he has returned repeatedly to the cuttings he made from newspapers at the time with the hope of putting those events into a novel but has failed at every attempt—this leads into a long bit on notions of probability and improbability and how they affect the parameters of novelistic form.

In a section discussing the vulnerability of cities like Mumbai to climate change, he recalls approaching his mother after reading a World Bank report that made him realize that the house in which his mother and sister live borders one of the neighbourhoods most at risk.  When he suggests that she move, however, she looks at him as if he had “lost [his] mind” (53).  This encounter makes him realize that individuals can’t be relied on to act rationally on this; there will have be collective, institutional and statist responses to the reorganization of living required by climate change.

Both incidences are instances of Ghosh’s powerlessness: as a writer unable to represent a moment of helplessness and terror in which he thinks he wasn’t invisible to the power that could have killed him and as a son unable to get his mother to let him protect her.  Neither instance is trivial, but when they are held up to the terms of his own argument they become part of its contradictions, and perhaps explain the rhetorical decibel level of the book.

The underlying suggestion in the book, that writers, critics, literature itself and to a lesser extent artists have failed Ghosh because they are unable to account for, or give voice to, his encounter with the tornado or because they cannot provide the tools to get his mother to move, makes his own concerns and experiences central in a way that would seem to align him with the high bourgeois and Romantic tradition that is very much an aspect of the era of carbon accumulation and extraction.  It is a constitutive part of a moment that gives us the rise of the novel and the emergence of the modern bourgeois subject, for whom the world must turn, that Ghosh seems to want to surpass.

Yet, that Ghosh has a particular fondness for Romanticism is evident from the way that Rilke figures in The Hungry Tide.  Moreover, in section 16 of Part one of The Great Derangement, Ghosh argues that the partitioning of “Nature and Culture” was resisted in “England, Europe and North America under the banners of romanticism, pastoralism, transcendentalism, and so on. Poets were always in the forefront of the resistance, in a line that extends from Holderlin and Rilke to such present day figures as Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin” (Ghosh 2017: 69). This is also the section in which Ghosh begins by seeming to protest the hiving of science fiction from “serious” literature and ends by confirming the distinction while invoking Atwood. How Ghosh can reconcile his critique of Updike’s demand for “individual Moral adventure” in Munif’s work, and his own synoptic (and in academic circles standard and somewhat routinized) critique of the rise of Protestantism and of Protestant individualism and moralism with such an account of transcendentalism and Romanticism is a question for a longer essay.

In the preceding segment (section 15), Ghosh discusses the famous vacation that Byron, John Polidori and the Shelleys took together in 1816.  Some of the writing that came out of it is mentioned: Frankenstein, Byron’s “Darkness,” Polidori’s The Vampyre.  “Darkness” is cited as an example of “climate change despair,” Frankenstein as a piece of fiction that had not yet been hived of from “serious” literature” but soon would.[6] It might be useful to think about a poem that Ghosh doesn’t mention but which also came out of that vacation: Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.” The poem provides a vivid meditation on the difficulty of an encounter with the non-human, especially the non-human as encountered as sheer, raw, indifferent power and nature.  At the same time the concluding (and baffling) three lines seem to articulate the human need to repudiate that which will not make itself available, that will not, that is, make itself intelligible:

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, 

If to the human mind’s imaginings 

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

In this era of what we now sometimes call the Anthropocene, what if what’s truly unthinkable is that, even as we have the power to affect the earth’s destiny, wrapped in its raw power, the non-human (the cyclone, the tornado, the mountain, Shelley’s “Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane”) whether thunderous or silent, does not see us?  What if any engagement with the non-human will have to take more seriously its sheer recalcitrance, its unavailability and opacity?

