I remember snickering when Chris Anderson announced “The End of Theory” in 2008. Writing in Wired magazine, Anderson claimed that the structure of knowledge had inverted. It wasn’t that models and principles revealed the facts of the world, but the reverse, that the data of the world spoke their truth unassisted. Given that data were already correlated, Anderson argued, what mattered was to extract existing structures of meaning, not to pursue some deeper cause. Anderson’s simple conclusion was that “correlation supersedes causation…correlation is enough.”
This hypothesis — that correlation is enough — is the thorny little nexus at the heart of Wendy Chun’s new book, Discriminating Data. Chun’s topic is data analytics, a hard target that she tackles with technical sophistication and rhetorical flair. Focusing on data-driven tech like social media, search, consumer tracking, AI, and many other things, her task is to exhume the prehistory of correlation, and to show that the new epistemology of correlation is not liberating at all, but instead a kind of curse recalling the worst ghosts of the modern age. As Chun concludes, even amid the precarious fluidity of hyper-capitalism, power operates through likeness, similarity, and correlated identity.
While interleaved with a number of divergent polemics throughout, the book focuses on four main themes: correlation, discrimination, authentication, and recognition. Chun deals with these four as general problems in society and culture, but also interestingly as specific scientific techniques. For instance correlation has a particular mathematical meaning, as well as a philosophical one. Discrimination is a social pathology but it’s also integral to discrete rationality. I appreciated Chun’s attention to details large and small; she’s writing about big ideas — essence, identity, love and hate, what does it mean to live together? — but she’s also engaging directly with statistics, probability, clustering algorithms, and all the minutia of data science.
In crude terms, Chun rejects the — how best to call it — the “anarcho-materialist” turn in theory, typified by someone like Gilles Deleuze, where disciplinary power gave way to distributed rhizomes, schizophrenic subjects, and irrepressible lines of flight. Chun’s theory of power isn’t so much about tessellated tapestries of desiring machines as it is the more strictly structuralist concerns of norm and discipline, sovereign and subject, dominant and subdominant. Big tech is the mechanism through which power operates today, Chun argues. And today’s power is racist, misogynist, repressive, and exclusionary. Power doesn’t incite desire so much as stifle and discipline it. In other words George Orwell’s old grey-state villain, Big Brother, never vanished. He just migrated into a new villain, Big Bro, embodied by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page.
But what are the origins of this new kind of data-driven power? The reader learns that correlation and homophily, or “the notion that birds of a feather naturally flock together” (23), not only subtend contemporary social media platforms like Facebook, but were in fact originally developed by eugenicists like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. “British eugenicists developed correlation and linear regression” (59), Chun notes dryly, before reminding us that these two techniques are at the core of today’s data science. “When correlation works, it does so by making the present and future coincide with a highly curated past” (52). Or as she puts it insightfully elsewhere, data science doesn’t so much anticipate the future, but predict the past.
If correlation (pairing two or more pieces of data) is the first step of this new epistemological regime, it is quickly followed by some additional steps. After correlation comes discrimination, where correlated data are separated from other data (and indeed internally separated from themselves). This entails the introduction of a norm. Discriminated data are not simply data that have been paired, but measurements plotted along an axis of comparison. One data point may fall within a normal distribution, while another strays outside the norm within a zone of anomaly. Here Chun focuses on “homophily” (love of the same), writing that homophily “introduces normativity within a supposedly nonnormative system” (96).
The third and fourth moments in Chun’s structural condition, tagged as “authenticity” and “recognition,” complete the narrative. Once groups are defined via discrimination, they are authenticated as a positive group identity, then ultimately recognized, or we could say self-recognized, by reversing the outward-facing discriminatory force into an inward-facing act of identification. It’s a complex libidinal economy that Chun patiently elaborates over four long chapters, linking these structural moments to specific technologies and techniques such as Bayes’ theorem, clustering algorithms, and facial recognition technology.
A number of potential paths emerge in the wake of Chun’s work on correlation, which we will briefly mention in passing. One path would be toward Shane Denson’s recent volume, Discorrelated Images, on the loss of correlated experience in media aesthetics. Another would be to collide Chun’s critique of correlation in data science with Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlation in philosophy, notwithstanding the significant differences between their two projects.
Correlation, discrimination, authentication, and recognition are the manifest contents of the book as it unfolds page by page. At the same time Chun puts forward a few meta arguments that span the text as a whole. The first is about difference and the second is about history. In both, Chun reveals herself as a metaphysician and moralist of the highest order.
First Chun picks up a refrain familiar to feminism and anti-racist theory, that of erasure, forgetting, and ignorance. Marginalized people are erased from the archive; women are silenced; a subject’s embodiment is ignored. Chun offers an appealing catch phrase for this operation, “hopeful ignorance.” Many people in power hope that by ignoring difference they can overcome it. Or as Chun puts it, they “assume that the best way to fight abuse and oppression is by ignoring difference and discrimination” (2). Indeed this posture has been central to political liberalism for a long time, in for instance John Rawls’ derivation of justice via a “veil of ignorance.” For Chun the attempt to find an unmarked category of subjectivity — through that frequently contested pronoun “we” — will perforce erase and exclude those structurally denied access to the universal. “[John Perry] Barlow’s ‘we’ erased so many people,” Chun noted in dismay. “McLuhan’s ‘we’ excludes most of humanity” (9, 15). This is the primary crime for Chun, forgetting or ignoring the racialized and gendered body. (In her last book, Updating to Remain the Same, Chun reprinted a parody of a well-known New Yorker cartoon bearing the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The posture of ignorance, of “nobody knowing,” was thoroughly critiqued by Chun in that book, even as it continues to be defended by liberals).
Yet if the first crime against difference is to forget the mark, the second crime is to enforce it, to mince and chop people into segregated groups. After all, data is designed to discriminate, as Chun takes the better part of her book to elaborate. These are engines of difference and it’s no coincidence that Charles Babbage called his early calculating machine a “Difference Engine.” Data is designed to segregate, to cluster, to group, to split and mark people into micro identities. We might label this “bad” difference. Bad difference is when the naturally occurring multiplicity of the world is canalized into clans and cliques, leveraged for the machinations of power rather than the real experience of people.
To complete the triad, Chun has proposed a kind of “good” difference. For Chun authentic life is rooted in difference, often found through marginalized experience. Her muse is “a world that resonates with and in difference” (3). She writes about “the needs and concerns of black women” (49). She attends to “those whom the archive seeks to forget” (237). Good difference is intersectional. Good difference attends to identity politics and the complexities of collective experience.
Bad, bad, good — this is a triad, but not a dialectical one. Begin with 1) the bad tech posture of ignoring difference; followed by 2) the worse tech posture of specifying difference in granular detail; contrasted with 3) a good life that “resonates with and in difference.” I say “not dialectical” because the triad documents difference changing position rather than the position of difference changing (to paraphrase Catherine Malabou from her book on Changing Difference). Is bad difference resolved by good difference? How to tell the difference? For this reason I suggest we consider Discriminating Data as a moral tale — although I suspect Chun would balk at that adjective — because everything hinges on a difference between the good and the bad.
Chun’s argument about good and bad difference is related to an argument about history, revealed through what she terms the “Transgressive Hypothesis.” I was captivated by this section of the book. It connects to a number of debates happening today in both theory and culture at large. Her argument about history has two distinct waves, and, following the contradictory convolutions of history, the second wave reverses and inverts the first.
Loosely inspired by Michel Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis, Chun’s Transgressive Hypothesis initially describes a shift in society and culture roughly coinciding with the Baby Boom generation in the late Twentieth Century. Let’s call it the 1968 mindset. Reacting to the oppressions of patriarchy, the grey-state threats of centralized bureaucracy, and the totalitarian menace of “Nazi eugenics and Stalinism,” liberation was found through “‘authentic transgression’” via “individualism and rebellion” (76). This was the time of the alternative, of the outsider, of the nonconformist, of the anti-authoritarian, the time of “thinking different.” Here being “alt” meant being left, albeit a new kind of left.
Chun summons a familiar reference to make her point: the Apple Macintosh advertisement from 1984 directed by Ridley Scott, in which a scary Big Brother is dethroned by a colorful lady jogger brandishing a sledge hammer. “Resist, resist, resist,” was how Chun put the mantra. “To transgress…was to be free” (76). Join the resistance, unplug, blow your mind on red pills. Indeed the existential choice from The Matrix — blue pill for a life of slavery mollified by ignorance, red pill for enlightenment and militancy tempered by mortal danger — acts as a refrain throughout Chun’s book. In sum the Transgressive Hypothesis “equated democracy with nonnormative structures and behaviors” (76). To live a good life was to transgress.
But this all changed in 1984, or thereabouts. Chun describes a “reverse hegemony” — a lovely phrase that she uses only twice — where “complaints against the ‘mainstream’ have become ‘mainstreamed’” (242). Power operates through reverse hegemony, she claims, “The point is never to be a ‘normie’ even as you form a norm” (34). These are the consequences of the rise of neoliberalism, fake corporate multiculturalism, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but even more so Bill Clinton and Tony Blaire. Think postfordism and postmodernism. Think long tails and the multiplicity of the digital economy. Think woke-washing at CIA and Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency. Think Hypernormalization, New Spirit of Capitalism, Theory of the Young Girl, To Live and Think Like Pigs. Complaints against the mainstream have become mainstreamed. And if power today has shifted “left,” then — Reverse Hegemony Brain go brrr — resistance to power shifts “right.” A generation ago the Q Shaman would have been a leftwing nut nattering about the Kennedy assassination. But today he’s a right wing nut (alas still nattering about the Kennedy assassination).
“Red pill toxicity” (29) is how Chun characterizes the responses to this new topsy-turvy world of reverse hegemony. (To be sure, she’s only the latest critic weighing in on the history of the present; other well-known accounts include Angela Nagle’s 2017 book Kill All Normies, and Mark Fisher’s notorious 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle.”) And if libs, hippies, and anarchists had become the new dominant, the election of Donald Trump showed that “populism, paranoia, polarization” (77) could also reemerge as a kind of throwback to the worst political ideologies of the Twentieth Century. With Trump the revolutions of history — ironically, unstoppably — return to where they began, in “the totalitarian world view” (77).
In other words these self-styled rebels never actually disrupted anything, according to Chun. At best they used disruption as a kind of ideological distraction for the same kinds of disciplinary management structures that have existed since time immemorial. And if Foucault showed that nineteenth-century repression also entailed an incitement to discourse, Chun describes how twentieth-century transgression also entailed a novel form of management. Before it was “you thought you were repressed but in fact you’re endlessly sublating and expressing.” Now it’s “you thought you were a rebel but disruption is a standard tactic of the Professional Managerial Class.” Or as Jacques Lacan said in response to some young agitators in his seminar, vous voulez un maître, vous l’aurez. Slavoj Žižek’s rendering, slightly embellished, best captures the gist: “As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!”
I doubt Chun would embrace the word “hysteric,” a term indelibly marked by misogyny, but I wish she would, since hysteria is crucial to her Transgressive Hypothesis. In psychoanalysis, the hysteric is the one who refuses authority, endlessly and irrationally. And bless them for that; we need more hysterics in these dark times. Yet the lesson from Lacan and Žižek is not so much that the hysteric will conjure up a new master out of thin air. In a certain sense, the lesson is the reverse, that the Big Other doesn’t exist, that Big Brother himself is a kind of hysteric, that power is the very power that refuses power.
This position makes sense, but not completely. As a recovering Deleuzian, I am indelibly marked by a kind of antinomian political theory that defines power as already heterogenous, unlawful, multiple, anarchic, and material. However I am also persuaded by Chun’s more classical posture, where power is a question of sovereign fiat, homogeneity, the central and the singular, the violence of the arche, which works through enclosure, normalization, and discipline. Faced with this type of power, Chun’s conclusion is, if I can compress a hefty book into a single writ, that difference will save us from normalization. In other words, while Chun is critical of the Transgressive Hypothesis, she ends up favoring the Big-Brother theory of power, where authentic alternatives escape repressive norms.
I’ll admit it’s a seductive story. Who doesn’t want to believe in outsiders and heroes winning against oppressive villains? And the story is especially appropriate for the themes of Discriminating Data: data science of course entails norms and deviations; but also, in a less obvious way, data science inherits the old anxieties of skeptical empiricism, where the desire to make a general claim is always undercut by an inability to ground generality.
Yet I suspect her political posture relies a bit too heavily on the first half of the Transgressive Hypothesis, the 1984 narrative of difference contra norm, even as she acknowledges the second half of the narrative where difference became a revanchist weapon for big tech (to say nothing of difference as a bonafide management style). This leads to some interesting inconsistencies. For instance Chun notes that Apple’s 1984 hammer thrower is a white woman disrupting an audience of white men. But she doesn’t say much else about her being a woman, or about the rainbow flag that ends the commercial. The Transgressive Hypothesis might be the quintessential tech bro narrative but it’s also the narrative of feminism, queerness, and the new left more generally. Chun avoids claiming that feminism failed; but she’s also savvy enough to avoid saying that it succeeded. And if Sadie Plant once wrote that “cybernetics is feminization,” for Chun it’s not so clear. According to Chun the cybernetic age of computers, data, and ubiquitous networks still orients around structures of normalization: masculine, white, straight, affluent and able-bodied. Resistant to such regimes of normativity, Chun must nevertheless invent a way to resist those who were resisting normativity.
Regardless, for Chun the conclusion is clear: these hysterics got their new master. If not immediately they got it eventually, via the advent of Web 2.0 and the new kind of data-centric capitalism invented in the early 2000s. Correlation isn’t enough — and that’s the reason why. Correlation means the forming of a general relation, if only the most minimal generality of two paired data points. And, worse, correlation’s generality will always derive from past power and organization rather than from a reimagining of the present. Hence correlation for Chun is a type of structural pessimism, in that it will necessarily erase and exclude those denied access to the general relation.
Characterized by a narrative poignancy and an attention to the ideological conditions of everyday life, Chun highlights alternative relations that could hopefully replace the pessimism of correlation. Such alternatives might take the form of a “potential history” or a “critical fabulation,” phrases borrowed from Ariella Azoulay and Saidiya Hartman, respectively. For Azoulay potential history means to “‘give an account of diverse worlds that persist’”; for Hartman, critical fabulation means “to see beyond numbers and sources” (79). A slim offering covering a few pages, nevertheless these references to Azoulay and Hartman indicate an appealing alternative for Chun, and she ends her book where it began, with an eloquent call to acknowledge “a world that resonates with and in difference.”
Somewhere between 500,000 and over 1 million Americans, and many more people worldwide, are now living with some form of post-viral symptomatology from COVID-19—or “Long COVID.” In a pandemic first and pervasively represented by elderly death or “mild” cases no worse than the flu, there are, in reality, three true outcomes after contracting the virus, one of which includes long-term illness, impairment, and disability. These “long haulers” are discovering what disability activists have long known and fought against: accommodation and access are not readily forthcoming, insurance is a nightmare, and people of color and women are much less likely to have their symptoms taken seriously enough to lead to a medical diagnosis. And medical diagnosis, if received, is fraught, too. If 1 in 4 Americans is already disabled, we have been and continue to be living through what some are calling a mass disabling event, akin to a war. This situation is not limited to the circulation of a virus and its aftermath in individual persons and bodies; it extends to the conditions past and present that have produced its lethality: capitalism and its attendants, including medical redlining, environmental racism, settler-colonialism.
Jonathan Sterne’s Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment arrives then just in time to complicate that history via the experience of impairment (as well as its kin experiences and identities, illness and disability). As Sterne writes, “The semantic ambiguity among impairment, disability, and illness remains a constitutive feature of all three categories. They move through the same space and bump into one another, sometimes overlapping, sometimes repelling. All three are conditioned by a divergence from medical or social norms. All three are conditioned by an ideology of ability and a preference for ability and health.” Sterne’s book doesn’t just map the experiences of impairment, he also troubles the binary of disabled and able body/mind. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne upends our received notion that we, somehow, are in control of our senses (or our minds, our limbs). Instead, some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others present as problems. Sterne’s book is about many kinds of impairment, and their intersections in subjects who are understood to be normative nonetheless or even because they’re impaired; what we think of as normal (gradual hearing loss as we work, listen to music, age) versus what is marked off as different and constitutes an unquestioned disability (e.g., childhood deafness following viral illness).
Early in the book, Sterne quotes the disability studies adage, “you will someday join us.” This definitive book is also Sterne’s personal story of living in the matrixes of illness, impairment, and disability, in the materiality of their experience as well as the cultures that contain and produce those experiences. Rather than presenting a work at the end of learning, deleting all the traces of theorization up until the point of arrival, Sterne fully tells the story of how he “joined”: from study groups to blog posts, across changes in understanding and bodily experience. Diminished Faculties therefore provides a rigorous, moving account of the experience of the normal and the pathological, the accounted-for body both disabled and abled, and the one shoved to the margins. Sterne also offers his reader the account of impairment via a political phenomenology grounded in his own story while moving slowly and responsibly beyond it to reconceive impairment theory as a theory of labor, of media, and fundamentally, of political experience.
Sterne is a preeminent voice in Media Studies, and the author of The Audible Past (Duke UP, 2003) and MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke UP, 2012). Diminished Faculties is his first book in nearly a decade, the third in a series of works that have shaped and reshaped sound studies, and the first to center his own history.
While in this way, Diminished Faculties is moving beyond his previous books to auto-theory, If The Audible Past begins with the “Hello” of the telephone, Diminished Faculties takes on another, amplified greeting. In 2009, Sterne was diagnosed with an aggressive case of thyroid cancer; the surgery to remove his tumor (the size of a pomegranate, as demonstrated in a drawing from S. Lochlann Jain) paralyzed one of his two vocal cords. Normal vocal cord functioning looks like, as Sterne puts it elsewhere “a monkey crashing cymbals”; a normative voice depends on that coordinated cooperation between halves. And as he tells us, his voice may sound better, whatever that really means, to his listener (smokey and rich) on one of his worst days. But Sterne also talks for a living—teaching and delivering research-and his voice blows out, he gets exhausted. As Sterne began vocal therapy, he started to use a personal amplification device that hangs from his neck, which he has termed his “dork-o-phone.” Staying with the example of what gets made visible as impairment, Sterne tells the story of someone coming to a house party, pointing to his chest and saying, “What the fuck is that?” Sterne replies: “Glasses for my voice.” This book tries, in part, to account for this importunate reaction, reconciling a moment of surprise or frustration or intolerance with the fact that impairment is everywhere, and tracking what that reaction does to the subject who is marked as other. As Sterne writes, “Think of all the moving parts in that scenario: a subject whose body cannot match its will; but also auditors struggling to align themselves with whatever techniques the speaker is using. Everyone is trying; nobody is quite succeeding.”
This is one way of naming the book’s method: “think of all the moving parts.” Each of its chapters weaves disability studies, auto-theory, history of science, and media history, turning the levels up or down on any particular input and frame. Diminished Faculties ushers the reader through these interlinked hermeneutics toward a redescription of impairment in the long 20th century.
The first chapter, “Degrees of Muteness,” offers a deep consideration of the uses of phenomenology, and its methods for describing experience, centered on Sterne’s diagnosis, surgery, and its aftermath. As Sterne writes, “this book begins with consciousness of unconsciousness (or is it unconsciousness of consciousness?)” Here he also introduces a media theory of acquired impairment, arguing that, “the concept of impairment is itself also a media concept. The contemporary concept of normal hearing emerged out of the idea of communication impairments and from a very specific time and place.” He moves from this study of a phenomenology of impairment into its deployment, to consider his own voice, or voices v (spoken, amplified, written, authorial). Via his personal amplification device, which he has named the “dork-o-phone,” Sterne takes this object to think with to give us a history and experience of assistive technology and design as it interacts with other infrastructures.
Sterne then moves from political phenomenology to breaking the normative form of a book by inserting the written guide for an imaginary exhibition “In Search of New Vocalities.” The exhibition is accessible, designed for bodies coming from places imaginary and real, an act of care in the scene of art going, if only in the mind. The tone of the book shifts once more for the concluding two chapters towards something more familiar from Sterne’s earlier books, here centered more squarely in STS and Disability studies.