At the same time, one might remember the challenge that Edward Kamau Brathwaite poses to Shelley in his own poem “Mont Blanc,” in X/Self, a line (“it is the first atomic bomb”) from which, he writes in the notes, is: “the pivot of the Euro-imperialist/Christine [sic] mercantilist aspect of the book” (Brathwaite 1987, 118).  Of course, in some ways what Brathwaite says of that line applies to the poem as whole, which thus works in powerful counterpoint to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” I quote here the opening:

Rome burns

and our slavery begins

in the alps

oven of europe

glacier of god…” (31)

The poem goes on to become a powerful meditation on the relationship between Europe and Africa, empire, apocalypse, European empire as apocalypse, climate change and nature.  If we are to speak in broad historical terms then, even in the Romantic literary tradition, the non-human and the inhuman—the inhumanity of Europe in the name of the human—are not always easily separated. And thus, as Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin have written in the context of a reading of X/Self, Carpentaria, and Curdella Forbes’s Ghosts, in a passage in which they also addresses Dipesh Chakrabarty’s two essays on climate change from which much of Ghosh’s argument seems derived and in response to which he appears to develop some of his arguments about the non-human:

One scenario…involves a rethinking of the human; another requires thinking beyond it. For Dipesh Chakrabarty, who is primarily concerned with the first, global warming poses a new challenge to postcolonial criticism in so far as it enjoins postcolonial critics to think, not just of the continuing history of inequality on the planet, but of  ‘the survival of the species’ and the future of the planet itself (2012:15). At another level, however, global warming requires postcolonial critics to do just the opposite: to return to basic questions of inequality, including those linked to histories of slavery and colonialism, but to rethink these in ecological terms. (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 90).

It’s probably clear by now that I don’t disagree with Ghosh that our imaginative structures and modes of identification, dominant forms of urban life, city planning, the culture of extraction and consumption, notions of the sovereign subject and habits of bourgeois moralism need to be rethought.  Moreover, although The Great Derangement doesn’t much engage justifiable questions—about why the era should be called the Anthropocene and not for, instance the Capitolocene, or why the indigenous in numerous contexts whose habits of existence were not historical contributors to climate change should be yanked into the Anthropos designated by the Anthropocene—it does raise some important questions, not least for postcolonial studies: for instance did colonialism slow climate change by arresting development in places like India? What would be the consequences for re-imagining postcolonial states and political structures with that in mind? Equally significant is his argument for engaging and understanding the importance of Asia to any account of climate change, both for reasons of geography and of the size of the continental population.[7]

It is not clear to me, however, that framing the issue around the question of literature as reduced to literary fiction, even as a symptom of the undeniable imaginative social failures of modern capitalism and neoliberalism gets us there—especially as so many artists and writers and critics are trying, however inadequately, to confront the looming disaster. I say “inadequately” not because of the limitations of the work but because of the magnitude of the task and the power of the resistance to change. Perhaps the bourgeois realist novel is indeed part of the problem, especially as product of the social transformations attendant on the rise of capitalism, but then perhaps Ghosh’s sticking to an elaboration of why that is the case and of what its failures are emblematic might have helped. Misreading symptoms doesn’t often enable recovery.

The transformations of community, society and imagination needed may take many expressions, novels—realist, sci-fi, cli-fi, magical-realist, young adult—films, paintings, animations, short stories, fables, dastaans, pamphlets, tracts, synopsizing popularizations like The Great Derangement, khutbas, Papal Encyclicals… It may benefit from the talent of the griot and the skill of the journalist. And yet “revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine” (Harney and Moten, 11).  If the argument is indeed about forms of expression and styles of thinking it needs to be made with more thought and care.

As I hope is evident from my far too short readings above, I have considerable admiration and respect for what Ghosh pulls off in Sea of Poppies and The Hungry Tide, which is what makes this book’s disappointments so very painful. At a moment in history when we urgently need to think collectively, when we need solidarity and a reconfigured sociality which, indeed, as Ghosh—like so many others—recognizes, requires (among other things) a planetary transformation of the relationship with the non-human, the dismissal of so many who are engaging in precisely the imaginative work required, simply in the service of an inflated rhetorical gesture, is more than merely baffling.  To conclude, then, with the language of portents: The posture of last man standing (or, for that matter, first man railing) is no propitious augury of a transformed imagination and society to come.

References

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1987. X/Self. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, 33 (Winter).