Chapter four is a theorization of Sterne’s identification of “aural scarification” and what he calls normal impairments. In this chapter, Sterne joins recent accounts of the built environment—and here he focuses on our sonic environment—that argue that disability itself reveals aspects of society that hurt everyone, however unevenly. Sara Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? (Riverhead, 2020) shows how the curb on the sidewalk, for example, makes city infrastructures impassable for wheelchair users—but also say, mothers pushing strollers, travelers with suitcases, skateboarders and so on. Add a curb cut and suddenly movement is much more possible in urban spaces for many—not just the conventionally disabled. On the other hand, sometimes access for disabled users is granted almost by accident. Sterne provides another example: closed captioning. Initially, closed captioning was resisted by major broadcast networks precisely because it was expensive and obtrusive—and would only help a small minority. Then other spaces changed and hearing users needed to be able to see what they would otherwise listen to, in airport bars, in hospital waiting rooms, at the gym. Suddenly, D/deaf users got the captions they needed—but only because abled users wanted the same technology. Sterne calls this “crip washing”; the scholar and critic Mara Mills calls this an “assistive pretext.”
Sterne adds to this account that we live in a physical world that is in fact designed for people who are a little bit hearing impaired. Our entire infrastructure is loud: airplanes, bathroom hand dryers, music, whether live or in ear buds. Sterne shows that it is better not to hear perfectly and we hear less well because we interact with this environment; being alive leads to impairment even if we start without it (“you will someday join us”). Throughout Diminished Faculties, Sterne troubles the binary of disabled and abled body/mind by putting disability into a constellation with impairment and illness. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne argues that some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others are marked as problems, which separates it as a term even as it overlaps with disability. What then is an impairment if we expect it, if it is normal, and it can be disappeared through design? Why are other impairments made visible through these same processes? Considering impairment and disability as a norm is a revision that Sterne requires of his reader, broadening our working understanding of the built environment.
The concluding chapter of the book offers a deft theory and history of fatigue and rest. Opening with theorizations of how we manage fatigue in relation to labor, from Taylorism to energy quantified by “spoons” as theorized by Christine Miserandino, Sterne moves his account of fatigue through and beyond a depletion model. He asks whether we can think of fatigue as something other than a loss, a depletion of energy? He argues that rather than a lack of energy, fatigue is a presence. Sterne reminds his reader throughout that fatigue is so difficult to capture phenomenologically precisely because if it is too overtly present, he couldn’t write it down, if not present enough, he could not articulate the experience of fatigue from within. In this moment, Sterne returns to political phenomenology—including its limits. There are certain experiences, extreme fatigue being one of them—that are sometimes simply not accessible in the moment of writing.
Impairment and fatigue are both concepts from media and the mediation of the body in society, and here are richly positioned within a history of technology and from disability studies. The two commingle, as Sterne deftly shows, to produce our lived experience of body in situ. Along the way, Sterne gives us additional experiences: an account of himself, an exhibition, and a theory to use (and a manual for how we might do it), turn to account, and even dispose of. Diminished Faculties is a lyric, genre-bending book, that is forcefully argued, rendered beautifully, and will open the path for further research. It is deeply generous both to reader and future scholar, as Sterne’s work always is. But additionally, this is a book that so many have needed, and need now, a way of situating the present emergency in a much longer, political history.
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Hannah Zeavin teaches in the History and English Departments at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021, MIT Press). Other work is forthcoming or out from differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Dissent, The Guardian, n+1, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere.
A pigeon in a mural. In early August 2011, the American street artist Shepard Fairey paints a mural in Copenhagen, Denmark, on a wall adjacent to the “ground zero” of a recently demolished squat called Ungdomshuset (the Youth House). Fairey could hardly have chosen a worse spot in the city to sport his ready-made design of a pigeon hovering over the word “peace”: shortly after the mural’s completion, graffiti writers defaced what Fairey refers to as “my Peace Dove mural.”[2] Their message was clear: “no peace” and “go home yankee hipster.” To make matters worse, Fairey ended his trip to Copenhagen with a “black eye and a bruised rib” after a violent assault.[3]
Today, Fairey’s pigeon—a take on Picasso’s famous peace dove—is still aloft in the mural high above the vacant lot, a serene emblem of triumphant peace. Unlike Hito Steyerl’s parable of contemporary art in “A Tank on a Pedestal”—where she recounts how pro-Russian separatists drove a Soviet battle tank “off a World War II memorial pedestal” to use it in guerilla warfare—the pigeon was never hijacked from its mural and redeployed as a war machine.[4] Or was it? Considering Fairey’s controversial mural from the combined perspective of art history, the history of counterinsurgency, and late-modern warfare prompts a series of questions that pertain to our “hypercontemporary” moment in much the same way that Steyerl’s example of a tank on a pedestal does: is the mural a theater of war? Picasso’s peace dove, a drone?
Shepard Fairey’s “Peace Dove Mural”, Copenhagen, August 2011.
In this essay, I consider Fairey’s pigeon in a mural as an art-historical index for the “bodies of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation” that characterize the “historical situation” of US drone warfare under the Obama administration.[5] By analyzing the peace-dove motif, and situating it in the broader context of drone warfare, I argue that the pigeon-cum-peace-dove emerges as an instrument of war alongside its mechanical double, the drone. The pigeon in the mural, then, is more than some helpless animal caught in the crossfire of a chance conflict: it is also a cipher for late capitalist war.
In what follows, I begin from the controversy surrounding Fairey’s Copenhagen peace dove mural before zooming out to reconsider how the peace dove motif relates to the conduct of war and politics from the end of the Second World War to the age of drone warfare—and beyond. As I show, the peace dove motif is historically at the center of an “image war” in which opposing political ideologies struggle for mastery in the realm of representations.[6] The story of the peace dove from Picasso through to Fairey, in other words, is the story of how an “icon of the left” was detached from its origins and aligned with a triumphant conception of liberal peace: one that effectively helped obscure US military aggression in the era of drone warfare.[7] Ultimately, then, the image conflict traced and contextualized in this essay points toward the historical limits of what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in a seminal essay from 1795, called the “sweet dream of perpetual peace.”[8]
I
“You don’t have to be Picasso, you just need to be inspired by Barack Obama.”[9]
To the Copenhagen Youth House activists, Fairey’s artistic peace statement was unwanted because it literally and symbolically erased the traces of conflict from the site of a year-long struggle that revolved around systemic dynamics of capitalist gentrification, political repression, and police violence. But the activists’ fury—as the tag line “go home yankee hipster” suggests—was equally fueled by their perception that Fairey’s peace message converged with President Obama’s rhetoric in the US-led war on terror by other supposedly more “peaceful” means, mostly drones.
On the street address Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen where the Youth House once stood, there is now an empty, graffiti-covered lot. The house that once stood there, by contrast, was a vibrant hub for radical politics and dissidence for more than a century. Historical figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin would pass through to give political speeches and conspire with local revolutionaries and exiled comrades. It was also here, in August 1910, that the German Marxist Clara Zetkin proposed the annual celebration of what is now known as the International Women’s Day.
After the eclipse of the historical workers’ movement, the building was temporarily abandoned. In 1982, in the wake of severe street confrontations, the Copenhagen municipality surrendered the disused building to the “BZ-movement” of young squatters, dropouts, and punks.[10] People started referring to the building as Ungdomshuset (the Youth House), which became a crucial countercultural node for the European punk movement and radicals of various stripes.
Around the turn of the millennium, the Copenhagen municipality sold off the estate to a Christian sect. The sale technically turned the building into an illegal “squat,” as its users refused to acknowledge the change of ownership. Instead, existing tensions rose, and conflicts about “the right to the city” developed into riots. The militants responded to eviction notices and a sensation-hungry press by hanging a banner from the windows of the occupied building, reading: “For sale, including 500 autonomist stone-throwing violent psychopaths from hell.”[11]
Early one morning in March 2007, one of the most carefully planned and most spectacular police operations ever carried out in Denmark took place. In scenes resembling a film, police helicopters lowered a team of special operations agents onto the Youth House, broke through barricaded windows with power tools, and filled the house with tear gas to evict the militants and clear the house for demolition. As news of the eviction spread, Copenhagen’s streets became ablaze with anger. Hundreds of militants from all over Europe joined the struggle. In their effort to “keep the peace,” while facing some of the most severe riots Denmark had ever seen, the Copenhagen police department mustered reinforcements from neighboring districts, and even neighboring countries.[12]
The state forces far outnumbered protesters and rioters, who could not prevent the Youth House’s eventual demolition.[13] Still, the riots, protests, and demonstrations carried on relentlessly after the demolition, and every single Thursday for several years, thousands of protesters would ritually march through the city. Even though in 2008 the municipality yielded to the pressure and allotted another building in the city’s outskirts to activist purposes, the Thursday protests carried on unrelentingly for several years. The original battle cry—nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven—still resounded among a discontented youth when Shepard Fairey made his cameo appearance in 2011.
When Fairey flew in to decorate the city—Fairey’s stint as a Copenhagen street artist included an art show at the self-styled “street art gallery,” V1, and no fewer than seven murals in prime locations across the city—the Youth House struggles were still recent memory. In a blog post, Fairey recalls being aware that “the mural location in question had a controversial history” but says he thought to himself: “what a shame, I hope I can do something that is a symbolically positive transformation.”[14] Apparently, some activists thought differently. Even before the mural was completed it was destroyed by graffiti.
The destruction of the Copenhagen mural and the ensuing image conflict soon attracted international media attention. The Guardian, for instance, reported that Fairey’s mural “appeared to reopen old wounds, with critics accusing Fairey of peddling government-funded propaganda.”[15] Fairey, in turn, insisted that his mural was non-political, stressing that he was merely promoting a universal message of peace, and went back to restore his mural. Just as quickly as he restored it, however, someone destroyed it anew.
V1, Fairey’s local art gallery, stepped in to mediate by inviting some artists, who supposedly represented the Youth House, to repaint the bottom half of the mural in a design of their own choice. Fairey recalls:
It was a powerful scene of hostile riot police like those who had evicted the Youth House dwellers and it incorporated one of the paint bombs on the mural as if it had been thrown by a riot cop. I thought it was a brilliant solution reflecting the history of the site and keeping my pro-peace message intact, but adding additional emphasis to the idea that peace is always facing attack from injustice that I felt was already more subtly implied by placing the dove in a target.[16]
These changes did little to help, and the mural kept getting attacked. And so too, unfortunately, did the artist. Soon, a mock version of the famous Obama posters the artist created for the 2008 US presidential election appeared on Copenhagen street corners. Instead of a picture of Obama, the poster now featured Fairey, with a bruised eye, over the familiar caption: HOPE. But why such vehement opposition? And “how”—as the artist asked—“is a mural advocating global peace inflammatory”?[17]
To understand the antagonism toward Fairey, one needs to consider how Fairey glossed over decades of struggles between local activists and a repressive state apparatus parading as the apotheosis of liberal democracy. As the mock poster amply suggests, the activists’ perception of Fairey as a useful idiot for American cultural imperialism originates in the street artist’s world-renown campaign to help elect Obama for president.
In 2008, Fairey created and distributed thousands of stickers, posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise to support the future president. Fairey even painted an “Obama mural” in Hollywood, photographed from a spectacular bird’s eye view. Across these images, the graphic form of Obama’s face is invariant. Fairey’s instantly recognizable aesthetic, which borrows in equal parts from political propaganda, pop art, and advertising, led TheNew Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, to extol Fairey’s Obama HOPE poster as “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You.’”[18]
Obama too, recognized the poster’s political efficacy. In a letter of appreciation to the street artist, Obama said: “I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. […] Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support.”[19] Soon after, with a little help from his “poster boy,” as the media later dubbed Fairey, Obama was elected. He was sworn into office on January 20, 2009. The rest is history. A history of hope, among other things.
Looking back from the recent Trump era, Obama’s presidency might appear to embody the progressive march towards what Kant, in 1795, had called “perpetual peace.” But the “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” as Kant stressed—to shield himself from allegations of subversive intent—remains precisely that: a philosopher’s dream, to which the “worldly statesman” does not need to “pay […] any heed.”[20] And though the worldly statesman Obama rhetorically advocated peace, he didn’t shy back from using military force.
One of President Obama’s first military campaigns, what became known as the “Obama-surge,” consisted in ramping up US troops in Afghanistan by an additional 17.000 soldiers. Later Obama’s military strategy shifted toward a series of so-called “small wars” or military interventions in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other places, that most certainly violated key philosophical articles in Kant’s treatise on peace – e.g. intervening forcibly in another state and employing “assassins.”[21] Advanced weapon technologies or “drones” for carrying out assassinations were instrumental to what some would describe as the Obama administration’s transformation of “the whole concept of war,” along with its attendant relationship to peace.[22]
However, Obama was not yet another “war president” but rather an example of a statesman who carefully paid heed to the dream of lasting peace and whose chief political task, accordingly, was to engineer this peace by all means necessary. One of the most potent tools that Obama inherited and redefined was the infamous US drone program. However, while new technology may have changed the reality of warfare, it takes more than technical advances to change social conceptions of war. Critics have rightly exposed the ambiguities in Obama’s peace rhetoric.[23] But which other “instruments” may have helped transform our understanding of war and its relationship to peace?
Key here, I believe, is how state and non-state actors ideologically supercharge artworks to wage “image war.”[24] One of the most famous examples of image war occurred when US officials, prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, deemed the reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica that was hanging in the UN Security Council chamber an inappropriate backdrop and ordered it to be concealed behind a curtain before the media arrived. According to the Retort collective’s analysis, this incident illustrates how states “struggle for mastery in the realm of the image.”[25] Can we pursue this analysis one step further to explore forms of image war that do not directly involve the state’s micromanagement of the “means of symbolic production”?
The advent of blogs, social media, and algorithms has challenged traditional top-down approaches to the politics of representation. As the Situationist Guy Debord pointed out at the dawn of our networked era, new decentralized or “diffuse” forms of control in the realm of the image exist side by side with more “concentrated” forms of spectacular representation.[26] State power no longer relies to the same extent on micromanaging appearances. Instead, as in the case of the Obama administration’s quasi-official endorsement of Fairey’s artwork, state power now benefits equally from artists-as-influencers who more or less wittingly align their aesthetics with the ideological exigencies of those in power.
Fairey placing his pigeon in a target to “subtly” imply, in his own words, “that peace is always facing attack from injustice” is an example of how ideology exists, independently of overt state control, in the expanded realm of art.[27] Fairey’s idea of a fragile and easily victimized peace—as not-so-subtly underscored by the white-feathered creature placed in a target—thus readily exposes a key ideological component of the liberal reasoning behind late-modern warfare: that perpetual peace requires an advanced pre-emptive “security” regime to ward off potential attacks from the enemies of peace.
In the liberal conception of peace, “keeping the peace” does not mean waging war indiscriminately but protecting the international community’s fragile state of equilibrium from external threats. What the US-led international community refers to as “peace” is not just a misnomer for perpetual war but also, in a historically specific sense, the precondition for newfangled forms of pre-emptive state violence, the urbanization of drone warfare, and the policing of racialized “surplus populations.”[28] From war power to police power, in other words.[29]
From such a perspective, Fairey’s pigeon dovetails with what Mark Neocleous calls the “liberal peace thesis.”[30] Now “a standard trope in the political discourse of international theory,” Neocleous argues, the liberal peace thesis is an untenable “claim for capitalism’s essentially pacific grounds.”[31] Since its inception in eighteenth-century political philosophy, the proponents of the liberal peace thesis have ignored evidence that contradicts the idea that free markets are an effective antidote to armed conflict. The constitutive violence at the heart of the liberal peace thesis, Neocleous notes, is encapsulated in ahistorical interpretations of Kant’s essay:
Liberalism, and thus many international lawyers, like [sic] to cite Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ as a key philosophical document outlining the liberal foundations of peace, yet usually omit the fact that the essay was published in October 1795, just one month after the military suppression of the revolt in Poland led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Poland’s partition by Russia and Prussia, and about which Kant had nothing to say.[32]
Likewise, proponents of the liberal peace thesis in the age of drone warfare typically have little to say about the lethal violence undergirding the “peace” discourse of the Global North. Obama is, again, a case in point. As one of the most popular American presidents ever, Obama was—and to some extent still is—primarily perceived as the embodiment of liberal democracy. In terms of US politics, Obama is something close to the incarnation of the liberal peace thesis: a champion of the most politically progressive values, with “peace” chief among them.
Eleven months into his presidency, in December 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping the US to play a more constructive role in world politics and for preferring “dialogue and negotiations” as “instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.”[33] The news that the 44th American president had received the world’s most prestigious peace prize resonated globally. Prefiguring Fairey’s pigeon mural, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a cartoon picturing Obama as a “black peace dove.”[34]
But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate admitted to having “instruments” other than just “dialogue and negotiations” in his peace arsenal. In his acceptance speech, Obama acknowledged that, as “the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he was “filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace.”[35] The answer to these “difficult questions,” as is now well known, took the form of the drone.
As Daniel Klaidman stated in his contemporaneous bestselling book Kill or Capture: the War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, “[b]y the time Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency.”[36] According to estimates produced by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama oversaw “ten times more” air strikes than his predecessor, amounting to “a total of 563 strikes, largely by drones,” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen among other places. The corresponding death-by-drone casualties logged by the bureau amount to somewhere “between 384 and 807 civilians,” and counting.[37]
In his Nobel Peace Prize remarks, Obama gauged the “costs of armed conflict” in relation to the “imperatives of a just peace” and concluded: “So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”[38] Obama’s closing remark?
Clear-eyed, we can understand thatthere will be war, and still strive forpeace. We can do that—for that is the story of human progress; that’s the hope of all the world; and at thismoment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.[39]
Leaving aside the question of whether the US-led, drone-based peace campaign is the story of human progress, it is clear that Obama’s work on Earth changed how we think about war and international conflict. Touting promises of “hope,” “progress,” and “change” (incidentally, the words that Fairey interchangeably used on his iconic HOPE posters), the Obama administration helped transform the concept of warfare into a logic of global “security.” As Grégoire Chamayou, in his instant classic of the drone age, pointed out, “in the logic of this security, based on the preventive elimination of dangerous individuals, ‘warfare’ takes the form of vast campaigns of extrajudiciary executions.”[40] As Chamayou remarks, “the names given to the drones—Predators (birds of prey) and Reapers (angels of death)—are certainly well chosen.”[41] So, is the pigeon in Fairey’s mural a bird of prey? The peace dove, an angel of death? Let’s examine in more detail the history of this magically ambiguous motif.
II
In 2010, the year before Fairey painted his “Peace Dove mural” in Copenhagen, there had been a global celebration of Picasso’s work. The temporary closure of the Picasso Museum in Paris, which sent many of Picasso’s works on tours of the global museum circuit, enabled major Picasso retrospectives in Moscow, New York, Münster, Seattle, Zürich, Vienna, and Liverpool.[42] The Liverpool exhibition, which took place at the Tate Liverpool gallery, was called Picasso: Peace and Freedom.
The exhibition frontispiece sported one of the artist’s iconic peace dove designs. According to the exhibition statement, this would be the first exhibition “to examine in depth the artist’s engagement with politics and the Peace Movement,” and it would “reflect a new Picasso for a new time.”[43] A new Picasso for a new time—but what “new time,” exactly? A time before Brexit, Boris Johnson, and Trump. A time of “hope,” for sure. A time that embodied all the most progressive values and hopes of Western liberal democracies. But how did Picasso’s peace dove become an emblem for an overarching liberal narrative of progress, peace and freedom?
While the dove has been a symbol of peace since ancient times, it was in the hands of the twentieth century’s most famous artist, Pablo Picasso, that it acquired its status as the quasi-official symbol of world peace. Appropriately to our story, Picasso’s peace dove originated, it is not often noted, as a fusion of street art avant la lettre and political propaganda. According to art historian Sarah Wilson, Picasso’s peace dove first appeared on the world stage in a poster on the streets of Paris announcing the World Congress for Peace, Paris-Prague, in 1949. It was the French communist and founding member of Surrealism, Louis Aragon, who, during a visit to Picasso’s studio, had chosen “Picasso’s pigeon—a soft wash drawing on a black ground” as a symbol for the upcoming international peace congress.[44]
Thanks to mechanical reproduction techniques, Picasso’s pigeon or La Colombe (1949)—originally intended as a limited edition lithograph of 50 prints—was being churned out by the thousands. Under the French Communist Party (PCF) auspices, Picasso’s delicate peace dove motif thus evolved into what specialist in political imagery Zvonimir Novak fittingly describes as a machine de guerre graphique, a graphical war machine.[45]
In response to the PCF’s “extremely successful billboard campaign,” French anti-communists, covertly sponsored by the CIA, formed a movement called Paix et Liberté (peace and freedom), with the sole purpose of discrediting the communist peace campaign that symbolically centered on Picasso’s wildly popular peace dove motif.[46] Did the 2010 Tate exhibition, Picasso: Peace and Freedom, perhaps intend some historical pun by alluding to the anti-communist propaganda of Paix et liberté in their exhibition title? It is difficult to tell, especially given that there was also a pacifist communist group with that name in the interwar years.[47] The changing ideological valence of the terms “peace and freedom” notwithstanding, the recuperation of Picasso’s peace dove exemplifies how art and politics intertwine in ways that exceed artistic intent. Much like Picasso’s Guernica was detached from its historical origins in “exchange for its continuing topicality”—as O.K. Werckmeister argued in his seminal book Icons of the Left—so too did his peace dove evolve into an all-purpose image of a politically non-descript peace. [48]
The original Paix et liberté group is an essential component in the history of Picasso’s peace dove. It was the French socialist politician, Jean-Paul David, who in 1950 founded Paix et liberté together with fellow partisans of the North Atlantic Treaty. To their concern, the signing of the treaty had been “effectively eclipsed” in France by the press coverage of the first communist peace congress.[49] The group’s aesthetic counter-offensive launched a flood of “posters supplemented by newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, stickers, and tracts that used the words, themes and symbols of the Communist Party to counter their message.”[50] In the climate of tense ideological antagonism that characterized the early phases of the Cold War, Novak recalls, the Parisian “walls were a site for a permanent war between billposters, the streets a battlefield scattered with paper tracts.”[51] A recurrent feature of the anti-communist campaign was how it exploited a deep-seated cultural sense of ambiguity about birds to draw attention to the two-faced nature of the communist peace symbol.
In a popular fable by Jean de La Fontaine, “The Bat and The Weasels,” a bat is caught by a weasel with an appetite for mice. The poor creature cunningly escapes death by convincing the predator that it is “not of that species” at all: “I, a mouse? No, no, some people must have told you merely out of malice. Thanks to the creator of the universe, I am a bird: behold my wings. Long live the nation that skims the air.” A little later, the same bat is caught again by another weasel, this time one that harbors an “enmity” toward birds. Again, the clever bat escapes. But this time by refusing to be a bird, insisting that, surely, it is the feathers that make the bird, not the mere ability to fly. La Fontaine’s fable—which, as one can imagine, also lent itself to French anti-Semitic political caricatures—was used against the communists to present them as morally suspect.
Because much of the support for the PCF in the 1940s and 1950s stemmed from the glory of the communist resistance movement’s fight against fascism during the Second World War, the Fontainesque anti-communist propaganda centered on undermining the idea that communists could be French republican patriots. One particular tract, a precursor to the Paix et liberté variations that followed in its path, gets this message across: recto, there is a winged creature draped in the French colors, with a caption that reads “I am bird, behold my wings”; verso, the creature reveals its true colors, a deep communist red, hammer and sickle on its chest, with the caption now reading “I am a mouse! Long live the rats!”
Perhaps the most successful attack of this kind was the poster, La colombe qui fait boum, which ingeniously transformed Picasso’s peace dove into an explosive device. According to Wilson, “the explosive slogan was soon pasted all over the walls of Paris as Picasso’s Dove had been: the print run was purportedly 300,000.”[52] As Wilson notes, Picasso’s voluminous FBI file references the satirical poster along with a press clipping from The Washington Post, February 17, 1952:
The back, the pouting breast and the belly made the form of a tank: the tail feathers were exhaust fumes. The head was a turret and the beak a cannon, the hammer and sickle brand was on the shoulder. There was a simple five word caption: ‘The Dove that goes Boom’. All Paris laughed and the Communists were ridiculed.[53]
The satirical attacks may have harmed the PCF’s image momentarily, but Picasso’s peace dove took off to become the quasi-official mascot of the world peace movement. From today’s perspective, however, the peace dove of the Picasso: Peace and Freedom exhibition at Tate Liverpool Gallery stands, along with Fairey’s peace dove mural, at the end of the historical arc of triumphant liberalism.
Retrospectively, 1989 was a hinge moment. On this crucial threshold from the “modern” to the “contemporary,” Francis Fukuyama famously trumpeted the “end of history” based on the alleged “fact that ‘peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world.”[54] In the prominent political scientist’s global peace narrative, “Western liberal democracy” had revealed itself to be the “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution.”[55] The future, from this perspective, was canceled. The only significant task left to humankind would be to come to terms with the past, a perpetual historical curating. Or, in Fukuyama’s own words: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”[56] But the “modern” constraints and contradictions of the pigeon-cum-peace-dove were carried over into the age of drone warfare and continues to shape our hypercontemporary—and oddly Fontainesque—condition.
III
Imagine this. Just as Shepard Fairey puts the finishing touches to his mural in Copenhagen, a mysterious mechanical bird crashes to the ground. But Fairey, in deep concentration, perhaps mulling over whether to include an olive branch in the pigeon’s beak, doesn’t notice it at all. The street artist is so immersed in his work that he forgets where he is. Los Angeles, New York, Reykjavik, or perhaps Tel Aviv? When Fairey looks around to see what the commotion is about, it is nightfall in Balochistan Province, Pakistan. A man, lit up by the headlights of a parked car, holds up what “looks a bit like a silver bird,” while another man stands guard with a Kalashnikov.[57] What’s going on here? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? A toy? No, it’s “a small combat-proven spy drone.”[58]
Of course, Fairey painting his peace dove mural and the “weird, birdlike mystery drone” falling from the sky were two separate events that happened in two different places. Fairey wasn’t magically beamed into Pakistan. Sheer historical coincidence brings these two birds to the fore at this exact historical moment (August 2011). But there is something uncanny about these twin events that brings to mind the work of the Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin, who in As Birds Flying (video, 2016) and The General’s Stork (mixed media, 2016–ongoing), mines the contemporary drone imaginary through an aesthetic exploration of the historical and ideological overlaps between birds and drones.
Amin does not discuss Shepard Fairey’s peace dove, but she does refer to the Pakistan “mystery drone” as an example of how drones are nested in deep-seated cultural imaginaries about birds flying. In The Generals Stork, Amin relates the crashed mystery drone to its commercial twin, the then much-hyped “SmartBird” by Festo engineering, and brings these two birds-as-drones into a larger media narrative about how, in 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork on suspicions of espionage because it was equipped with an electronic tracking device. A device that, as it transpired, merely registered the bird’s migratory patterns.
To Amin, the Pakistan spy-drone crash highlights the progressive obscuring of the boundaries between natural beings and military artifacts that characterize situations of drone warfare and creates the conditions of possibility not only for storks being detained but also for generalizing a sense of paranoia that pervades everyday life under drone surveillance: “Imagine the confusion of finding such an object in a place where people are so accustomed to drone attacks. What happens when we can no longer differentiate a machine from a living thing?”[59]
Amin critically addresses the projected drone future where birds-as-drones and other similar creatures “naturally” circle the sky above. And Festo’s “smart bird,” to be sure, marks a historical threshold. The “SmartbBird” has since inspired a flock of cheaply available “bionic” or “bio-mimetic” drones, so called because they are engineered to mimic birds and other living creatures. In 2016, for instance, Amazon patented new drone technology that would allow future delivery drones to perch “like pigeons” on streetlights, church steeples, and other vertical urban structures.[60] When the world’s largest online retailer jumps on the bionic drone bandwagon, we can start to imagine what the drone future might bring.
Indeed, if one is to believe the media hype, bio-inspired drones might be the next big thing. One 2019 NBC news report rubric reads: “Inspired by the aerial abilities of birds, bats and insects, researchers are crafting a new generation of ultralight drones that lack propellers and are equipped not with fixed wings but with flapping ones.”[61] More recent examples confirming this trend are legion. In contemporary robotics, common pigeons of the kind that inspired Picasso’s peace dove motif are being anatomically dissected to teach semi-autonomous machines to perform more like their feathered brethren.[62] The common pigeon that inspired Picasso’s peace dove is, essentially, a proto-drone.[63]
Amin’s art project, As Birds Flying, further instructs us about the historical and symbolic crossovers between birds and their mechanical counterparts, the drones, and crucially brings colonialism into the frame. Amin’s film is based on found drone footage of locations in the Middle East, including views of Israeli settlements, and poetically reinterprets how religious myths, colonial wars, airpower, spy birds, surveillance technologies, and late-modern drone warfare historically interlock.
In the artistic research project The General’s Stork, Amin recalls the story of Lord Allenby’s seizure of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in 1917 to show how deep the bird-as-drone imaginary reaches into the historical texture of orientalism and colonialism:
[Lord Allenby] launched an attack based on a biblical prophecy found in the book of Isaiah 31:5, which states: “As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it.” By reason of this prophecy, he sent as many planes as possible to fly over Jerusalem, forcing the Turks to surrender the city. So, when Allenby marched into Jerusalem, it was seen as a prophecy fulfilled. Right at the core of this prophetic figure, or augury, is the symbolic and actual presence of the avian, the prophecy of the birds flying over Jerusalem, the birds mutating into airplanes, the airplanes mutating into drones, and the menace of predictive drone technology metastasizing into the specter of aerial bombardment. This prophecy has become predictive in terms of drone technology, envisioning what will be and what is yet to come.[64]
Amin’s examination of “the symbolic and actual presence of the avian” in the historical ascendance of the drone underscores how the realms of the symbolic and the real overlap. Just as the biblical prophecy helped Lord Allenby visualize and ultimately legitimize Jerusalem’s destruction, the liberal peace thesis provides ideological justification for the US-led drone program. Lord Allenby’s prophecy materialized as mechanical birds flying over Jerusalem dropping bombs while Picasso’s peace dove, in turn, participates in an ongoing image war with no less deadly consequences. As diverse as these different historical contexts of killing may be, they are equally grounded in deep-seated cultural narratives with a near palpable orientalist subtext.
Seen from an art-historical perspective, the migration of the common pigeon (Colombia livia)—from Picasso’s 1949 ink-wash drawing through to Fairey’s 2011 peace dove mural and further still—forms an irregular pattern across history that culminates symbolically at the height of the age of drone warfare and resonates into our present moment. Today, there is a more-than-symbolic sense in which Picasso’s peace dove mutates into a drone—or a swarm of drones, to be exact.
In December 2016, as Obama’s presidency was coming to an end, the skies above the Disney World theme park “dazzled with drones” in a spectacular night-time show: “For Starbright Holidays’ finale, the drones form a dove. With the music swelling, the sequence packs an emotional punch.”[65] In an article in USA Today, Ayala, one of Disney’s so-called Imagineers (that is, an imagination engineer) notes that “his team originally animated the word, ‘peace,’ but later removed it. The dove, the Imagineers figured, transcends language and culture. ‘We have the symbol of peace,’ notes Ayala. ‘What better way to show it than from the stars themselves—from the universe?’”[66]
Although arbitrary to the events recounted in this essay, the Disney show appears as a grand finale of the ideology of liberal peace as epitomized by the drone. It also bespeaks what Andrea Miller calls the “specter of the drone,” an example of how “diffuse histories and geographies of war are folded into the sign of the drone” in new forms of entertainment.[67] The proliferation of drones as a tool of entertainment since 2016 practically refutes its reputation as an aggressive instrument of US neo-imperialist war in ways that are most certainly conducive to the drone industry. President-elect Joe Biden’s drone fireworks celebration in November 2020 testifies to this historical shift—and raises important questions about what the drone future might hold.[68] So where are we now? And what happened to the pigeon in the mural?
*
In 2013, Shepard Fairey fell out of love with his former political icon, Obama, and became an outspoken critic of drone warfare (if not of liberal peace).[69] As Fairey’s criticism of Obama’s use of drones became known to the public, one blogger quipped: “End of a Fairey Tale: Poster Artist Says Obama’s Drones Killed ‘Hope’.”[70] A 2015 Washington Post op-ed took a similar line: “Obama’s done. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Obama administration for Republicans. That widespread enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 has eroded, and with less than two years left in office, one of his most visible supporters, the guy who made the most iconic image of the Obama years has even turned on him.”[71] The commentator turned out to be correct: Obama was done. The Fairey Tale of perpetual peace ended, as we now know, with the brutal awakening in 2017 to the Trump era and the spectacular rise of late-capitalist fascism.[72]
The story about the destruction of Fairey’s peace dove mural in Copenhagen now belongs in a backroom of Fukuyama’s “museum of human history.” And no one paid much attention to Shepard Fairey’s peace dove after its attempted assassination by graffiti writers in 2011. After Fairey returned to the US, the partly destroyed mural was left to its own devices; an aesthetic prop in the staging of a “radical chic” image that accompanies Copenhagen’s ongoing gentrification. To this day, Fairey’s pigeon remains intact in its mural, hovering peacefully above street level commotion. Its mechanical double, however, is as busy as a bee.
The Covid 19-pandemic has rekindled interest in “bionic” drones inspired by flying creatures such as birds, bats, and bees. In China, for instance, drones disguised as white doves surveil the population, firing up the imagination of conspiracy theorists worldwide.[73] In the US and in many other countries, a new breed of Fontainesque drones with and without feathers are operating daily outside of the military context. In addition to commercial drones and drones operated by amateur hobbyists, so-called “pandemic drones” are now performing various roles: delivering medical supplies, sanitizing streets, or “shouting” at people to keep their distance.
According to statistics from the Bard College Drone Center, more than 500 public safety agencies acquired drones between 2018 and 2020, bringing their total number close to 1,600—and counting. If the US is a bellwether of a global tendency for public safety agencies to add drones to their “peace arsenal,” the question remains whether this peace is preferable to what was called, once upon a time, by a more recognizable name: war.
Taking recent political unrest in the US and elsewhere into consideration one can fear that the mainstream adoption of drones—under continuing capitalist relations of production—will reinforce rather than challenge existing systems of technologically enabled oppression. It is crucial to remember, as scholar of surveillance Simone Brown notes, that oppressive forms of surveillance did not arrive with new technologies such as drones. Instead, drone surveillance is but a new expression of the same racism and anti-blackness that undergird existing power structures.[74] Whether we are dealing with “ghetto birds” or drones disguised as white peace doves, racist police power is still, to paraphrase James Baldwin, policing black communities like occupied territories.[75] The “sweet dream of perpetual peace,” in other words, still weighs heavily on the brains of the living.[76]
_____
Dominique Routhier is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the research project Drone Imaginaries and Communities (Independent Research Fund Denmark) at the University of Southern Denmark. His first book With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation, is forthcoming with Verso Books in 2023.
[1] Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers par J. de La Fontaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint and Saillant, 1755), 53, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1049428h.
[4] Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (New York: Verso, 2017), 1–8.
[5] T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 562.
[6] The term “image war” has been used in various theoretical contexts since the Gulf War. Perhaps most famously, Jean Baudrillard theorized “the birth of a new kind of military apparatus which incorporates the power to control the production and circulation of images” in a series of essays that appeared in English translation under the title The Gulf War did not take place (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 5. Dora Apel in War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univeristy Press, 2012), W.J.T. Mitchell in Cloning Terror: The War of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), and, of course, the Retort collective in Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005) all use the term (or corelates) in their analysis of the spectacular nature of late modern warfare.
[7] In terms of methodology, I rely on Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[8] Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 67.
[10] For a more detailed historical contextualization of the Youth House, see René Karpantschof and Flemming Mikkelsen, “Youth, Space, and Autonomy in Copenhagen: the Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement, 1963-2012,” in The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements from the 1970s to the Present, eds. Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 179-206.
[20] Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” 67.
[21] “Targeted killing” using drone airstrikes is arguably state assassination by another name. Thanks to Tim Carter for helping me clarify my argument here.
[22] Christi Parsons and W. J. Hennigan, “President Obama, Who Hoped to Sow Peace, Instead Led the Nation in War,” Los Angelses Times, January 13, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/.
[23] See, for instance, Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May, “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2013, pp. 623-650.
[24] For an excellent discussion of this term in relation to the task of art history, see James Day, “Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War: Ten Recent Publications on Image-Politics in Relation to the Possibility of Art Historical Analysis,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 48 (2015), doi:10.7146/nja.v24i48.23071.
[25] Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts (Retort), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005), 19.
[26] See Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London ; New York: Verso, 1990).
[28] See Ian G. R. Shaw, “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis,” Geographica Helvetica 71, no. 1 (February 15, 2016): 19–28, doi:10.5194/gh-71-19-2016.
[29] Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
[33] “The Nobel Peace Prize 2009,” NobelPrize.Org, accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2009/press-release/.
[34] Stephanie Busari and Claire Barthelemy, “Obama Peace Prize Win Polarizes Web,” CNN World, accessed April 21, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/09/obama.nobel.peace.reaction/index.html.
[35] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” (Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2009), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize.
[36] Daniel Klaidman, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 117.
[37] Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, “Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush.
[44] Sarah Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 131.
[45] Zvonimir Novak, Agit tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire (Les Éditions L’échapée, 2015), 210.
[46] Anastasia Karel, “Brief History of Paix et Liberté,” Princeton University Libraries, accessed February 11, 2021, http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/paix/.
[48] See Otto Karl Werckmeister, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78.
[62] Eric Chang et al., “Soft Biohybrid Morphing Wings with Feathers Underactuated by Wrist and Finger Motion,” Science Robotics 5, no. 38 (January 16, 2020), doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aay1246.
[63] The “animal prehistory” of drone technology is comparatively well-rehearsed, see Stubblefield, Drone Art, especially chapter 4, “The Animal Remainder: Excavating Nohuman Life from Contemporary Drones.”
[67] Andrea Miller, “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 86.
[68] For an excellent analysis of Joe Biden’s drone fireworks in the shifting historical context of drones, see Caren Kaplan “Everyday Militarisms: Drones and the Blurring of the Civilian-Military Divide During COVID-19” Forthcoming in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, eds. Michael Richardson and Beryl Pong, Open Humanities Press.
[69] A more recent incident in France testifies to Fairey’s continued commitment to the liberal cause and his knack for appealing to world leaders with his propaganda art. Briefly told, Fairey painted a gigantic Marianne-mural, that, in an echo of the 2011 Copenhagen incident, was destroyed by anonymous graffiti artists. See HIYA! Rédaction, “Un Crew Anonyme Fait «pleurer» La plus Grande Marianne de France! #MariannePleure,” HIYA!, December 14, 2020, https://hiya.fr/2020/12/14/inedit-un-crew-anonyme-fait-pleurer-la-plus-grande-marianne-de-france-mariannepleure/.
[72] For a forthcoming analysis of “late capitalist fascism,” see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).
[73] See for instance the self-declared international movement “Birds Aren’t Real,” which absurdly claims that all birds are government-controlled drones. Whether or not these “activists” are serious about their claims is hard to tell.
[74] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.
[76] I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and insightful criticisms that have helped me greatly improve this essay.
Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 2015.
Chang, Eric, Laura Y. Matloff, Amanda K. Stowers, and David Lentink. “Soft Biohybrid Morphing Wings with Feathers Underactuated by Wrist and Finger Motion.” Science Robotics 5, no. 38 (January 16, 2020). doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aay1246.
Clark, T.J. “The Conditions of Artistic Creation.” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 561–62.
Day, James. “Review Essay: Art History in Its Image War. Ten Recent Publications on Image-Politics in Relation to the Possibility of Art Historical Analysis.” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 48 (2015). doi:10.7146/nja.v24i48.23071.
Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London ; New York: Verso, 1990.
Joshua Reeves and Matthew S. May. “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16, no. 4 (2013): 623. doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0623.
Kant, Immanuel. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Edited by Pauline Kleingeld. Translated by David L. Colclasure. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Kaplan, Caren. “Everyday Militarisms: Drones and the Blurring of the Civilian-Military Divide During COVID-19.” In Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, edited by Michael Richardson and Beryl Pong. Open Humanities Press, Forthcoming.
Karpantschof, René, and Flemming Mikkelsen. “Youth, Space, and Autonomy in Copenhagen: The Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement, 1963-2012.” In The City Is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, edited by Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze, 179–206. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.
Klaidman, Daniel. Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
La Fontaine, Jean de. Fables choisies. Tome 1 / , mises en vers par J. de La Fontaine. Tome premier, 1755. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1049428h.
Miller, Andrea. “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 85–106. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Neocleous, Mark. War Power, Police Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Novak, Zvonimir. Agit tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire, 2015.
Shaw, Ian G. R. “The Urbanization of Drone Warfare: Policing Surplus Populations in the Dronepolis.” Geographica Helvetica 71, no. 1 (February 15, 2016): 19–28. doi:10.5194/gh-71-19-2016.