Ghosh, Amitav. 2017. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

__________ 2008. Sea of Poppies.  New York: Picador.

__________ 2005. ‘Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

__________ 2005. The Hungry Tide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

__________ 2002. The Glass Palace. New York: Random House.

Heise, Ursula. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen. 2nd ed. 2015.  Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: Routledge.

Harney Stefano, and Moten, Fred.  2013.  The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.  New York: Minor Compositions.

Ishiguro, Kazuo.  “Writers’ indignation: Kazuo Ishiguro rejects claims of genre snobbery” The Guardian, March 8, 2015

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/kazuo-ishiguro-rebuffs-genre-snobbery, accessed August 16, 2017

Le Guin, Ursula K. 2015. a “96. Addendum to “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”” Ursula K. LeGuin’s blog, 2015.  http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Blog2015.html, accessed Aug. 10 2017

__________b. “Are they going to say this is fantasy?” Ursula K. LeGuin’s blog, 2015.

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Blog2015.html, accessed Aug. 10 2017.

Notes

[1] My thanks to R.A. Judy, Biju Matthew, Christian Parenti and Sarita See for conversation about this review.

[2] http://centerforartandthought.org/work/project/storm-typhoon-haiyan-recovery-project?page=3

[3] Would it matter, for instance, that there are numerous literary critics doing powerful and thoughtful work in the growing field of environmental humanities, and at the intersections of environmental humanities and Native Studies, Black studies and Postcolonial Studies?

[4] Obviously these examples are not even close to being comprehensive and are far too Anglophone–this is quite simply an effect of the limitations of my knowledge.

[5] The phrase is actually from Jack Halberstam’s wonderful introduction to The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

[6] Although, I must say I know of no literature departments in which Frankenstein would not be thought of as serious literature, partitioning or not.  Moreover, having been mentored early in my current job by my dear, and now retired, colleague, Bruce Franklin, it’s a little hard to take these claims seriously.

[7] For some of the discussions about these issues in postcolonial studies, see (along with Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” and the Volume of New Literary History, The State of Postcolonial Studies. 43:2, 2012, which contains responses to Chakrabarty’s essay in the previous volume, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”) Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History. New York: OR Books, 2017. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, New York, Routledge, 2015. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.  Jennifer Wenzel et al. Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.  Of course, this list is far from exhaustive.

by Michaela Brangan

The list of things which ought to register as politically dire on a mass scale but do not is long. It includes the “kettling”^[1] and mass arrest of over two hundred people by DC Metro police at Donald Trump’s inauguration. The remaining defendants’ plight portends dimly for the right to assemble and protest without being targeted by police and arrested.^[2] To defray the high costs of litigation and lives upended, two groups, Dead City Legal Posse and DefendJ20 Resistance, formed and work in tandem to organize support for the J20 defendants, prosecuted as “the Rioting Defendants.” The vast majority of support and media coverage for this activism has been provided by members of the left-anarchist community. Emphasized on the front page of Defend J20/DCLP’s fundraising site is the dangerous precedent convictions would set, and the “astonishing display of legal solidarity” of the defendants, almost all of whom are unified in fighting their charges in court. None of the few who have pleaded guilty to misdemeanors have cooperated with the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges.

Maybe this gives pause to those who might assume anarchists don’t do legal strategy, which the phrase “legal solidarity” would imply. Procedural engagement with the state apparatus? Arguing the right to dissent under the First Amendment? Is DCLP/DefendJ20 using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house? Is it uncovering state hypocrisy through the performance of legal theater, one piece of a multifarious project of resistance? Or, is the collective defense strategy rooted in a simple necessity: obtaining liberation for those threatened by the state, “Until everyone is free,” as DefendJ20 Resistance vows?

Does it matter? Knowing how solidarity happens, how it is sustained, and why it is necessary, is more than a sidebar to resistance politics. In The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press), James Martel points to one method of analyzing antiauthoritarian reactions to oppression. Martel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, promises a “political agenda…[which is] to think about a phenomenon that is ongoing and to try to understand why it happens, how it could be multiplied and extended, and finally, what the results of such subversion are in terms of the kinds of subjects that emerge from the process.” This subversive process he names “misinterpellation”: what happens when you respond to a “call…not meant for you.”