Werckmeister, Otto Karl. Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Wilson, Sarah. Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.
This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.
“In studying its (Hindutva as political monotheism) long genesis, my objective is not to advance toward a prognostic reading of the present…My purpose will instead be to explore, with some degree of speculation, the ground of the present.”
(Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism, 10)
The sentences above are crucial for approaching the novelty of Anustup Basu’s approach in his monograph Hindutva as Political Monotheism. Studies of Hindutva usually focus on its historical geneses, its sociological impact, and its anthropological dimensions.[1] Basu’s monograph is a path-breaking attempt to trace its genealogy as a political monotheism. This effort, he says, is not “a presentist elaboration of what we are witnessing now, but a deep search of its (Hindutva’s) historical origins” (2). The key analytical optic he deploys to understand Hindutva as a political monotheism, as an ideology that seeks a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity,” and as “a monotheme of religiosity rather than religion itself” are the works of the hard-right thinker and one-time Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (5). Schmitt’s theses on the concept of the political assists Basu in drawing out a “tacit monotheistic imperative in European organic theories of religious and ethnocentric nationhood” that he explores in detail in his first chapter (5). This monotheistic impulse utilizes the colonial epistemological category of “Hinduism” to invent it as a “jealous” political and national identity that eventually colonizes the apparatus of the post-colonial state. In an introduction and four subsequent chapters, Basu traces the development of this monotheistic impulse as a literary and cultural project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its eventual replacement by “Hindutva 2.0”—an advertised and informational experience of urban modernity—in the contemporary period. Basu does not conduct this inquiry by presenting a chronological narrative of the development of core Hindutva ideas; rather, the word “speculation” in the epigraph above signals his eclectic and creative juxtaposition of multiple primary sources to trace a genealogy of Hindutva as a political monotheism.
Hindutva as Political Monotheism (henceforth Hindutva) locates the search for a fully developed political monotheism in India in relation to two dimensions of inquiry. The first is the colonial epistemological invention of “Hinduism,” the larger arcs of modernity in India, and the drafting and implementation of post-colonial India’s constitution in 1950. The second places the contemporary rise of Hindutva within the broader global crisis of liberalism and the concomitant rise of ethic-national chauvinisms. Two conceptual terms serve as touchstones in the four chapters. The first is axiomatic that is derived from William Connolly’s work on American evangelical-capitalism in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). The axiomatic, Basu writes, is a “singular religious passion that does not necessarily depend on theological consistency” (5). This observation connects with his argument broached earlier that Hindutva is more about religiosity than about religion per se. He further specifies that the axiomatic is “a techno-social regime of governmentality than simply a theologico-pastoral formation” (5). The second term is parabasis, which he draws from Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). This term emerges from classical Greek theater and refers to the duration in the play when the actors leave the stage, and the chorus addresses the audience. Basu deploys parabasis to explore the “historical roots of a relatively recent voice of a wider urban consensus beyond usual suspects such as the ardent disciple of (M.S.) Golwalkar or the angry foot soldier of (Narendra) Modi” (9).[2] This urban consensual voice, while constituted by dissonant timbres, converges in crucial aspects to consolidate and sustain “the increasing metropolitan revision of regional eccentricities and the fervor for security and techno-financial growth” (10). The genealogical precedents and rise to prominence of this “electronic Hindu political monotheism,” which surpasses the older impasses of print capitalism, is the central knowledge-object Basu focuses on in Hindutva.
Chapter One—“Questions Concerning the Hindu Political”—lays the theoretical foundations by elaborating some key concepts from Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (2007) and Political Theology (2006). The key extension that he makes to Schmitt’s vitalistic conceptualization of the political as the realm defined by the friend-enemy antagonism is by reading it as a “fundamentally monotheistic calling” and not via the German thinker’s observation that all secular concepts are at their base sublimated religious ones (14). This austere notion of the political is a “mythopoetic automaton” that enables the imagination of a unified people and the state only after having “categorically distinguished the believer from the infidel” (14). This “passion” is monotheistic by “secular transposition, because it has to be a singular impelling of devotion to the nation and the state” (14). In the colonial/post-colonial Indian context, this monotheism is conceived by the Hindu right as constitutively Hindu, an axiomatic that is then opposed to rival monotheistic axiomatics like Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity. A fiction of a primordial, prepolitical Hindu India is, thus, disseminated which has supposedly survived and persisted despite Islamic, and later, British colonization of what is now a nation-state.
Basu states that he isn’t interested in an “instrumental” reading of the Indian context in Schmittian terms (23). Schmitt’s theorizations are not used as a mechanical explanatory model applied to the Indian context; rather, his “sparse” invocation is useful in highlighting three important themes of particular pertinence to nation-thinking and imaginaries of sovereignty: “the modern understanding of religion, the romance of the past, and the concomitant monotheistic imperative of political theology” (14). Basu is interested in mining the connection between Schmitt’s notion of the political and Hindutva for three specific reasons. First, there has been a consistent monotheistic impulse in the discursive invention of “Hinduism” from the nineteenth century onwards. The Abrahamic cast endowed to Hinduism from that period paves the way for its consolidation as a political and nationalist identity that desires the state form. Second, Hindu nationalism is thoroughly Eurocentric and Orientalist at its core, a fact underscored rather risibly, as reported in the news portal The Wire (2021), in a recent revision to the history curriculum of Delhi University where the Mughal emperor Babur’s entry into India is termed “invasion” while the East India Company’s rule is couched under the more benign term “territorial expansion.” Third, when Hindu nationalism became institutionalized as a political movement in the 1920s and 30s, it was directly influenced by European fascisms and Herderian romantic-organicist formulations (17). But what makes Schmitt particularly relevant to Basu’s project is his identification of the passion of “jealousy” as the core of the monotheistic distinction between friend and enemy in the realm of the political. This passion facilitates the imagination of a Hindu India as “an organic whole rather than an associational pact” and is often summoned to judge the contrarian pressures of regionalism or to condemn secularism and federalism in the Indian context (151).
Let us tarry with some of the distinctive features of Basu’s reading of the passion of “jealousy” in Schmitt awhile. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argues that the friend-enemy distinction is the central antagonism in the political sphere. Given Basu’s focus on “grounds,” it is crucial to note the way he distinguishes Schmitt’s friend-enemy antagonism and its relation to sovereign decisionism from the Hobbesian model of decisionism. Hobbes begins from the contractualist fiction and not the primordial time-space that precedes the contract. In contrast, for Schmitt, this primordial is the settlement of the question of friend and enemy. Thus, the friend-enemy antagonism and its settlement prior to social contracts or associations constitutes the very grounds of the political. Basu writes:
The political is decided by a primalpathology prior to self-consciouspeopleness; it…has to be an already-there organic unity. It cannot be associational or contractual precisely because it must express a singular and undivided will before reason andtalk can proceed. Schmitt’s political theology therefore necessarily defines the bearer of the political as a monotheistic congregation, jealous of any apostates, pagans or heretics in its midst. (18)
The passion of jealousy points us towards the chilling imperative that a war for extermination between both parties is possible at any time. The purpose of the state is to respond to this fear at every step. When the juridical resources of the state cannot fulfil this expectation, a “secular miracle” is called for—the exception.[3] This sovereign decision can either be a war against “internal” enemies or a “perpetual civil war as an index of relentless determination or purification” (18). The chilling imperatives of Hindutva as political monotheism, which can be conducted both as a war on internal enemies and a permanent civil war, echo these Schmittian postulations.
Chapter Two (“The Hindu Nation as Organism”) is the core of Hindutva. This chapter juxtaposes philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal’s work on Indic “little traditions” with modern Hindutva’s organismic invented “grand” tradition that attempts to subsume a massive plurality of identities via a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity” (5). Basu deploys Aamir Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony (2007) to caution that there is no “pristine truth of pluralism” to contrast with the pristine truth of monotheism—both desires are sullied by the colonial modern. They gesture to a lost excess beyond the organizing frames of colonial taxonomies. But what is missing, Basu writes, in Hindutva discourses is the “critical admission of irony and amnesiac mourning—an understanding of the bygone as necessary fiction with a phantom aspect…” (34). This differentiates Hindutva’s monotheistic search for lost origins from the double consciousness that marks scholars like Matilal, Mufti, and, indeed, works like Hindutva itself.
In contrast to Hindutva’s modernist desire for a theistic unity and consistency in line with the Abrahamic traditions, Matilal’s works on “little traditions” show that while the numerous South Asian scriptural traditions have “involved themselves with logic and epistemology, religious duties and rituals, metaphysics and soteriology,” they have hardly ever “furnished a constitutive moral worldview” (38). This seeming lack of a constitutive, coherent moral worldview and a massive polyphony of voices within what is called the Hindu tradition has led many Western thinkers to posit that “Indian religion was inseparable from Indian mythology” (Hegel) or that there was “no concept of morality in Sanskrit” (Max Weber) (39-41). To make Hinduism “necessarily Brahminical and resolutely monolingual,” as Hindutva attempts to do, would involve the negation of the dynamic osmosis among the tremendous babble of “little traditions” into a “manufactured and jealous ‘Epic of Traditions’…in order to institute a masculine, Savarna national morality robbed of all errant and queering energies” (41). This is a project still in the making, but one which has become more prominent and public in recent times.
The other insuperable bottleneck that Hindutva faces is that of caste. While Hindutva discourse insists on the “original Varna as a recognition of merit over birth,” the questions of Jati and Varna are always complicated by plural traditions that are “artisanal, ecological, and based on everyday customs and pieties” (44-6). The problem here lies in Hindutva’s uncritical adoption of the Western anthropological category of religion itself. As Basu says, quoting Matilal: “‘The social reality [called] religion did not exist in ancient or classical India’—at least in a core, etymological root sense of the word, as reliq, or that which binds and relegates” (47). Responding to this absence, Hinduism is invented as a monotheism and as resolutely monolingual by Hindutva. The valorization of Brahminical theodicy in this monolingual reformulation is a manifestation of the desperate desire of Hindutva historicism to respond to and rectify the purported lack posited by the Orientalizing gaze of the big colonizing Other.
The tour de force in this chapter is Basu’s analysis of the “pieties” of Hindutva discourse and the problems it encounters in endowing the nation an organismic cast. For Hindutva thinkers like MS Golwalkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyay, the Hindu nation in its essence is paradoxically predicated on “terrestrial homogeneity as well as cosmogonic inequity” (32). Once this promised Hindu punyabhumi (consecrated land) is achieved via the revival of Hindu virtue:
…this nation, in its perfection, will be marked by a balanced metabolism of natural caste patrimony and a principleddocility of the lower orders. Citizenship shall be defined by selfless service and sacrifice, not by individual rights and interests. The state here can only be an organic expression of an originaryBrahminical peace; it may not be a profane artifice to ward off a natural state of (caste) war. (32)
This invocation of Brahminical peace and caste war leads directly to Basu’s fascinating consideration of Hindutva’s “primal origin myth” and evocation of “deep time” that he conducts via an elaboration of four themes: “Time and Origins,” “Race and Law,” “Territory, Imaginative Geography, Identity,” and “Language, Countermemory, and Culture.” I won’t go into the details of each theme but will explicate Basu’s theorization of Hindutva “deep time” through a contrast with an interesting moment in a well-known South Asian fictional text. Nirmal, a central character in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2006), tries to explain how he will attempt to communicate the vastness of geological timescales to a group of rural children in Bengal:
It’s not just the goddesses—there’s a lot more in common between myth and geology. Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are—heavenly deitieson the one hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly, equally remote fromus…And then, of course, there is the scale of time—yugas and epochs, Kaliyug and the Quaternary. And yet—mind this!—in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit thetelling of a story. (150)
Nirmal’s homology between myth and geology shows how the vastness of geological time is conceptualized by different epistemological formations in varied yet comparable ways. As the medievalist Jeffrey J. Cohen (2015) writes—“Every historical period works with the conceptual tools it inherits but is never bound by that heritage to the replication of that which is already known” (83). Nirmal seems to intuitively understand the connection between such different epistemological attempts at comprehending the vastness of temporal scales. He uses this understanding and tries to channel it creatively towards a pedagogical goal—how to make his students grasp the vastness of the temporal scales of geohistory.
Is the Hindutva homology, or rather the erasure of the gap between myth and history the same as what Nirmal institutes between myth and geology? Time, as Basu says, in its Hindu-Aryan naissance “is geological” (49). Basu succinctly distinguishes imaginaries of temporal scale in Puranic cosmologies and the way Hindutva banalizes them for statist ends. Deep time in Puranic texts is not quantifiable in literal terms, and function as “pure magnitudes to invoke fear, shame and reverence…” (51). Such pure magnitudes create an “existential distance between humans of the present and the Dharmic exemplum” (52). Time-reckoning in the ancient era could simultaneously exist as cyclical in terms of cosmology and linear in terms of the moment of the here and now. The problem with Hindutva thinking lies in “making the two identical, and then vectorizing the whole thing in terms of statist mythography” (52). The complexities of the temporal imaginaries that so invigorate Nirmal to help his students encounter questions of geological scale is rerouted via colonial historiography by Hindutva discourse into “coarse positivisms of rise and fall” (53). Invocations of deep time in Hindutva discourse is not a contention with different timescales, but a negation of timeliness and metric history, as for example in Golwalkar’s rhetorical flourish that Hindus ruled India for ten thousand years before a “foreigner” set foot in it (54-5). Metric time and history are conceptualized as a form of rupture. The original period of Hindu glory cannot be located within temporal frameworks; instead, history begins with a curving towards Kaliyuga (end times). Secular history is a fall from a myth of origins, while the myth of the golden Hindu past exists in a time before time.
This conceptualization of deep time before historical time proper is also imagined as a period of Brahminical peace. The invocation of a mythic past in terms of Varna is necessary for Hindutva because it is predicated “in the form of a Jati revenge against Islam, not Jati parity within Hinduism” (56). The monotheme of a jealous Hindu identity ranged against rival axiomatics can only be consolidated by “foreclosing the emergence of countermemories and competing fictions of Jati identity” (56). Deploying Michel Foucault’s ideas on race war from Society must be Defended (2003), Basu argues that for this Hindu monotheme to emerge and to anticipate a possible future when this essence is restored, the link between history and caste-war must be actively denied or forgotten:
No matter how far back one goes, profane historical knowledge does not present nature, right, order, or peace for Hindutva. Hindutva’s historicism is therefore founded on an idealism that knowledge and truth belong to the order of Brahminical peace; that they cannot belong to the side of violence, miscegenation, and relentless caste war. (62)
Besides the potential extermination of the enemy and forgetting of caste war, this narrative of Hindu redemption is predicated on the concurrent remembering of an ideal Hindu subject that is “apparently different from the profane, modern one, yet one that is lost in an ever-receding past that in itself cannot be viewed other than through the prism of the modern” (86). This ideal Hindu subject, simultaneously ancient and modern, must be reinstated as sovereign among the plurality of identities in the subcontinent. This is one of the core elements of the Hindutva project.
Chapter Three—“The Indian Monotheism”—moves away from Hindutva discourse to an analysis of “normative Hinduism,” a secularized, albeit Hinduized, sensus communis that has been the bedrock of the post-colonial nation-state. This discourse of “soft” Hinduness ranges across a spectrum from “benign to sharp.” It also oscillates between a patronizing benevolence towards Islam and a paranoid hauteur directed towards the jealous monotheism of Hindutva (124). In recent decades, Basu writes, this “apparently benign Hinduness has increased its powers as a psychological parabasis for a majoritarian nation” (88). Chapter Three looks at “discursive antecedents” in the “broader nineteenth-century Indological identification of ‘Hinduism’ and the discourses of Hindu reform, Hindu anthropology, jurisprudence, and history” (7). This “benign” discursive trajectory of a Hindu monotheme has increasingly been replaced with “ritualized pathological expressions” (88). The fact that benign Hinduness and ritualized pathological Hindutva are often substitutable with each other reveal that they are secret sharers drawing from the same wellspring of the Hindu monotheme.
In terms of specifics, “The Indian Monotheism” considers a broad “constellation of moments”—the Vedantic reform of Raja Rammohan Roy, the literary moment of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s universalization of the caste question, and the “pacific paternalism” of M.K. Gandhi (146). Crucial to this discursive project of a “monothematic Hindu becoming in anticipation of the nation-state” is the furnishing of “imagined communities and personages with a subjectivity and a historical agency pertinent to the overall invention of a Hindu past” (147). This occurred in several ways—the elevation of neo-Vedantic monism as a counter to the messy facts of polytheism in Hindu practices (evident, for instance, in the literary interventions of Roy), the institutionalization of the Bhagawad Gita as the holy book of the Hindu people (a reading very prominent in Bankim), and the portrayal of figures like Rama and Krishna as prophetic personages greater than Christ or the Buddha. In each case, the development of the Hindu monotheme necessitated arguments with colonial Reason and the subsumption of ambiguous and scattered elements within the ambit of “antiquarian or monumental” histories that corresponded to nationalistic desires (147). All these moments of argumentation had major differences with Hindutva—for instance, Rammohan Roy’s Hindu monism as universal religion bypassed the passion of jealousy altogether, while Radhakrishnan’s pragmatic defense of Varna differs from the theologico-cosmogonic cast that Hindutva ideologues like Golwalkar posited. What unites them though is the deep desire for a quintessentially Hindu-Indian axiomatic.
The discussion of the trajectory from Roy to Radhakrishnan is bookended by Hegel’s philosophical critique of the Gita on the one hand and B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism on the other. Hegel’s 1827 civilizational diagnosis that the “absence of a monotheistic esprit de corps” in the Gita compromises the nation’s “security in a world of lordship and bondage,” serves as a foil for the intellectual ripostes by Rammohan Roy and Bankim (101). Much more interesting though is Basu’s discussion of Ambedkar’s Jacobin critique of Hinduism. I will highlight one aspect of Ambedkar’s radical critique of Hindu monotheism through a contrast with Radhakrishnan. For Radhakrishnan, caste became a means to contain race conflict in India. The genius of the Indian caste system, for Radhakrishnan, was the prevention and containment of race war (which was supposedly common in all societies) via a process of harmonization rather than the alternatives of enslavement or extermination (129). Caste, thus, is presented as not ontologically unique to Indian society. According to Radhakrishnan, it is a feature of all societies. It is just that it happened to be a practical and harmonious way to stave off race war perfected in the Indian context. This universalization of the caste question and its specific flowering in Indian climes produced a “democracy of spirit,” although it was not amenable to the accumulation of wealth or political power (129).
Ambedkar, Basu says, rejects the “naturalistic, race-based exoneration” of caste in the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan trajectory of Hindu reformism. The caste imaginary’s strict adherence to notions of purity and endogamous marriage went against a phenomenology of biological race—a fair-skinned lower caste person would still be ostracized while a dark-skinned Brahmin would not (136). From a political economic perspective, caste was not division of labor, but “a calibrated division of laborers” that could not be encompassed by economism alone (137). The essence of caste does not depend on a naturalistic explanation but is a “sublimation in time” (137). It shifts and mutates in a historical field “pertaining to shifts in custom, culture, production, theology, or the aesthetics of self-making” (137). Caste discrimination was a disciplinary framework that combines “a libidinal economy of desire with a political one of interest” (140). This notion of disciplining the caste other is fundamentally inimical to the idea of democracy that Ambedkar draws from his teacher John Dewey—“…a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (142). The problem with Indian nationalism, suffused by reformism of the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan type, is that it short-circuited social revolution in favor of a political one (143). In doing so, “soft” Hinduism suffused with the “lure of temperate Brahminism” became the raison d’etre of the post-colonial state. This constituted the “parabasis of the new Hindu normal” whose affective power rendered the “Indian constitutional revolution passive by foreclosing a constitutional morality” (145). Hegemonic Indian nationalism viewed the spiritual work of the nation as already complete millennia ago—all that was necessary was reform and revival (149). Rare exceptions like Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore, whom Basu considers briefly at the end of this chapter, went against the grain of this Hindu-normative common sense.
Chapter Four—“Hindutva 2.0 as Advertised Monotheism”—considers Hindutva monotheism from the other end of the temporal spectrum: “in terms of millennial mutations in the era of information and globalization” (7). This chapter is a return to familiar turf for readers familiar with Basu’s earlier work on film and media cultures. The two key conceptual terms in this chapter—“Hindutva 2.0” and “advertised modernization”—fuses the analysis of contemporary media ecologies with considerations of affect. Thus, the assemblage of Hindutva 2.0 presumes a “neuropolis of populations” and sustains itself on “industrialized instincts of jealousy and anxiety” (166). As a mediatized phenomenon, predicated on the rapid proliferation of cellphones, the internet and digital technology, it does not depend on some of the established avenues of modernity like newspapers, books or university spaces. It is not dependent on “traditional” orders like shakhas or temples either. Instead, it works “primarily by way of loose, fungible distributions of affect, spectacle and…the substance of the advertised” (158). In an age of Whatsapp forwards, or what is colloquially called the “Whatsapp University,” it hollows out historical consciousness and reduces it to the syncopated form of a meme or a short message that can be forwarded virally. Hindutva 2.0 also establishes new synergies between “being Hindu and neoliberalism, one taking place on a plane of marketable desires and terrors” (158). In doing so, it spreads both soft and hard versions of the Hindu normal across the entire digital spectrum.
The other key term—advertised modernization—draws on trajectories of affect studies that point towards “a neuropolitics of the twenty-first century in which multidirectional stimulations, attention spans, diversions, ennui, or boredom become potent political factors” (180). “Advertised” is a conceptual metaphor which goes beyond questions of truth and falsehood; instead, it renders “an innocuous ‘take away,’ a ‘feel good’ sensation, or in some cases, a consumable fear” (180). In such an advertised scenario, which is also necessarily majoritarian, there is “no narrative obligation to truth or closure”; rather, it is the affect it evokes and the sense of belonging it creates to a particular brand that counts (180). Probably its most well-known global manifestation in recent times is the “pure gesture” of the Trumpian lie. As is obvious, most of what Trump (or Modi) utter in public can be debunked with minimal fact-checking; yet, for the devout Trump or Modi follower, they operate as “pure gestures advertising a new covenant between tradition and modernity, rather than as dialectical matters of an Aristotleian politics aimed at virtue…” (181). The Trumpian statement itself may be outrageously false, but it comes straight from the heart for legions of acolytes.
The Trump-Modi performatives also thrive in a changed scenario of the advertisement. The older model of the fifteen to thirty second advertisement emerging from “vertical models of mass culture” is passé. What has taken its place is an “order of convergence marked by nondirectional flows between platforms, instant audience migrations, and corporate cooperation” (181). In this changed scenario, political campaigning itself becomes interactive and is constituted by feedback loops and the processing of data that occur 24/7—consider here, for instance, the use of holograms and selfies during Modi’s 2014 campaign. The political personality becomes a brand that proliferates across a wide mediaverse circumnavigating a multidirectional circuit of affect. Branding, in Basu’s words, “becomes a matter of controlled chaos, leveraged in order to achieve critical densities of affect, recall value, or regularities of reference” (182). In this altered mediascape, the monotheme of Hindutva does not operate through a straightforward invocation of jealousy against the infidel; instead, congregations of believers coalesce in “virtual affinity spaces” that cut across older divides of city and country.
Basu also provides a contrast between two different historical constellations to outline the specificity of Hindutva 2.0. This contrast is set up through his discussion of the journalist Akshaya Mukul’s book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015) at the beginning of the chapter. Mukul’s fascinating book received a fillip when he came across the “Poddar papers,” a massive archive of correspondence, pamphlets and manuscripts by, on or written to Hanuman Prasad Poddar, who along with Jaydayal Goyandka founded the Gita Press in Gorakhpur in 1923. Mukul writes:
As Gita Press stands within striking distance of a century, the only organization that may be said to parallel its success is the Bible Society. No other publishing house in India has marketed religion so successfully. (430)
Through cheap editions of Hindu religious texts in multiple languages, its Hindi monthly Kalyan (first published in 1927) and its English avatar Kalyana-Kalpataru (first published in 1934), Gita Press made deep inroads throughout India, even into Hindu homes that wouldn’t identify necessarily with Hindutva. Espousing conservative upper caste-Hindu values and functioning as a foot-soldier of the Sangh Parivar, despite its claims that it maintains a safe distance from politics, Gita Press also managed to get a wide spectrum of notable figures of varying ideological proclivities, ranging from Golwalkar to Gandhi, to write for Kalyan. The notable absentee unsurprisingly was Ambedkar, a figure Kalyan was scathingly critical of. Often deploying what Basu calls a “paranoid style” (155), Gita Press at various times has also effectively deployed the language of hate and insular religious identity.
While Gita Press is still influential, Basu extensively discusses Mukul’s book to show how Hindutva 2.0 is a massive shift in amplitude in the era of new media forms and the neoliberal order. This is especially evident with the rise of Narendra Modi as a media phenomenon—a process that demonstrated “the advertised realignment of tradition and modernity” for a “virtual Hindu congregation” (182). In this new distributional matrix of information, the divergent energies constituting the virtual Hindu congregation could touch the “Brahminical sensible” [a term Basu reworks from Jacques Ranciere’s idea of the distribution of the sensible from Dissensus (2015)] at various points without being subsumed within a monolingual Hindutva discourse. Basu concretizes the difference between Hindutva 2.0 and the older model of print capitalism thus:
That older revivalist discourse, as have seen in the case of Gita Press…struggled to subsume the modern disciplines and the physical sciences into an apex Hindu vision. It had to world the caste question afresh in an altered universe of rights, freedoms and irreverent democratic tempers. It attempted, at every turn, to reconcile mythology with history, science and realism, or theodicy with justice. Such discursive efforts—rarely sublime,often ludicrous—have had a long history and continue to this day. However, in this new ecology, they acquire fresh powersof particularization and shooting through. (183)
The neuropolitical dimension in this new informational ecology enables the collapse of traditional distinctions between city and country and epistemologies like Vedic cosmogony and astrophysics. The public this ecology subsumes can react in a variety of ways within the frame of this Hindu normativity—ranging from indulgence to outright dismissal, from neurosis to humor. But the key difference between this moment and the “traditional” print capitalist one, as Basu says, is that “it can bravely ‘touch upon,’ without obligation, many matters that traditional Hindu nationalist discourse has either avoided or approached gingerly” (183).
In a broader spectrum of culture, advertised modernity is also evident in the shifts in the fantasy machine of Bollywood in the era of neoliberalization. Basu’s earlier work on the “geo-televisual aesthetic” (2010) is particularly relevant here in mapping these shifts.[4] On the one hand, post-1990 Bollywood films are marked by the gradual disappearance of the rural sphere, the poor, Dalit or Muslim character, and an obliteration of what film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar (2007) calls, the presence of the street; on the other hand, we notice the gradual rise to prominence of what Mazumdar calls the “lifestyle mythology” of the urban elite (143). Basu argues in Hindutva that advertised modernization operates at “the level of colors, saturations, textures, magical transportations, luminosities, and sonorous resonances” by which the “new, urban Hindu elite…[presents]…its life and aspirations as artwork” (191-2). Vedic and Puranic cosmologies exist side by side with a muscular patriotism and an open (and opulent) celebration of right-wing mythologies as in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s controversial film Padmavat (2018).
The underside of this glossy normative Hindu advertised fantasy is the proliferation of gritty, stylish films usually about Bombay’s underbelly. The “encounter” film—which revels in vigilante justice and extrajudicial killing meted out to characters from the underworld—has become a sub-genre in its own right. Basu reads it as a symptom of a persisting fascination with sovereign decisionism and of vigilante violence (especially against Muslims and Dalits, phenomena that spill from reel to real life) in the Indian context. A good example here would be Shimit Amin’s 2004 noir film Ab Tak Chappan (Till Now Fifty-six), which valorizes the life of the “encounter specialist” of the Mumbai Police Force, Daya Nayak. The title refers to the “encounter score” of fifty-six extrajudicial killings that Nayak purportedly participated in.
This acceptance of extrajudicial violence, of course, is not a new phenomenon in Indian public life as the long and controversial histories of legal instruments like the AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) and TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act) easily illustrates. What the contemporary “encounter” film does though is to stage the majoritarian desire for sovereign decisionism with a “cool” dressing of the gritty, seductive style of noir. At the level of cultural fantasy, the proliferation of such films signals two things. First, it “presents a metropolitan caste Hindu existence as the only form of life worth living” (199). Islam enters this cultural fantasy only when assimilated into “an overall civic religiosity of the (Hinduized) market” as in the celebration of figures like former President APJ Abdul Kalam or the three superstar Khans—Shahrukh, Aamir and Salman—of Bollywood (199). Otherwise, the Muslim is completely othered. Second, such fantasies also present the “urban caste Hindu existence as the only secure form of life worth living” (200). In this variation of the fantasy, the Muslim becomes the security threat against which society must be defended. As Basu writes, this “perception of Islam as an absolutist ethics is important for the cult of the encounter because it authorizes the state to respond with fearful symmetry and an instant theodicy of its own” (200). The bleed between reel and real could not be more chilling than this.
No account of the urban Indian fascination with sovereign decisionism can be complete without reference to the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In one respect, Modi represents the open vocalization of certain desires that lay immanent before 2014: the fascination with a strong leader, alternative history scenarios where Vallabhbhai Patel or Subhash Chandra Bose led India instead of the “soft” Nehru, and the long-standing admiration for Hitler’s works in many middle-class Indian homes. Basu’s focus, however, is only incrementally with the personality of Modi and more with the images projected of Modi as a media phenomenon. What interests Basu is how the new “congregational plane” of advertised modernization “animated by instantaneous and wide dissemination” effectively negated an old truism about India as a coalition at the altar of Modi’s charismatic aura. At another level, this proliferating form of advertised modernization also brought together two elite urban population categories that had hitherto remained apart. Basu calls these two population subsets the Gentoo (the colonial term for “Hindu” that draws on the Portuguese gentio—pagan) and the Dehat (the Hindi term for rustic). The Gentoo is the technocratic elite enamored with neoliberal development. Within this category there is a spectrum of possibilities: the Gentoo wedded to hard Hindutva, the Gentoo who imagined the metropolitan good life as indistinguishable from Hinduness, and finally, the secular-neoliberal who conditionally supported Modi’s economic “reform” persona without going the whole hog with his cultural nationalist project. The Dehat, on the other hand, was the vernacular elite that emerged from the rich farming and privileged caste groups.
Before 2014, at best only a provisional and uneasy Gentoo-Dehat coalition could be imagined. The media phenomenon that Modi became from around 2006 onwards with the celebration of the mythologized “Gujarat model of development” brought these two subsets together on the congregational plane. For the Gentoo especially, “Modi was a Dehat who could talk the talk of the Chicago boys and talk it well” (173). The public personality of Modi that was projected coalesced the images of the neoliberal messiah who would turbocharge the Gentoo model of development, the “strong” and decisive Hindu leader who would not compromise on national security against internal and external enemies, and the “saintly” man of sewa (service) who rose above petty politicking and remained untouched by the profanity of corruption. This could not have happened without the new media ecology that was “marked by speedy informational flows and feedback loops independent of traditional institutions of news and veracity” and where “one could freely disperse affects and expressions without disciplinary enunciation or narrative form” (170). In short, Hindutva 2.0 as advertised monotheism.
Hindutva is an eclectic and multidimensional work that makes major interventions in multiple knowledge-fields like media and cinema studies, religious studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, studies of nationalism and affect studies. Readers of Carl Schmitt can also deploy Basu’s reading of “jealousy” to read the mutation of the German thinker’s later work such as his theorization of the “absolute enemy” in The Theory of the Partisan (2007). Schmitt’s work, written in the wake of guerrilla movements and anticolonial revolutions during the Cold War period, prefigures how the contemporary juridical category of the “terrorist” envisaged as a figure relegated outside the sphere of the law, follows the tracks of earlier legal categorizations like “pirate” or “guerrilla.” Schmitt’s underlying argument that the contemporary partisan (or “terrorist”) is no longer an enemy, but a “satanic pursuer” who attempts to create ex nihilo (quoted in Ulmen 2007, xviii), would be useful to analyze via Basu’s categories of the passion of jealousy and its relation to the primordial settlement of the political.
Moreover, while anchored strongly in the Indian context, Hindutva also has global relevance. While analyses of phenomena like the Trumpian lie clearly illustrates the broad reach of Basu’s work, his conclusion clearly shows how the insights of Hindutva can be utilized to contend with our current global conjuncture. I highlight one passage from the conclusion as an illustration:
In a world dominated by a cartel of international banks, a transnational plutocracy, and North Atlantic military powers and their constablestates, the nation is no longer the seat of those two immense themes of the liberal tradition: self-determination and the rights of the people. Yet paradoxically, and perhaps precisely because of this, the nation has to be defined as a progressively more insular cosmology of justice. It has to berelentlessly purified and made to close in upon itself; the country has to be at once achieved and repeatedly taken back. (206)
This paradoxical movement of simultaneous achievement and the repeated taking back of the spectral nation is not limited to Hindutva 2.0 and the rise of Narendra Modi alone. With proper contextualization, these insights can also apply to Trumpian America, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Duterte’s Philippines, Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey among others. Indeed, as Basu writes, twenty-first century “fascism is about focalizing…intense localisms and threading them into a nationalist politics of rage and revenge banks” (206). The strongman (and it is usually a man, with Marine Le Pen one of the exceptions) is he who cuts through the patina of incessant talk (what Schmitt in an earlier Fascist conjuncture criticized about procedural liberalism) by monopolizing widespread public skepticism about corruption and about information culture. He promises to replenish the masculinity of the nation by simplifying discourse and identifying the enemy clearly.
That said, I advance one critique of Hindutva from my own location as a scholar of the borderland region of Northeast India. While I grant that Northeast India isn’t the focus of Hindutva, there is a missed opportunity here for framing a more complicated account of the political in the South Asian context. In the first chapter, Basu writes that the specter of the concentration camp “hovers around the National Register of Citizens (NRC) project that the present Hindu nationalist government in India has reactivated in the Indian northeastern state of Assam” (19). I do not disagree that the ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) has weaponized the NRC as a pan-Indian phenomenon, and that detention centers are a grim reality in Assam today. But the word “reactivated” above, to use Basu’s own terms against himself, seems to make Hindutva the only player in town in Assam (204). The BJP is a relative late entrant into the NRC process. The genealogy of the NRC predates the BJP becoming a major player in this borderland state and has to be located in the complex politics of what the political essayist Sanjib Baruah in In the Name of the Nation (2020) calls a “settlement frontier” of the erstwhile colonial state (47-75). As Ornit Shani (2018) writes in her book on the creation of independent India’s first set of electoral rolls:
In Assam…ethno nationalist attitudes manifested particularly towards the non-Assamese ‘floating population,’ many of whom are Bengali speaking Hindus fromEast Pakistan. Local authorities expressed a view of membership from a state that was defined by a descent group and delimited to ‘children of the soil,’ who were eligible to have full rights. Thus, ethno nationalist conceptions were not necessarily on the basis of religion. (72)
This long history shapes the institutionalization of the NRC as a discriminatory citizenship regime. These facts show that the grounds of the political in such borderland contexts are not exclusively determined by religious binaries and its attendant passion of jealousy familiar to scholars of mainland South Asia.
To be sure, there have been synergies between ethnonationalism and Hindutva in recent times. But the completion of the NRC process also reveals the faultlines between Hindutva and ethnonationalist politics. When the NRC was published in 2019, for instance, the BJP was disappointed that many Hindus were included in the list. They have recently promised a new, updated NRC. This faultline between Hindutva and ethnonationalism has hardened with the implementation of the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) in December 2019 which proposes to give citizenship to Hindu refugees, even though the BJP went on to win a majority in the state elections in 2021. None of these complexities are however mentioned in Basu’s account. In fact, in footnote twenty-five of Chapter One, the only source Basu cites about the NRC is an NPR report. He also writes in that same footnote that after “lying dormant for decades, it (the NRC) became politically relevant once more after Modi came to power” (213). Anyone familiar with Assam’s political scenario would be quick to point out that this discourse has not been dormant in the region at all, and that while Modi’s coming to power may have made it visible to mainstream Indian political discourse, the Northeastern borderlands have long been wrestling with this issue prior to 2014. In comparison to the eclectic historical and theoretical sketch of Hindutva, one is left wishing for a more complex rendering of the political in a borderland space such as Assam in this portion of Basu’s book.
By way of a conclusion and drawing further from my own location in Northeast Indian studies, I initiate a brief conversation between Basu’s book and another major book on Hindutva that was published recently: Arkotong Longkumer’s ethnographic study The Greater India Experiment (2021). Hindutva is essentially correct, I think, in drawing a genealogy of an urban Hindu normativity. But what about Hindutva’s spread in locales beyond the Gentoo-Dehat urbanscape, especially in places that have been to a large extent inimical to the idea of India such as the borderland Northeastern region? In his fascinating discussion of Hindutva worldings in the Northeastern region, Longkumer shows how within the larger monotheme of Hindu religiosity that Basu identifies, actual Hindutva practices are defined by shape-shifting and flexible positionalities as it tries to draw the divergent cosmologies of “tribal” religions within its fold. Of particular interest here is how Hindutva actors in Northeast India deploy the language of global indigeneity, polytheism and paganism to show connections between indigenous religions in the region and Hinduism. For instance, Longkumer writes that a 2005 BJP party document titled “Evolution of the BJP,” draws on the works of anthropologists on local and global aspects of indigeneity to argue that:
…paganism relates, crucially, to local gods and ancestors of the land based on ideas of polytheism…In summing up thebasic overlap between paganism and Hinduism, the BJP text says: ‘In a sense at the basic level Hinduism is a pagan religion. As Paganism allows for evolution Hinduism too allows for evolution. Since Paganism is belief in many Gods there is generally no fight over Gods. This is the greatest virtue of Polytheism…OnceHinduism is expressed along these lines, then, it has the potential to relate with other native traditions that are intimately connected to land. (115-16)
While Hindutva proselytization in Northeast India is still an ongoing and contested process, such sentiments about polytheism are often invoked by Hindutva activists on the field to contest the animosity that monotheistic faiths like Christianity display against “pagan” and animist belief systems. An urban Hindu monotheme that has become dominant with advertised modernity and a flexible deployment of polytheism as a proselytizing strategy in the borderlands—these are two torn halves that do not constitute a whole, but gesture towards a larger and still developing story of why Hindutva has become the dominant political discourse in India today.
[1] For examples, see Jaffrelot (1995); Hansen (1999); Vanaik (2017).
[2] M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73) was a prominent early ideologue of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the apex body in what is called the “Sangh Parivar.”
[3] Schmitt’s views on the connection between exception and miracles comes out most clearly in his reading of Chapter 37 of Hobbes’ Leviathan in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1996). Schmitt says—“A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subjects to believe to be a miracle; but also—and here the irony is especially acute—the reverse: Miracles cease when the state forbids them” (55).
[4] Basu defines the geo-televisual as a cinematic idiom that emerged from the mid-90s onwards and which cannibalized and combined heterogenous elements (MTV, video games, international travel, spiritualism et al) in a “fungible yet sensuous style—one that begins to operate at the level of the tissue and the nerve” (7). We notice an early intimation of the neuropolitical here.
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Works Cited
Amin, Shimit. 2004. Ab Tak Chappan. Mumbai: K Sera Sera, Varma Productions.
Baruah, Sanjib. 2020. In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Basu, Anustup. 2010. Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-Televisual Aesthetic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2006. The Hungry Tide: A Novel. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1997. Leviathan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1995. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
Longkumer, Arkotong. 2021. The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mufti, Aamir R. 2007. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Mukul, Akshaya. 2015. Gita Press and the Making of Modern India. New Delhi: Harper Collins.
Ranciere, Jacques. 2015. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated Steve Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—.2007. The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition). Translated George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 1996. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Translated George Schwab. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
—. 2007. The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. Translated George Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.
Shani, Ornit. 2018. How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the UniversalnFranchise. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Ulmen, G.L. 2007. “Translator’s Introduction.” The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. New York: Telos Press, ix-xxi.
Vanaik, Achin. 2017. The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities. London: Verso.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a Faustian dream. Conceived in the future tense, its most ardent AI visionaries seek to create an enhanced form of intelligence that far surpasses the capacities of human brains. AI promises to transcend the messiness of embodiment, the biases of human cognition, and the limitations of mortality. Entering its eighth decade, AI is largely a science fiction, despite recent advances in machine learning. Yet it has captured the public imagination since its inception, and acquired potent ideological cache. Robots have become AI’s humanoid faces, as well as icons of popular culture: cast as helpful companions or agents of the apocalypse.