The need for a rehabilitated understanding of Louis Althusser’s famous concept goes unquestioned. But Martel is going further, with a “political agenda” of “discipline—a form of training,” to uncover “a conspiracy, a form of resistance based on a common rejection of the practices of law, politics, and economics—with an accompanying form of subjectivity…a deeper ‘we’…the anarchism of the soul.” If what is meant by the phrase “political agenda” is the outlay of steps available for enactment, Martel’s is hard to follow, especially his reluctance to theorize solidarity in regard to anarchist political action. Instead, he sources politics out of Nietzschean individualism, and stretches his theory over community struggles, such as the Movement for Black Lives. It seems human solidarity is a “liberal universal” trap, to be avoided.

Martel intersperses clusters of historical events with philosophical and literary examples that point to different ways of calling (“Come, Come!” (Lauren Berlant); “Look! A Negro!” (Frantz Fanon)) over a wide swath of rebellions. I will cover some, beginning with the original interpellative call: “Hey, you there!” The respondent to this call is likely the intended hearer. Althusser explains, “they hardly ever miss…(nine times out of ten it is the right one);” the Man (almost) always gets its man. But “[w]hat,” Martel asks, “do we make of this [one out of ten] mistakenly hailed subject?” to whom the cop says, impatiently, looking past him: no, not you. Martel deftly exploits the interpellative misfire. Even a minor misfire undoes interpellation’s whole purpose; rather than error or “an occasional phenomenon,” the misinterpellative moment reveals the state’s inherent weakness. Misinterpellation gives the clearest view of the always failed subject, and then, the possibility for something else becomes visible: that we might have said “‘no’ to great systems that otherwise overwhelm us,” such as law, such as politics, such as economics.

Is this resistance for which failure is always necessary? Revolution springing out of the failed subject resonates with the materialist’s mounting contradictions that prompt the shedding of false consciousness, but Martel categorically rejects what he calls the “dupes” theory and favors James Scott’s “hidden transcripts” of resistance. What appears “‘spontaneous’” or revelatory on the surface are offshoots of “deep roots in practices of resistance that effectively never cease.” (The book contains many scare-words. For example, “spontaneous” is in scare-quotes on first and second mentions with no referent, which indicates critique of the concept; when “spontaneous” is cited a third time, it is with approval. “Authentic,” truth,” “real,” “obvious” and “happy ending” may send some readers hunting before realizing that they are nudges, however inconsistent. “Happy ending” did make me laugh, though.)

The Haitian Revolution is a perfect example of misinterpellative empowerment, as Martel sees it. When slaves heard of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a few leaders cynically latched onto the plain language meaning to mobilize slaves to fight behind them. But rank-and-file ex-slaves interpreted the Declaration as a document of unmediated self-determination, exposing their self-styled leaders’ hypocrisy, as well as the incoherence of the rights-declaring documents that excluded them. Martel rightly draws from this that “the concept of the universal serves as a site upon which we can clearly observe the failure of the universal to appear.” Another example falls a little more flatly. Mohammad Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit-seller who self-immolated in front of the governor’s office, “attempt[ed] to assert his subject position,” his suicide “the only path he felt that he could” take “in order to assert his own form of counteragency, or at the very least, to allow his failure as a subject to be complete and undeniable.” According to Martel, the masses’ reaction to Bouazizi’s suffering was not as political solidarity, but a mimetic function. His suffering “became true for nearly everyone else in Tunisia as well,” as “[s]omehow the story…dramatized a form of injustice that was already present and already known but held back from…what had been borne…was no longer possible.” At the risk of sounding like a betrayer of the literary, my field: something is lost when reading revolutionary upheaval solely as dramatic catharsis.