The transcendent vision of artificial intelligence has educated, informed, and inspired generations of scientists, military strategists, policy makers, entrepreneurs, writers, artists, filmmakers, and marketers. However, apologists have also frequently invoked AI’s authority to mystify, intimidate, and silence resistance to its vision, teleology, and deployments. Where, for example, the threat of automation once triggered labor activism, rallying opposition to an esoteric branch of computer science research that few non-specialists understand is a rhetorical non-starter. So is campaigning for alternatives to smart apps, homes, cars, cities, borders, and bombs.
Two remarkable new books, Kate Crawford’s The Atlas of AI and Frank Pasquale’s New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI, provide provocative critical assessments of artificial intelligence in clear, accessible, and engaging prose. Both books have titles that could discourage novices, but they are, in fact, excellent primers for non-specialists on what is at stake in the current ascendency of AI science and ideology—especially if read in tandem.
Crawford’s thesis—“AI is neither artificial nor intelligent”—cuts through the sci-fi hype to radically reground AI power-knowledge in material reality. Beginning with its environmental impact on planet Earth, her narrative proceeds vertically to demystify AI’s ways of seeing—its epistemology, methodology, and applications—and then to examine the roles of labor, ideology, the state, and power in the AI enterprise. She concludes with a coda on space and the astronautical illusions of digital billionaires. Pasquale takes a more horizontal approach, surveying AI in health care, education, media, law, policy, economics, war, and other domains. His attention is on the practical present—on the ethical dilemmas posed by current and near-future deployments of AI. His through line is that human judgment, backed by policy, should steer AI toward human ends.
Despite these differences, Crawford and Pasquale converge on several critical points. First, they agree that AI models are skewed by economic and engineering values to the exclusion of other forms of knowledge and wisdom. Second, both endorse greater transparency and accountability in artificial intelligence design and practices. Third, they agree that AI datasets are skewed: Crawford focuses on how the use of natural language datasets, no matter how large, reproduce the biases of the populations they are drawn from, while Pasquale attends to designs that promote addictive engagement to optimize ad revenue. Fourth, both cite the residual effects of AI’s military origins on its logic, values, and rhetoric. Fifth, Crawford and Pasquale both recognize that AI’s futurist hype tends to obscure the real-world political and economic interests behind the screens—the market fundamentalism that models the world as an assembly line. Sixth, both emphasize the embodiment of intelligence, which encompasses tacit and muscle knowledge that cannot be fully extracted and abstracted by artificial intelligence modelers. Seventh, they both view artificial intelligence as a form of data-driven behaviorism, in the stimulus-response sense. Eighth, they acknowledge that AI and economic experts claim priority for their own views—a position they both reject.
Crawford literally travels the world to map the topologies of computation, beginning in the lithium mines of Nevada, on to Silicon Valley, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Mongolia, and ending under personal surveillance outside of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin suborbital launch facility in West Texas. Demonstrating that AI is anything but artificial, she documents the physical toll it extracts from the environment. Contra the industry’s earth-friendly PR and marketing, the myth of clean tech and metaphors like ‘the Cloud,’ Crawford points out that AI systems are built upon consuming finite resources that required billions of years to take form: “we are extracting Earth’s geological history to serve a split second of contemporary technological time, building devices like the Amazon Echo and iPhone that are often designed to last only a few years.” And the Cloud itself leaves behind a gigantic carbon footprint. AI data mining is not only dependent on human miners of rare minerals, but also on human labor functioning within a “registry of power” that is unequal and exploitive— where “many valuable automated systems feature a combination of underpaid digital piece workers and customers taking on unpaid tasks to make systems function,” all the while under constant surveillance.
While there is a deskilling of human labor, there are also what Crawford calls Potemkin AI systems, which only work because of hidden human labor—Bezos himself calls such systems “artificial artificial intelligence.” AI often doesn’t work as well as the humans it replaces, as, for example, in automated telephone consumer service lines. But Crawford reminds us that AI systems scale up: customers ‘on hold’ replace legions of customer service workers in large organizations. Profits trump service. Her chapters on data and classification strip away the scientistic mystification of AI and Big Data. AI’s methodology is simply data at scale, and it is data that is biased at inception because it is collected indiscriminately, as size, not substance, counts. A dataset extracted and abstracted from a society secured in systemic racism will, for example, produce racist results. The increasing convergence of state and corporate surveillance not only undermines individual privacy, but also makes state actors reliant on technologies that they cannot fully understand as machine learning transforms them. In effect, Crawford argues, states have made a “devil’s bargain” with tech companies that they cannot control. These technologies, developed for command-and-control military and policing functions, increasingly erode the dialogic and dialectic nature of democratic commons.
AI began as a highly subsidized public project in the early days of the Cold War. Crawford demonstrates, however, that it has been “relentlessly privatized to produce enormous financial gains for the tiny minority at the top of the extraction pyramid.” In collaboration with Alex Campolo, Crawford has described AI’s epistemological flattening of complexity as “enchanted determinism,” whereby “AI systems are seen as enchanted, beyond the known world, yet deterministic in that they discover patterns that can be applied with predictive certainty to everyday life.”[1] In some deep learning systems, even the engineers who create these systems cannot interpret them. Yet, they cannot dismiss them either. In such cases, “enchanted determinism acquires an almost theological quality,” which tends to place it beyond critique of both technological utopians as well as dystopians.
Pasquale, for his part, examines the ethics of AI as currently deployed and often circumvented in several contexts: medicine, education, media, law, military, and the political economy of automation, in each case in relation to human wisdom. His basic premise is that “we now have the means to channel technologies of automation, rather than being captured or transformed by them.” Like Crawford, then, he recommends exercising a resistant form of agency. Pasquale’s focus is on robots as automated systems. His rhetorical point of departure is a critique and revision of Isaac Asimov’s highly influential “laws of robotics,” developed in a 1942 short story—more than a decade before AI was officially launched in 1956. Because the world and law-making is far more complex than a short story, Pasquale finds Asimov’s laws ambiguous and difficult to apply, and proposes four new ones, which become the basis of his arguments throughout the book. They are:
Robotic systems and AI should complement professionals, not replace them.
Robotic systems and AI should not counterfeit humanity.
Robotic systems and AI should not intensify zero-sum arms races.
Robotic systems and AI must always indicate the identity of their creator(s), controller(s), and owner(s).
‘Laws’ entail regulation, which Pasquale endorses to promote four corresponding values: complementarity, authenticity, cooperation, and attribution. The four laws’ deployment depends on a critical distinction that Pasquale draws between technologies that replace people and those that assist us in doing our jobs better. Classic definitions of AI have sought to create computers that “can sense, think, and act like humans.” Pasquale endorses an “Intelligence Augmentation” (IA) alternative. This is a crucial shift in emphasis; it is Pasquale’s own version of AI refusal.
He acknowledges that, in the current economy, “there are economic laws that tilt the scale toward AI and against IA.” In his view, deployment of robots may, however, offer an opportunity for humanistic intervention in AI’s hegemony, because the presence of robots, unlike phones, tablets, or sensors, is physically intrusive. They are there for a purpose, which we may accept or reject at our peril, but find hard to ignore. Robots are being developed to enter fields that are already highly regulated, which offers an opportunity to shape their use in ways that conform to established legal standards of privacy and consumer protection. Pasquale is an advocate for building humane (IA) values within the technology, before robots are released into the wild.
In each of his topical chapters, he explains how robots and other AI systems designed to advance the values of complementarity, authenticity, cooperation, and attribution might enhance human existence and community. Some chapters stand out, as particularly insightful, including those on “automated media,” human judgment, and the political economy of automation. One of Pasquale’s chapters addresses important terrain that Crawford does not consider, medicine. Given past abuses by medical researchers in exploiting and/or ignoring race and gender, they may be especially sensitive and receptive to an IA intervention, despite the formidable economic forces stacked against it. Pasquale shows, for example, how IA has amplified diagnostics in dermatology through pattern recognition, providing insight into what distinguishes malignant from benign moles.
In our view, Pasquale’s closing chapter endorsing human wisdom, as opposed to AI, displays multiple examples of the former. But some of their impact is blunted by more diffuse discussions of literature and art, valuable though those practices may be in counter-balancing the instrumental values of economics and engineering. Nonetheless, Pasquale’s argument is an eloquent tribute to a “human form of life that is fragile, embodied in mortal flesh, time-delimited, and irreproducible in silico.”
The two books, read together, amount to a critique of AI ideology. Pasquale and Crawford write about the stuff that phrases like “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” refer to, but their main concern is the mystique surrounding the words themselves. Crawford is especially articulate on this theme. She shows that, as an idea, AI is self-warranting. Floating above the undersea cables and rare-earth mines—ethereal and cloud-like—the discourse makes its compelling case for the future. Her work is to cut through the cloud cover, to reveal the mines and cables.
So the idea of AI justifies even as it obscures. What Crawford and Pasquale draw out is that AI is a way of seeing the world—a lay epistemology. When we see the world through the lens of AI, we see extraction-ready data. We see countable aggregates everywhere we look. We’re always peering ahead, predicting the future with machinist probabalism. It’s the view from Palo Alto that feels like a god’s eye view. From up there, the continents look patterned and classification-ready. Earth-bound disorder is flattened into clear signal. What AI sees, in Crawford’s phrase, is a “Linnaean order of machine-readable tables.” It is, in Pasquale’s view, an engineering mindset that prizes efficiency over human judgment.
At the same time, as both authors show, the AI lens refracts the Cold War national security state that underwrote the technology for decades. Seeing like an AI means locating targets, assets, and anomalies. Crawford calls it a “covert philosophy of en masse infrastructural command and control,” a martial worldview etched in code.
As Kenneth Burke observed, every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. What AI can’t see is also its raw material: human complexity and difference. There is, in AI, a logic of commensurability—a reduction of messy and power-laden social life into “computable sameness.” So there is a connection, as both Crawford and Pasquale observe, between extraction and abstraction. The activity of everyday life is extracted into datasets that, in their bloodless tabulation, abstract away their origins. Like Marx’s workers, we are then confronted by the alienated product of our “labor”—interviewed or consoled or policed by AIs that we helped build.
Crawford and Pasquale’s excellent books offer sharp and complementary critiques of the AI fog. Where they differ is in their calls to action. Pasquale, in line with his mezzo-level focus on specific domains like education, is the reformist. His aim is to persuade a policy community that he’s part of—to clear space between do-nothing optimists and fatalist doom-sayers. At core he hopes to use law and expertise to rein in AI and robotics—with the aim to deploy AI much more conscientiously, under human control and for human ends.
Crawford is more radical. She sees AI as a machine for boosting the power of the already powerful. She is skeptical of the movement for AI “ethics,” as insufficient at best and veering toward exculpatory window-dressing. The Atlas of AI ends with a call for a “renewed politics of refusal,” predicated on a just and solidaristic vision of the future.
It would be easy to exaggerate Crawford and Pasquale’s differences, which reflect their projects’ scope and intended audience more than any disagreement of substance. Their shared call is to see AI for what it is. Left to follow its current course, the ideology of AI will reinforce the bars on the “iron cage” that sociologist Max Weber foresaw a century ago: incarcerating us in systems of power dedicated to efficiency, calculation, and control.
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Sue Curry Jansen is Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, PA. Jeff Pooley is Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg, and director of mediastudies.press, a scholar-led publisher. Their co-authored essay on Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism—a review of the book’s reviews—recently appeared in New Media & Society.
A specter is haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism.
Granted, as is so often the case with hauntings, reactions to this specter are divided: there are some who are frightened, others who scoff at the very idea of it, quite a few dream about designing high-tech gadgets with which to conclusively bust this ghost so that it can bother us no more, and still others are convinced that this specter is trying to tell us something important if only we are willing to listen. And though there are plenty of people who have taken to scoffing derisively whenever the presence of General Ludd is felt, there would be no need to issue those epithetic guffaws if they were truly directed at nothing. The dominant forces of technological society have been trying to exorcize this spirit, but instead of banishing this ghost they only seem to be summoning it.
The problem with spectral Luddism is that one can feel its presence without necessarily understanding what it means. When one encounters Luddism in the world today it still tends to be as either a term of self-deprecation used to describe why someone has an old smartphone, or as an insult that is hurled at anyone who dares question “the good news” presented by the high priests of technology. With Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, Gavin Mueller challenges those prevailing attitudes and ideas about Luddism, instead articulating a perspective on Luddism that finds in it a vital analysis with which to respond to techno-capitalism. Luddism, in Mueller’s argument, is not simply a term to describe a specific group of workers at the turn of the 19th century, rather Luddism can be seen in workers’ struggles across centuries.
At core, Breaking Things at Work is less of a history of Luddism, and more of a manifesto. Historic movements and theorists are thoughtfully engaged with throughout the volume, but this is consistently in service of making an argument about how we should be responding to technology in the present. While contemporary books about technology (even ones that advance a critical attitude) have a tendency to carefully couch any criticism in neatly worded expressions of love for technology, Mueller’s book is refreshing in the forthrightness with which he expresses the view that “technology often plays a detrimental role in working life, and in struggles for a better one” (4). In clearly setting out the particular politics of his book, Mueller makes his goal clear: “to make Marxists into Luddites” and “to turn people critical of technology into Marxists” (5). This is no small challenge, as Mueller notes that “historically Marxists have not been critical of technology” (4) on the one hand, and that “much of contemporary technological criticism comes from a place of romantic humanism” (6) on the other hand. For Mueller “the problem of technology is its role in capitalism” (7), but the way in which many of these technologies have been designed to advance capitalism’s goals makes it questionable whether all of these machines can necessarily be repurposed. Basing his analysis on a history of class struggle, Mueller is not so much setting out to tell workers what to do, as much as he is putting a name on something that workers are already doing.
Mueller begins the first chapter of his book by explaining who the actual Luddites were and providing some more details to explain the tactics for which they became legendary. As skilled craft workers in early 19th century England, the historic Luddites saw firsthand how the introduction of new machines resulted in their own impoverishment. Though the Luddites would become famous for breaking machines, it was a tactic they turned to only after their appeals to parliament to protect their trades went ignored. With broad popular support, the Luddites donned the anonymizing mask of General Ludd, and took up arms in their own defense. Contrary to the popular myth in which the Luddites smashed every machine out of a fit of wild hatred, the historic record shows that the Luddites were quite focused in their targets, picking workshops and factories where the new machines had been used as an excuse to lower wages. Luddism did not die out in its moment because the tactics were seen as pointless, rather the movement came to an end at the muzzle of a gun, as troops were deployed to quell the uprising—with many of the captured Luddites being either hanged or transported. Nevertheless, this was certainly not the last time that machine-breaking was taken up as a tactic: not long after the Luddite risings the Swing Riots were even more effective in their targeting of machinery. And, furthermore, as Mueller makes clear throughout his book, the tactic of seeing the machine as a site for resistance continues to this day.
Perhaps the key takeaway from the historic Luddites is not that they smashed machines, but that they identified machinery as a site of political struggle. They did not take hammers to stocking frames out of a particular hatred for these contraptions; rather they took hammers to stocking frames as a way of targeting the owners of those stocking frames. These struggles, in which groups of workers came together with community support, demonstrate how the Luddite’s various tactics served as “practices of political composition” (16, italics in original text) whereby the Luddites came to see themselves as workers with shared interests that were in opposition to the interests of their employers. The Luddites were not to be assuaged by appeals to the idea of progress, or lurid fantasies of a high-tech utopia, they could see the technological changes playing out in real time in front of them, and what they could see there was not a distant future of plenty, but an immediate future of immiseration. The Luddites were not fools, quite the contrary: they saw exactly what the new machines meant for themselves and their communities, and so they decided to do something about it.
Despite the popular support the Luddites enjoyed in their own communities, and the extent to which machine-breaking remained a common tactic even after the Luddite risings had been repressed, already in the 19th century more optimistic attitudes towards technology were ascendant. Mueller detects some of this optimism in Karl Marx, noting that “there is evidence for a technophilic Marx” (19), yet Mueller pushes back against the common assumption that Marx was a technological determinist. While recognizing that Marx (and Engels) had made some less than generous comments about the Luddites, Mueller emphasizes Marx’s attention to the real struggles of workers against capitalism and notes that “the struggles against machines were the struggles against the society that utilized them” (24, italics in original text). And the frequency with which machines were becoming targets of worker’s ire in the 19th century demonstrates the way in which workers saw the machines not as neutral tools but as instruments of the factory owners’ power. While defenders of mass machinery may point to the abundance such machines create, some figures like William Morris pushed back on these promises of abundance by noting that such machinery sapped any pleasure out of the act of laboring while the abundance was just a share in shoddy goods. In Marx and Morris, as well as in the actual struggles of workers, Mueller points to the importance of technology becoming recognized as a site of political struggle—emphasizing that in worker’s resistance to technology can be found “a more liberatory politics of work and technology” (29).
That the 19th century was home to the most renowned fight against technology, does not mean that these struggles (be they physical or philosophical) ended with the arrival of the 20th century. While much is often made of the “scientific management” of Frederick W. Taylor, less is often said of the ways in which workers resisted this system that turned them into living cogs—and even less is usually said of the strike at the Watertown Arsenal wherein (quite unlike the case of the Luddites) Congress sided with the workers (and their union). Nevertheless, the Taylorist viewpoint that “capitalist technologies like scientific management” were “an objective way to improve productivity and therefore the condition of workers” (35) was a viewpoint shared by a not inconsiderable number of socialists in those years. Within the international left of the early 20th century, debates about the meaning of machinery were heated: some like Karl Kautsky took a deterministic stance that developments in capitalist production methods were paving the way for communism; others like the IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn cheered the tactic of workers sabotaging their machines; still others like Thorstein Veblen dreamed of a technocratic society overseen by benevolent engineers; various Bolsheviks argued about the deployment of Taylorist techniques in the new Soviet state; and standing at the edge of the fascist abyss Walter Benjamin gestured towards a politics that does not praise speed but searches desperately for an emergency brake.
While the direction of debates about technology in the early 20th century were significantly disrupted by the Second World War (just as they had been upended by the First World War), in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima debates about technology and work only intensified. Automation represented a new hope to business owners even as it represented a new threat to workers, as automation could sap the power of agitated workers while centralizing further control in the hands of management. Importantly, automation was not simply accepted by workers, and Mueller notes “on the vanguard of opposing automation were those often marginalized by the official workers’ movement—women and African Americans” (63). Opposition to automation often took the form of “wildcat strikes” with union leaders failing to keep pace with the radicalism and fury of their members. In this period of post-war tumult, left-wing thinkers ranging from Raya Dunayevskaya to Herbert Marcuse to Shulamith Firestone articulated a spectrum of different responses to the promises and perils of automation—yet even as they theorized: workers in mines, factories, and at the docks continued to strike against what the introduction of automation meant for their lives. Simultaneously, automation became a topic of interest, and debate, within the social movements of the time, with automation being viewed by those movements as threat and hope.
Lurking in the background of many of the discussions around automation was the spread of computers. As increasing numbers of people became aware of them, computers quickly conjured both adoration and dread—they were a frequent target of student activists in the 1960s and 1970s, even as elements of the counterculture (such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog) were enthusiastic about computers. Businesses were quick to adopt computers, and these machines often accelerated the automation of workplaces (while opening up new types of work to the threat of being automated). Yet the rise of the computer also gave rise to a new sort of figure, “the hacker” whose very technological expertise positioned them to challenge computerized capitalism. Though the “politics of hackers are complicated,” Mueller emphasizes that they are often some of technology’s “most critical users, and they regularly deploy their skills to subvert measures by corporations to rationalize and control computer user behavior. They are often Luddites to the core” (105). Not uniformly uncritical celebrants of technology, many hackers turn their intimate knowledge of computers into a way of knowing where best to strike—even as they champion initiatives such as free software, peer-to-peer sharing, and tools for avoiding surveillance.
Yet as computers have infiltrated nearly every space and moment, it is not only hackers who find themselves regularly interacting with these machines. The omnipresence of computers creates a situation wherein “work seeps into every nook and cranny of human existence via capitalist technologies, accompanied by the erosion of wages and free time” (119) as more and more of our activities become fodder for corporate recommendation algorithms we find ourselves endlessly working for Facebook and Google even as we respond to work emails at 1 a.m. Despite the promises of digital plenty, computing technologies (broadly defined) seem to be giving rise to an increasing sense of frustration, and though there are some who advocate for an anodyne “tech humanism,” it may well be that “the strategy of refusal pursued by the industrial workers of old might be a more promising technique against the depression engines of social media” (122).
Breaking Things at Work concludes with a call for the radical left to “put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy” (127-128). Such a politics entails not a rejection of progress, but a critical reexamination of what it is that is actually meant when the word “progress” is bandied about, as too often what progress stands for is “the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us” (128). Putting forth such a politics does not require creating something entirely new, but rather recognizing that the elements of just such a politics can be seen repeatedly in worker’s movements and social movements.
In putting forth a clear definition of “Luddism,” Mueller highlights that Luddism “emphasizes autonomy” by seeking to put control back into the hands of the people actually doing the work, “views technology not as neutral but as a site of struggle,” “rejects production for production’s sake,” “can generalize” into a strategy for mass action, and is “antagonistic” taking a firm stance in clear opposition to capitalism and capitalist technology. In the increasing frustration with social media, in the growing environmental calls for “degrowth,” and in the cracks showing in the golden calf of technology, the space is opening for a politics that takes up the hammer of Luddism. Recognizing as it does so, that a hammer can be used not just to smash things that need to be broken, a hammer can also be used to build something different.
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One of the factors that makes Luddism so appealing more than two centuries later is that it is an ideology that still calls out to be developed. The historic Luddites were undoubtedly real people, with real worries, and real thoughts on the tactics that they were deploying—and yet the historic Luddites did not leave any manifestoes or books of their own writing behind. What remains from the Luddites are primarily the letters they sent and snatches of songs in which they were immortalized (which have been helpfully collected in Kevin Binfield’s 2015 Writings of the Luddites). And though one can begin to cobble together a philosophy of technology from reading through those letters, the work of explaining exactly what it is that Luddism means has been a task that has largely fallen to others. Granted, part of what made the Luddites successful in their time was that the mask of General Ludd could be picked up and worn by many individuals, all of whom could claim to be General Ludd (or his representative).
With Breaking Things at Work, Gavin Mueller has crafted a vital contribution to Luddism, and what makes this book especially important is the way in which it furthers Luddism in a variety of ways. On one level, Mueller’s book provides a solid introduction and overview to Luddite thinking and tactics throughout the ages, which makes the book a useful retort to those who act as though the historic Luddites were the only workers who ever dared oppose machinery. Yet Mueller makes it clear from the outset of his book that he is not primarily interested in writing a history, rather his book has a clear political goal as well—he wishes to raise the banner of General Ludd and encourage others to march behind this standard. Thus, Mueller’s book is simultaneously an account of Luddism’s past, while also an appeal for Luddism’s future. And while Mueller provides a thoughtful consideration of many past figures and movements that have dallied with Luddism, his book concludes with a clear articulation of what a present day Luddism might look like. For those who call themselves Luddites, or those who would call themselves Luddites, Mueller provides a historically grounded but present focused account of what it meant, and what it can mean, to be a Luddite.
The clarity with which Mueller defines Luddism in Breaking Things at Work places the book into a genuine debate as to how exactly Luddism should be defined. And this is a debate that Mueller’s book engages with in a particularly provocative way considering how his book is both a scholarly account and an activist manifesto. Writing about the Luddites tends to fall into several camps: works that provide a fairly straightforward historical account of who the original Luddites were and what they literally did (this genre includes works like E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, and Kevin Binfield’s Writings of the Luddites); works that treat Luddism as an idea and a philosophy that is not exclusive to the historic Luddites (this genre includes works like Nicols Fox’s Against the Machine, and Matt Tierney’s Dismantlings), works that emphasize that the tactic of machine-breaking was not practiced exclusively by the Luddites (this genre includes works like Eric Hobsbawm and Geogre Rudé’s Captain Swing, and David Noble’s Progress Without People), and works that draw lines (good or bad) from Luddism to later activist practices (this genre includes approving works like Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rebels Against the Future, and disapproving works like Steven Jones’s Against Technology). Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work does not fit neatly into any single one of those categories: the Marxist analysis makes the book pair nicely with Thompson’s book, the engagement with radical theorists makes the book pair nicely with Tierney’s book, the treatment of machine-breaking as a common tactic makes the book pair nicely with Noble’s book, and the call to arms places the book into debate with books by the likes of Sale and Jones.
All of which is to say, the meaning of Luddism remains contested terrain. And even though many of technology’s celebrants remain content to use Luddite as an insult, those who would proudly wear the mask of General Ludd are not themselves all in agreement about exactly what this means.
Mueller has written a wonderfully provocative book, and it is one in which he does not attempt to hide his own opinion behind two dozen carefully composed distractions. Instead, Mueller is quite clear “to be a good Marxist is to also be a Luddite” (5), and this is a point that leads directly into his goal of turning Marxists into Luddites and making Marxists out of those who are critical of technology. And in his engagement with Marx, Mueller tangles with the perceptions of Marx as technophilic, engages with a variety of Marxist thinkers who fall into a range of camps, all while trying “to be faithful to Marxism’s heretical side, its unofficial channels and para-academic spaces” (vii). And all the while Mueller endeavors to keep his book grounded as a contribution to real struggles around technology in the world today. Considering Mueller’s clear statement of his own position it is likely that some will level their critiques at the book’s Marxism, and still others might critique the book for not being sufficiently Marxist. And as is always the case with books that situate their critique within a particular radical tradition it seems inevitable that some will wonder why their favorite thinker is not included (or does not receive more attention), even as others will wonder why other branches from the tree of the radical left are missing. (Mueller does not spend much time on anarchist thinkers).
Overall, the question of whether this book will turn its Marxist readers into Luddites, and its technologically critical readers into Marxists is one that can only be answered by each reader themselves. For what Mueller’s book presents is an argument, and the way in which a reader nods along or argues back is likely to be heavily influenced by the way they personally define Luddism. And Mueller is not the first to try to rally people beneath the Luddite’s standard.
In 1990, Chellis Glendinning published her “Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto” in the pages of the Utne Reader. Furiously lamenting the ways in which societies were struggling under the onslaught of new technologies, her manifesto was a call to take up oppositional arms. While taking on the mantle of “Neo-Luddite,” the manifesto articulated a Luddism (or Neo-Luddism) that was defined by three principles: “1. Neo-Luddites are not anti-technology,” “2. All technologies are political,” and “3. The personal view of technology is dangerously limited.” Based on these principles, Glendinning’s manifesto laid out a program that included the dismantling of a range of “destructive” technologies (including genetic engineering technologies and computer technologies), pushed for the search for “new technological forms” that would be “for the benefit of life on Earth,” and this in turn was couched in a call for “Western technological societies” to develop a “life-enhancing worldview.” The manifesto drew on the technological criticism of Lewis Mumford, on Langdon Winner’s call for “epistemological Luddism,” and on the uncompromising stance towards technologies deemed destructive typified by Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television.
The Neo-Luddites are more noteworthy for their attempt to reclaim and redefine Luddism than they are for their success in actually creating a movement. Indeed, the lasting legacy of Neo-Luddism is not that of a vital social movement that fought for (and continues to fight for) the principles Glendinning put forth, but instead about half a bookshelf worth of books with “Neo-Luddite” somewhere in their title. There are certainly critiques to be leveled at the Neo-Luddites, but when revisiting Glendinning’s manifesto it is also worth placing it in the moment at which it emerged. The backdrop for Breaking Things at Work is one in which most readers will be accustomed to seemingly omnipresent computing technologies, climate exacerbated disasters, and a world in which the wealth of tech billionaires grows massively by the minute. By contrast, the backdrop for Glendinning’s manifesto was a moment in which personal computers had not yet achieved ubiquity (no one was carrying the Internet around in their pocket), climate change still seemed like a distant threat, and Mark Zuckerberg was still a child. It is impossible to say whether or not Glendinning’s manifesto, had it been heeded, could have prevented us from getting into our present morass, but preventing us from winding up where we are now certainly seems to have been one of Glendinning’s goals. At the very least, Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites (as well as the thinkers upon whom they drew) are a reminder that the spirit of General Ludd was circulating before you could Google “Luddism.”
There are many parallels between the stances outlined by Glendinning and those outlined by Mueller. Though it seems that the key space of conflict between the two is around the question of dismantling. Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites were not subtle in their calls for dismantling certain technologies, whereas Mueller is considerably more nuanced in this respect. Here attempts to define Luddism find themselves butting against the degree to which Luddism is destined to always be associated (for better or worse) with the actual breaking of machines. The naming of entire classes of technology that need to be dismantled may appear like indiscriminate smashing, while calls for careful reevaluation of technologies may appear more like thoughtful disassembly. Yet the underlying question for Luddism remains: are certain technologies irredeemable? Are there technologies that we can remake in a different image, or will those technologies only reshape us in their own image? And if the answer is that these technologies cannot be reshaped, than are there some technologies that we need to break before they can finish breaking us, even if we often find ourselves enjoying some of the benefits of those technologies?
Writing of the reactions from a range of 1960s social movements to the technological changes they were seeing playing out, Mueller notes that the particular technology that evoked “both fear and fascination” was none other than “the computer” (91). This point leads into what is perhaps the most troubling and challenging element of Mueller’s account, as he goes on to argue that hackers and some of their projects (like free software) fit within the legacy of Luddism. I imagine that many hackers will not be too pleased to see themselves described as Luddites, just as I imagine that many self-professed Luddites will scoff at the idea that using bitcoins to buy drugs on the dark web is a Luddite pursuit. Yet the idea that those most familiar with a technology may know exactly where to strike certainly has some noteworthy resonances with the historic Luddites.
And yet the matter of hackers and “high tech Luddism” raises a much broader question, one that the left has been trying to answer for quite some time, and perhaps the key question for any attempt to formulate a Luddite politics in this moment: what are we to make of the computer? Is the computer (and computing technologies, broadly defined) the offspring of the military-industrial-academic complex with logics of control, surveillance, and dominance so deeply ingrained that it ultimately winds up bending all users to that logic? Despite those origins, are computing technologies something which can be seized upon to allow us to reconfigure ourselves into new sorts of beings (cyborgs, perhaps) to break out of the very categories that capitalism tries to sort us into? Have computers fundamentally altered what it means to be human? Is the computer (and the Internet) simply something that has become so big and so widespread that the best we can hope for is to increase our knowledge of it so that we can perform sabotage strikes while playing in the dark corners? Are computers the “master’s tools”?
Considering that computer technologies were amongst those that the Neo-Luddites called to be dismantled, it seems pretty clear where they came down on this question. Yet contemporary discussions on the left around computers, a discussion in which Breaking Things at Work is certainly making an intervention, is quite a bit more divided as to what is to be done with and about computers. At several junctures in his book, Mueller notes that attitudes of technological optimism are starting to break down, yet if you survey the books dealing with technology published by the left-wing publisher Verso Books (which is the publisher of Breaking Things at Work) it is clear that a hopeful attitude towards technology is still present in much of the left. Certainly, there are arguments about the way that tech companies are screwing things up, commentary on the environmental costs of the hunger for high-tech gadgets, and paeans for how the Internet could be different—but it often feels that leftist commentaries blast Silicon Valley for what it has done to computers and the Internet so that the readers of such books can continue believing that the problems with computers and the Internet is what capitalism has done to them rather than suggest that these are capitalist tools through and through.
Is the problem that the train we are on is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go, so we need to slow down so that we can switch tracks? Or is the problem the train itself and we need to hit the emergency brake so that we can get off? To those who have grown accustomed to the comforts of being on board the train, the idea of getting off of it might be a scary thought, it might feel preferable to fight for a more equitable distribution of resources aboard the train, or to fight to seize control of the engine car. Besides, the idea of actually getting off the train seems like little more than a fantasy—it will be hard enough just to get it to reduce its speed. Yet the question remains as to whether the problem is the direction we’re going in, or if the problem is the direction we’re going in and the technology that is taking us in that direction.
Here it is essential to return to an important fact about the historic Luddites: they were waging their campaign against the introduction of machinery in the moment of those machines’ newness. The machines they attacked had not yet become common, and the moment of negotiation as to what these machines would mean and how they would be deployed was still in flux. When technologies are new they provide a fertile space for resistance, in their moment of freshness they have not yet become taken for granted, previous lifeways have not been forgotten, the skills that were necessary prior to the introduction of the new machine remain vital, and the broader society has not become pleasantly accustomed to their share of machine generated plenitude. Unfortunately, once a technology has become fully incorporated into a workplace (or a society) resistance becomes more and more challenging. While Mueller evocatively captures the long history of workers resisting the introduction of new technologies, these cases show a consistent tendency for this resistance to take place most strongly at the point of the new technology’s introduction. The major challenge becomes what to do when the technology has ceased being new, and when the reliance on that technology has become so total that it becomes almost impossible to imagine turning it off.
After all, it’s easy to say that “computers are the problem” but at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of computers. And besides, many of those who would be quite happy to see capitalism come to an end quite like their computerized doodads and would be distressed if they couldn’t scroll social media on the subway, stream music, go shopping at 2 a.m., play video games, have video calls with distant family, or write overly lengthy book reviews and then post them online. One of the major challenges for technological criticism today is the simple fact that the critics are also reliant on these gadgets, and many of the critics quite like some things about some of those gadgets. In this technological climate, where the idea of truly banishing certain technologies seems fantastical, feelings of dissatisfaction often wind up getting channeled in the direction of appeals to personal responsibility. As though an individual deciding that they will abstain from going on social media on the weekend will somehow be a sufficient response to social media eating the world. This is the way in which a massive social problem winds up being reduced to telling people that they really just need to turn off notifications on their phones.
What makes Breaking Things at Work, and its definition of Luddism, vital is the way in which Mueller eschews such appeals to minor lifestyle tweaks. As Mueller makes clear the significance of the Luddites is not that they broke machines, but that they saw machines as a site of political struggle, and the thing we need to learn from them today is that machinery still must be a site of political struggle. Turning off notifications, following people with different politics, trying to spend a day a week offline—while these actions can be useful on an individual level, they are not a sufficient response to the ways that technology challenges us today. In a moment wherein so many of the proclamations from Silicon Valley are treated as though they are inevitable, Luddism functions as a powerful retort and as a useful reminder that the people most invested in the belief that you cannot resist capitalist technologies are the people who are most terrified that people might resist those technologies.
In one of the most infamous of the surviving Luddite letters, “the General of the Army of Redressers,” Ned Ludd writes: “We will never lay down our Arms. The House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality, and repeal that to hang Frame Breakers. But We. We petition no more that won’t do fighting must.” These were militant words from a militant movement, but the idea that there is such a thing as “Machinery hurtful to Commonality” and that such machinery needs to be opposed remains clear two hundred years later.
There is a specter haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism. And as Mueller makes clear in Breaking Things at Work that specter is becoming more corporeal by the moment.
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Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.
This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.
Jed Rasula’s doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1989 for a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, is titled “The Poetics of Embodiment: A Theory of Exceptions.” His forthcoming book with Oxford University Press is titled The Lower Frequencies: Genre and Extravagance in the Novel. From exception to extravagance: that relay offers an apt resumé of Rasula’s critical oeuvre, which has been consistently devoted to the discrepant, the illegible, the exorbitant, the eccentric, and the superfluous. Rasula’s first critical book, The American Poetry Wax Museum, studies the “reality effects” of anthologization and canon formation from 1940-1990. But while this is indeed a work of literary history and sociology, it amounts to a reckoning with the metaphysics of genteel cultural coercion, a study of “canontology” as that which signifies “the criteria for existence—the modes of being and appearing” that are stipulated by canons (471).
Rasula is himself an anthologist of another stripe. Imagining Language (MIT, 2001), coedited with Steve McCaffery, convenes a vast assembly of linguistic deviation, experiment, and expansion across three millennia, organized conceptually and thematically so as to produce discordant congruities brought into theoretical and contextual focus by rigorously rhapsodic section introductions. Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (Action Books, 2012), coedited with Tim Conley, assembles a vertiginous array of efforts by international modernists to include the cacophonous provocations of urban experience within the field of the poem through parataxis, visual forms, and aural effects. These are anthologies that do not reproduce canontology but rather explode its parameters.
It is in his book This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2002) that Rasula goes farthest toward undoing distinctions between the roles of literary critic, anthologist, and poet. The book traverses the sweep of American poetry from Whitman through Pound, Olson, and Zukofsky to such contemporary figures as Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, while referring to dozens of poets along the way. As it does so, This Compost deploys a unique style of quotation whereby texts are woven together in compound threads, constructing associative bonds between passages from different poets distinguished only by a tilde (~), with names and titles cited sequentially in endnotes. Amid these we find passages of Rasula’s poetic prose, distributed across subsections of a continuous essay and thinking with rather than interpreting the poetry—drawing out conceptual, historical, imaginative implications and consequences with often startling lucidity:
The peculiar skill of any art is in making all that is available of itself be surface; even its depths (like the picaresque profundities of Moby-Dick) are disclosed only as surface events. This puts writer and reader on more or less equal footing, because although each has a different approach to the text, once the text is in place the surface it makes available is haunted or shadowed by an obverse, the obvious perversity by which it affords glimpses of eaches and anys where every and all appear to lurk. Both sides are never visible at once, although a fundamental tropical urge is to make both sides available in such rapid succession that, like a coin trick, a continuity of the alternating surfaces blends into one demonic animated texture that is posed as identity and surplus indistinguishably. (71)
In This Compost, it is as though the surfaces of poems had descended into the darkness of the underworld along with their reader (or wreader, as Rasula sometimes writes, emphasizing the co-implication between reading and writing) before emerging once more into the light, now transfigured by their passage into possibilities of relation they always harbored among themselves.
Rasula’s work cannot be subsumed under a “methodology,” but if there is one word that captures the enabling condition of his mode of thought it would modernism. The exceptions his work theorizes and the extravagance it displays are akin to the exteriorizing force of modernist rupture, to the self-surpassing energies that go by the name of modernism and continue to agitate the present. Imagining Language delves into three thousand years of the archive, but the inspiration for that transhistorical editorial labor stems from the revolution of the word carried out by modernism, projected forward and backward from the rift it opens in the history of the letter, the line, and the law of genre. In The Shadow Mouth: Modernism and Poetic Inspiration (Palgrave, 2009) and Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015), Rasula turns his attention directly toward this subject matter, but it is only in his two most recent volumes that the full scope of his immersion in modernism across the arts comes into focus. History of Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory (Oxford University Press, 2020) are companion volumes carving forking paths from early German Romanticism through Wagnerism to the proliferation of international avant-gardes and the global convulsions of jazz before following the ungrounding of these upheavals back to prehistoric precedents in cave painting, reading modernism as a “renaissance of the archaic.” With the prodigious and perhaps unprecedented range and variety of materials these volumes convene across nine hundred pages, Rasula has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to develop a research practice and a prose style adequate to the sheer profusion of modernist precedent—if not through an unattainable approximation of totality then by producing a sufficiently complex experience of its irreducible inventions.
The signal claim of History of a Shiver is that “the first modernism was Romanticism” (73). If the eighteenth century querelle between the ancients and the moderns remained “a neoclassical affair” (73), we might deduce from this claim that modernism emerges within modernity not through the rupture between the classical and the modern, but rather between the classical and the romantic. The impetus of modernism—its sublime impudence—stems from the self-conscious affirmation of this break, signaled in particular by a movement beyond classical genres. Rasula argues that modernism might be “understood in broad historical terms as the self-overcoming of genres in all the arts, for it’s this above all that illuminates the distinguishing trait of modernism while making legible its basis in Romanticism” (74). The specific Romanticism to which Rasula refers is the circle of writers concentrated in Jena, Germany, in the late 1790s, including Friedrich Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Ludwig Tieck. Through their journal, Athenaeum, the Jena Romantics made the overcoming of separations between genres and art forms their explicit project through such keywords as Romantische Poesie, Mischgedicht, or Roman, which constellate their ambition to inaugurate forms of writing, thought, and sociality fusing art, science, philosophy, and politics while displacing the opposition of literature and criticism. “To affirm creative activity in terms of perpetual expansion and self-overcoming,” writes Rasula, “is not so much to envision the completion of a work as to valorize a project exceeding any momentary incarnation in a particular work” (56). Through this “feeling for projects” affirmed by Friedrich Schlegel, Jena circa 1800 becomes a fragment of the future it anticipates and constructs, with unclassifiable works like Novalis’s Das Allgemeine Brouillon making manifest a mode of striving not only metaphysical or historical, but above all formal—a demand that forms become adequate to all that exceeds them.