Martel wants us to reclaim failure as the impetus to conspire and create “radically contingent, agonal, and undetermined state[s]” of being. While he invokes Scott’s theory of hidden community resistance, he forgets to explain how he sees organizing working. He suggests the concept of unity is a phantasm of liberal desire. His anarchic soul opposes unity and forms “far messier and unstructured” politics, “temporary and shifting sets of relationships.” But it is hard to know what the moral or political problem is with structure. Sustainable structures can be for the mutual benefits of those who make, participate in, and rely on them. Decentralized structures are not necessarily messy. Mutual aid collectives work to undo perceptions that anti-statist and anti-capitalist organizing means a lack of structure or rootedness in existing community formations. A common rallying cry for political anarchists is “Solidarity, not charity,” which suggests a critique of one-off relations. In her account of the Tunisian uprising, which Martel cites, Alcinda Honwana describes an outpouring of solidarity across widely disparate groups, and catalogues the careful coordination of marches, strikes, and sit-ins. Though she does call the movement leaderless, there is little room to interpret Honwana’s as anything than an ethnography of organized mass struggle. What appears messy or unstructured may only be so in the eye of the statist, and all the better for the anti-statist.  Structures the state cannot understand are good assets.

Virtuous messiness leads to interesting alignments. Frantz Fanon’s refusals of universalism and negritude is precisely a refusal of imposed ideologies, “of the false choices…he opts for neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but both,” and this is well explained and named as political resistance. Yet Martel reads Nietzsche’s amor fati alongside Fanon, folding it into a kind of mantra that reads a little like a tricked-out version of dialectical behavioral therapy.

If we love our fate, doesn’t that mean that we have to accept the world as it is? … Clearly, this is a ‘rhetorical’ question: I have already begun to suggest how this not necessarily the right way to read Nietzsche. [A]mor fati just means loving the present, accepting it, and, from that position rearticulating and reconceptualizing the subject position itself.

Again:

Amor fati means loving and accepting the mess that we are.

Again:

[F]or Nietzsche, we must love all of this messy self that we are, warts and all, including the part of us that hates and denies our self.

And again:

What the misinterpellated subject finds, via the process of amor fati, is herself, her crazy quilted, weird, multiple subjectivity.

While I am intrigued by this notion, as it indulges my feelings of self-worth, I am hard-pressed to find a substantial difference between these maxims and Oprah’s (Oprah-man?), or those of the charismatic Cal Roberts, Hugh Dancy’s character on Hulu’s The Path. What I do know is that these do not form a political agenda but a method of personal growth that can just as easily lead away from politics than towards it. Messiness is mystifying.

So it goes with Martel’s analyses of various fictional characters as practitioners of amor fati. He claims that his readings go “against the grain”: rather than being “read as losers, as boring or quiescent, or as angry or crazy” as readers “often…scorn” them, Martel privileges marginal characters as worthwhile subjects. This generalization about what readers “often” do struck me, and it was here that the theory began to reveal that its subversive power depends solely on detachment. Isolated subjects, supposedly rescued from the margins, are fried by the glare of Martel’s theoretical lens to become useful, if unrecognizable, objects. Martel argues against Agamben, asserting that Bartleby is not passive. “Prefer[ring] not to” indicates doing only what he wants, his object-like-ness becoming an anarchic choice. The novel’s fascinating and paradoxical descriptor for Bartleby’s irritating behavior, “passive resistance,” is left mysteriously unanalyzed. The “seemingly minor and irrelevant character” of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, is trashed as an unattractive loser—we take Mrs Ramsey’s opinion of Lily as truth—so she can then be sided with as the “ultimate protagonist.” Dozens of scholars have shown Lily Briscoe to be a major and relevant, and dignified, subject for study. None of these arguments are cited. Few would be interested in discovering an “ultimate protagonist” within this novel, but one would least of all expect Martel to think that is a worthy goal, since he rejects hero-centered analyses. “Woolf is not the kind of author or thinker who affords us…an easy conclusion,” he says, but also: “In looking at these two characters, Bartleby and Lily, we see that often it is the most despised and the lowliest of creatures who have the most to teach us.” Reading these novels as lessons in pathos is surely the easiest route, isn’t it? I cannot think of what “kind of…thinker” Martel would compare Woolf to, but I speculate that she would least like to be put in the moralist camp. (On the other hand, Melville seems to have lived for it.)

Misinterpellated subjects learn to welcome the prospect of being mowed under, like Lilies growing out of place in the monocultural, universal field of existence. This is good because “these characters [Bartleby and Lily] succeed by failing [normatively]. Unnoticed, they are able to subvert from deep within the system that oppresses them.” Martel recommends the amor fati to brutalized, over-policed persons and communities of color. This is “not a passive acceptance of what must be but rather an active engagement with the world” by refusing “the liberal universal,” and embracing self-love. This subversion points the way out of immiseration. Franz Kafka, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ralph Ellison, Michael Brown, and Fred Moten are mashed together to demonstrate this. While this literary assemblage is subversive, recommending how black people should think about themselves so they can get ahead in the world is not.

Perhaps there is an alternative to “TINA,” Martel thinks, in amor fati and anarchism. But this will always be a hard row to hoe because, he warns, “archism will always promote itself as being better, flashier, funner, and easier” promising “wholeness and fulfillment…Anarchists will often be seduced by these shiny, empty promises, adopting archist practices in the midst of their anarchist politics and dooming them to failure.” No concrete example is provided for what “archist practices” and anarchists he’s referring to, but I deduce that this failure isn’t the kind he talks about with approval, like Bartleby dying in a prison yard, which compels his former boss to remember him. One might fill in the failed “archic practices of anarchists” blank with, say, Defend J20 Resistance. The failure would be buying into the con of “wholeness,” or structure, or unity, or solidarity, or humanity. Organizing for collective liberation. Hoping to beat the state.

Margaret Thatcher’s famous “TINA”—“There Is No Alternative”—which Martel equates to liberalism ought to be squared with her not quite as famous, but much more seductive, vision of “No Society.”

There are individual men and women and there are families…There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help…

No great fan of the state herself, Thatcher never lost an opportunity to re-kick the British left as it was flailing. She dismisses the idea of society because it raises the possibility that society could be organized in the alternative. For his part, Martel dismisses “the liberal universal” to embrace a politics that consists of “the seeking out of failure rather than success and resolution.” I aver that, whatever the problems are with universalism, the opposite approach is not inherently political. A nihilist can embrace individualist anarchism, but political anarchism cannot easily become nihilist, since it relies on the assumption that solidarity will not fail.

The activism around the J20 prosecutions is one example of the structures that arise when misinterpellated (accused) subjects conspire to resist oppression. To jointly agree to a statement of unity; to offer a statement of solidarity to the public; to engage with law’s formal practices to get free and prove a point; to make public-facing arguments about rights and legal precedent; to not sell out your comrades; to raise funds online. The state does not expect these actions from “the Rioting Defendants.” It would surely prefer they conceived of themselves and their politics as messy failures instead of a unified front. Solidarity, as they say, gets the goods and annoys the state. Not, David Palumbo-Liu has recently pointed out, a merely “imaginative” solidarity, “a sentimental kind of transitory alliance,”  but concrete, “risk-taking” solidarity. “[I]t is a call for generosity,” he argues, “what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘conviviality,’ rather than solitude and isolation.” Martel is right that the opportunity for political reinvention come in moments of misinterpellation, the chance to deny power by refusing imposed subjectivities. But if liberation from oppression relies on training up anti-joinerist, even morbid, habits of mind, then how will new subjects recognize and inhabit conspiracies and convivialities—the breaths, and lives, of others?

Notes

^[1] A crowd control tactic that forces demonstrators into a confined area and traps them there between barricades and lines of armored police, and has been argued to be a human rights violation before the ECHR. The J20 protesters were confined for several hours without access to medical care, food, water, or facilities; some protesters claim to have been victims of excessive force while in custody. The ACLU is representing several J20 defendants as plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit against the District of Columbia.

^[2] As of March 25th, the number of defendants who originally faced prosecution has been reduced, through various dismissals and acquittals, from 194 to 59. The remaining defendants will go on trial in small groups every few weeks, starting April 17. Source: Jude Ortiz, National Lawyers Guild (phone interview) and defendJ20resistance.org

Michaela Brangan holds a JD from Cardozo School of Law, and is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Cornell University.