History of a Shiver coalesces around the recognition that such striving involves a passion for synesthesia: “The Mischgedicht—or blended composition—fanned the flames of an ambitiously synesthetic compulsion revisited with increasing urgency throughout the nineteenth century” (61). Moreover, in Rasula’s account the vehicle of this synesthetic compulsion was music. Due to an ineffability apparently exceeding that of other arts, and “because music was the art form least encumbered by mimetic criteria” (61), it served as an endlessly mutable locus of synesthetic reverie, such that experiences of “seeing music” or “listening to incense” pass over from idle analogy to transgenerational project, conveyed by the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk from Romantische Poesie to early twentieth century avant-garde experimentation. Rasula is attentive to the irony of one particular art form taking on, through synesthetic revery, the burden of overcoming particular art forms—but what is irony? And how are we to understand the specific nature of this particular irony? It is by posing and indeed answering questions like this—which up the ante of art historical observation—that Rasula is able to illuminate the undercurrents of a century’s obsessions with an order of metaphysical insight equal to his objects of study, here in response to a fragment by Schlegel:
“Irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an endlessly abundant chaos”—in short, the primordial cosmic potentiality from which art (and all creative effort) derives. Irony is the romantic salutation of a finite being greeting the infinite cosmos, graced by reciprocal genuflections of cricket and leviathan. According to the principle of the fragment, every creative act leaves some trace of its “infinitely teeming” energy in the domain of the possible. Although the romantic concept of irony was mostly applied to literature, its artistic consequences are closely linked to the increasing eminence of music during the nineteenth century. Disclosing patterns of “eternal agility,” accompanied by an ironic awareness of the fragility of musical forms, music became the Trojan horse that smuggled Romanticism into modernism. (58-59)
It is not only ironic that music is positioned as the art capable of overcoming divisions among the arts; music is the irony which bears and conveys that Romantic imperative through the nineteenth century: the eternal agility of a medium with no object and no delimited spatial frame, temporally restless and composed of fleeting tones that die upon the air into which they are born and within the senses they populate. It is the clear consciousness of endlessly abundant chaos, communicated by music, from which modernism draws its sublime impudence from Romanticism, an ironic consciousness that extends to the dialectical relation between medium specificity and interarts experimentation, each pole of that relation propelling the other into generative contradictions. Taking up Carl Dalhaus’s notion of the “pathos of emancipation” (23) implicit in the contradictions of medium specificity and synesthetic yearning, the first half of History of a Shiver tracks tantalizing efforts to “surmount the input/output ratio of sense-specific arts” (24) from the throes of melomania and the delirium of Wagnerism through the subtractive operations of symbolism, the untimely pastorals of pageantry, pictorialism, and dance in California, invocations of a fourth dimension and a sixth sense, and a theoretical excursion through the ideal of endless melody.
Chapters on symbolism and on pictorialism and dance exemplify Rasula’s discrepant approaches to defamiliarizing modernism. “Drawing a Blank: Symbolist Retraction” is a beautiful, fluent meditation upon the “propensity to vacate the stage, reconvene space as magnitude, and generally clear the ground in order to start from scratch” (116). This “particular motif of retraction or clearing a blank,” Rasula argues, “is the salient feature of symbolism that persisted into modernism” (116). It’s not only the argument itself but also a subtle appreciation of the complex emotional textures of this subtractive operation that lend Rasula’s account its singularity. “I feel myself more trusting of the nameless,” Rilke intones, and as we read, that feeling of trust enters into the vacancies of Hammershøi’s interiors; into the “simple feelings” of Maeterlink’s plays and puppet theater (137); into the ghostly evanescence of Fernand Khnopff’s paintings, or their serial repetition of figures upon undeveloped ground; into portraits by Auguste Levêque, Mieczyslaw Jakimowicz, Odilon Redon, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wherein closed eyes bespeak a silent inner life; into Mallarmé’s compositions in which the lines “mustn’t be composed of words; but of intentions, and all the words must fade before the sensation” (121). Moving among so many names—some familiar, others less so—Rasula helps us sense the nameless blank of indeterminate meaning in the background or below the surface of what we thought we knew, of what we have been looking at for a long time:
Symbolist painting exudes a kind of thematic huddling, suggesting the predatory nature of certain subjects, as though the subjects chose the painters and not the other way around. So those scenarios of silence and absence seem on the verge of releasing some sound, like the skittering of rats or a sudden flutter of pigeons. (145)
To see sight renounced is to be asked to consider another sense (143); to trust the nameless is to let the object sink into indeterminacy, into resonance with undefined attributes—so symbolist retractions fertilize synesthesia and merge with the ineffability of music by evoking interiorities or elsewheres subtracted from recognition, suggesting reminiscence, and suffused with significance.
The following chapter on pictorialism and dance in turn-of-the-century America follows such obscure figures as photographer Arnold Genthe into the neo-Hellenic fantasies of Carmel by the Sea, or poets Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey onto the open road in their Songs from Vagabondia (1894). Rasula reconstructs affinities between the bucolic idylls, hieratic poses, flowing gowns, and pagan mysteries of American pageantry and Pacific arts colonies with fin-de-siècle Europe through such transatlantic crossover figures as Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, imbibing and interpreting Wagner, praised by Mallarmé. Photography not only documented the bodily postures and physical mystique of such figures, it also sculpted, curated, and framed their production according to the contrasting subjective ideals looking both forward and backward at the switching point between centuries:
Photography provides a vivid study of contrasts at that fin de siècle moment when Jean-Martin Charcot was documenting the convulsions of his hysterics for scientific purposes, while dance and body culture manuals were deploying a similar range of corporeal expressivity to illustrate modern standards of healthy living. In the genteel and ultimately redemptive petition to art by pictorial photography, the female form emerged as a tasteful return to Hellenistic animation—animus tamed by anima. (183)
Moving from Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey’s experiments with the photographic documentation of movement to Diana Watts’s The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal and Genthe’s photographs of Duncan, his collaboration with Percy Mackay (leader of the American pageantry movement), and his link to the photographic pictorialism of Stieglitz’s Camera Work, to Edward Steichen’s affiliation with the same journal, Rasula tracks the curious capacity of burgeoning art photography to shuttle between pastoral bohemia, mechanical scientism, nostalgic Hellenism, and Hollywood glitz. Formal problems of lighting and pose link these apparently discrepant photographic worlds with symbolism, while documentation of outdoor dance links pictorialism to the “barefoot modernism” of Duncan and the Arcadian dream of Vagabondia. Anne Brigman would photograph a series of wilderness nudes posed on outcroppings in the high Sierras, evocative of H.D.’s poems in Sea Garden and of “new dimensions” of “the human form as part of tree and rock rhythms” (198). Such projects exemplify Rasula’s reminder that “the influential view of modernism as a series of formal advances in various arts has obscured the extent to which such advances were stations in a spiritual quest.” “It has been too easy,” he notes, “to recognize formal issues from outside, while the tangle of hunches and beliefs that actually drove someone’s engagement with his or her art can seem inscrutable and messy. Once something like an idea emerges, it seems to have little to do with the plangent psychological and material muck out of which it arose” (189-190). Rasula’s rare gift is his capacity to make that plangent substance and that tangle of hunches manifest, not only prior to but in the ideas they generate and by which they are displaced.
The arabesque associations between major and minor streams of incipient modernism in History of a Shiver flow into Acrobatic Modernism like elaborately winding tributaries into a vast river, itself composing manifold currents. Understanding the structure of the book is crucial to grasping its method. We find three central chapters—“Make it New,” “Jazzbandism,” and “Multiplied Men”—constructed as something like encyclopedic catalogues. Here the task is to track down and include as many nodes in these thematic networks as possible: the writing moves briskly between names, practices, movements, and contexts, enumerating and briefly characterizing declarations of fidelity to the new in all its forms; the international scope and protean reception of jazz as a global phenomenon; invocations of plural selves and heteronymic displacements of identity. The sheer profusion of these chapters is at once exhausting and exhilarating, as the Preface anticipates:
My advice to the reader, then, is to regard the text like a big crowd on Times Square, Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, Mexico City’s Zócalo, or Trafalgar Square in London. As you venture into the swarm, let the kaleidoscope spin. After a while patterns will emerge in prismatic rotation, and the poor old tired horse of modernism may turn out to be a zebra after all. Count the stripes, if you will, or at any rate, saddle up. (vii)
One might add “buckle up,” in preparation for a ride that charges onward with the velocity of Marinetti’s automobile retrofitted for the freeway.
Yet these three central chapters are bookended by five others which proceed at a somewhat more reflective pace, and which pursue more or less continuous lines of investigation through the opening and closing sections of the volume. The first three chapters—“The Ache of Modernism,” “Luminous Sores,” and “Gathering Hay in a Thunderstorm”—elaborate an approach to artworks as “pathic receptacles,” compounds of thought and feeling deposited by making, poiesis. “Signs in any medium,” Rasula notes, “propagate more signs even as they purport to close in on the object of representation or on some intended meaning.” Thus,
To speak of an artwork as a pathic receptacle indicates this migratory propensity, this condition by means of which our sentience gets the better of us, as it were, thanks to which artifacts attain a life of their own. The transfigured object harbors a twofold pathos: on the one hand, like a corporeal dismemberment, the work is poignantly removed from the body that nourished it; on the other hand, in defiance of the medical model, the work itself (the disjected member) becomes the phantom sensation. (61)
The notion of artworks as phantom sensations, and of prosthesis as constitutive of embodied apprehension and production, is theorized in greater detail and with striking insight in Rasula’s dissertation on “The Poetics of Embodiment.” Here it offers an approach to artworks traversing apparently discrete forms or distinct media and attentive to “a biomorphic insistence, a biologically exigent extension of corporeality” attending the work of artists whose “generative impulse is profoundly embedded in a somatic manifold” (62).
In “Luminous Sores: The Pathic Receptacles of Modernism,” this approach enables a deep reckoning with the impact of the Great War on the relation between modernism and modernity. What distinguishes Rasula’s treatment of this well-worn topic is a concept of the artwork adequate to understanding how the war brought into “cataclysmic focus” (64) a wrenching recalibration of sensory ratios and a thoroughgoing displacement of generic norms that was already well underway. The “acute materialization of pathic intensity” focalized by the war is “a rupture that tells us, poignantly, that art is of the body and the body’s traumas extend to art” (115)—“that art’s receptacles hurt when they undergo transformation” (114). From the perspective of the synesthetic dialectic developed in History of Shiver—wherein synesthetic yearning becomes lodged in particular artforms, transgressing their distinctions precisely through intensifications of their address to particular sensory channels—we are in a position to understand how Nietzsche’s response to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk registers the pain of modernism in the element of both formal and historical transformation, given the body’s inadequacy to the demands of reception: “the absolute arts tear us to pieces, as it were, and we also enjoy only by bits, now as ear-people, now as eye-people, etc” (qtd on 115). “The siren call of ‘absolute art,’” writes Rasula, “endowed each sense with an enhanced perspective of loss—what it had to shed to partake of the absolute—as well as the advantages of further refinements along the paths of ‘eye-people’ and ‘ear-people’” (115).
This clarification illuminates not only anticipations by artworks of the sundering of bodies by the war, but also competing claims of medium specificity and inter-arts experimentation as central to modernism. The apparent contradiction of those accounts attests to “the paradoxically enabling trauma of productive loss” (126) traversing the unsettling of both generic and historical regularities throughout the nineteenth century. To position the war as ruptural cause of modernist culture is to occlude an understanding of the war itself as an effect of complex historical determinations stemming from the upheavals of modernity—those which shape as well the affective field in which artworks express the pain of transformation, and in which they become adequate to register the force of the war’s catastrophe. One must have suffered a long time to be adequate to the crisis of suffering, and have been greatly transformed to endure such transformation. When we read Hegel’s critique of Enlightenment and his philosophical transubstantiation of the French Revolution, we may be acutely aware that the pathos which also suffuses Beethoven’s Eroica is preparing the ground for those artworks of the twentieth century which take up ruptural traditions in the name of the new. Rasula cites Loy’s “Apology of a Genius”:
We come among you
innocent
of our luminous sores (127)
Among whom? one might ask. As Rasula will show, the genius of modernism is immersed in many thousands of years of cultural history, but it displays its wounds “among” the denizens of modernity. The sores of modernism illuminate the darkness of modernity like an underworld, by torchlight drawn from its own fires. Such a torch would be a prosthesis, supplementing the body’s lack, displaying its need, connecting it with the elements. The “excess of deficiency” (127) from which modernism suffers is bred in the bone of modernity, and its projects—whatever their explicit predecessors—stem in particular from the attunement of Jena Romanticism toward the dialectical overcoming of discrete artforms and genres.
In “Gathering Hay in a Thunderstorm” (Chapter 3), Rasula draws Aby Warburg’s research toward his Bilderatlas and his concept of pathosformel into contact with H.D.’s poetry and the meditations of her Tribute to Freud, in order “to explore the affective force of antiquity as a healing agent” (129). As the chapter weaves together H.D.’s vision of writing on the wall in Corfu with her dream of a caterpillar writhing under salt, with the intensities of her bond with D.H. Lawrence, and with the religious impulses of her sensibility, the depth and subtlety of Rasula’s psychoanalytic learning becomes apparent. There’s a sensitivity to the intersection of psychic trace and historical complex that imbues this material with a density of insight which the volume slows down to register. Meanwhile, the linking of H.D.’s case not only with Warburg’s art historical investigations but also the fissures of his dual identity as psychiatric patient and scholar of Renaissance art realizes the concept of pathosformel through the elaboration of its parameters. Warburg “sought the disclosure of otherness as such, in any form” (130), and Rasula takes the pursuit of this disclosure as an occasion for its advent: Warburg’s experience of his own body as akin to “a telephone girl during a storm or under artillery fire” (133) is fused not only with the “heraldic electricity” (159) of H.D.’s disposition, but also with the shock of cinematic experience recorded in Mann’s Magic Mountain and the harrowing cuts of the film Borderline, starring H.D. and Paul Robeson. Rasula limns the pathic intensity registered by Warburg in Renaissance paintings as a “sense of density evoked by the intractable body” (136) and lodged in works of art, reading the psychic distress at issue as manifest in the scholar’s life as much as in the concepts he develops. It’s the shiver that passes from one to the other that passes as well from Warburg to H.D., and that gives us to think modernism writ large as akin to a caterpillar writhing under the sprinkled salt of modernity—as an image of somatic convulsion. Citing Maeterlinck—“perhaps illnesses are the various and authentic poems of the flesh” (161)—the chapter offers a profound if understated meditation on the inextricability of illness and health, with culture caught at the crux of their chiasmus.
These opening chapters of Acrobatic Modernism enable us to imagine the quiver of the tightrope as it is traversed, or the sudden shudder of the fine line as one shifts to keep one’s balance above the void. The “acrobatic” is a matter of virtuosity, to be sure, but also of corporeal peril and exposure in the midst of the performance. The saltimbanque of Baudelaire’s “La Muse Vénale” not only shows off her charms, but does so through a “laughter soaked with tears that no one sees, / To split the sides of the vulgar.” The “hectic multiplicity” of modernism is riven by the very energies propelling its performances, such that “whether there’s a choice or not, modernism demands an acrobatic response to change, and change is the legislative circumstance of modernity” (11). Poised on the cusp of transformation, or undergoing its crux, the acrobat makes a living of the impossible, takes it as a test or “metabolic provocation” (12) productive of elaborate postures. Such performances take their toll, and Rasula’s title inspires attention, throughout, to the ways in which exposure to extremity—even when pulled off with aplomb— demands contortions as painful as impressive. “Historical mutation is the elective burden of modernism” (22) and artworks bear, as prostheses, the pain of the amputations they supplement, even those proceeding the birth of those who produce them.
Precedent becomes the closing theme of this book, as “the new” intersects with the question of how much precedent invention can include. A chapter on “The Renaissance of the Archaic” is preceded by a chapter on “The New Mythology,” and these form a diptych at the hinge of prehistory. The metaphor is meant to evoke Rasula’s discussion of the symbol:
In the original Greek, symbol refers to the two halves of a pledge split in two, so each half bears within it the potential for reunion. Moby-Dick is possessed of the perfect symbol: insofar as the white whale is symbolic, it’s because it is the living counterpart (and possessor) of Ahab’s lost leg. In that sense, then, a symbol emits phantom sensations, woeful registers of somatic penury. In addition to the spatial aspect of its object status, a symbol is also a temporal indicator. The sundered pledge attests to past truncation, portending the future reunion when the two halves of the pledge are reunited. (348)
Modernism is a sundered reunion with the deep past: reunion becomes the very act of severance that proclaims the new even as it claims a destiny in common with the archaic.
“The New Mythology” takes the landmark journal Transition as a signpost, dwelling on its publication of the “Work in Progress” that would become Finnegans Wake, with its sense of historical simultaneity wherein (as Siegfried Giedion claimed), “present, past, and future are not chopped off from one another but merge into one uninterrupted fabric” (296). But as usual, Rasula brings the usual suspects (Joyce) into contact with lesser-known figures, such as the German Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen or critic Carola Giedion-Welker, the latter becoming a kind of guide through both closing chapters. Giedion-Welker’s lucid commentaries on Joyce, Arp, Moholy-Nagy, Ozenfant and Jeanneret, Satie and others others illuminate the stakes of Dada, Constructivist, and Surrealist artworks and their archaic precedents. It’s her attunement to the problem of sensory ratios, the requirement of renovating human perception through mutations of proportion demanded by modernity, that Rasula particularly values in her perspective. “Reminiscence of the archaic,” she writes of Giacometti’s sculptures, “is this delicate awakening of the form from out of the plane of stone, this swelling up and down of the plane.” And of Arp she notes that the material is infused with “something growing, welling, gliding which admits neither of formal nor mental frontiers and fixations” (298). We might glean from such descriptions that, for Giedion-Welker, the reminiscence of the archaic in modernity involved a measureless formal flux or interior pressure transforming the dimensions of the work in accordance with historical forces traversing the present and connecting it with a distant past. What’s interesting in these passages is that the language is not one of rupture but of undulation, as if the deepest past were sculpting from within the immediacy of the present without the regulation of proportional laws.
The inspiration of the archaic suggests a return to origins, to inaugural moments, thus fusing the new with the old as that which was not old when it took place, and it is this simultaneity of taking place which accounts for how allegiance to precedent strictly entails commitment to the unprecedented: the first instance of what once was, right now. The incipient curvature Giedion-Welker sees in the awakening of modernist forms to archaic precedent (think of Gaudier-Brzeska) is manifest in the dynamic, rather than static, equilibrium urged by Piet Mondrian, the kinetic rhythm advocated by Naum Gabo, or the asymmetrical balance of typographical design adopted by Jan Tschichold (302). Rasula positions the values and inventions of Constructivism, its realization of the apparently abstract in the concrete practice of making, as part of the pursuit of a new mythology—and in this sense in continuity with the project of Jena Romanticism. “We admit,” Naum Gabo acknowledged, “that we do not what what ‘reason’ is, what ‘myth’ is, where free fancy begins, and where knowledge ends,” and it was this uncertainty about parameters of knowledge, perception, and imagination in modernity which forced a production of the new often inseparable from a recovery of the old. Gabo declared that “the aim of our time consists in creating a harmonious human being” (319), where the emphasis falls upon creating, since harmony could no longer be taken for granted. And indeed this specifies the terrain upon which Constructivism and Surrealism—apparently divergent or opposing movements—converged upon the same goal in different ways. “New innocence and new experience,” Rasula writes, “join to produce (from a Constructivist perspective) or to induce (in the Surrealist outlook) a new sentience” (346)—a new sentience for which the boundaries between reason and the irrational are as unclear as those between knowledge and myth.
In a sweeping final chapter, Acrobatic Modernism then considers “The Renaissance of the Archaic” such new sentience involved, again conjoining major figures (Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Charles Olson, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko) with a host less familiar names, (Max Raphael, Anatole Jakovski, Andrea Caffi, Martha Graham, among many others). Abstract Expressionism anchors the chapter’s associative tour through investments in the paleolithic, and a trajectory comes into view from Constructivism and Surrealism into a postwar context for which avant-garde excavations of the archaic had themselves become historically mediated. “Prehistory” —that which comes before the beginning of record—comes to constitute an opening upon the way in which the archaic had been made new by modernism, as cave painting recalls the gestural inauguration of the unprecedented: art. The book draws toward a close with a moving meditation upon the hand print as prehistoric sign and modernist motif, wherein the marking of corporeal presence asserts or shadows or abstracts the being-there of the human in the midst of the ghostly apparitions of time’s passage. It’s through such associative gestures that Rasula is able to bring what seems to be unrelated into suggestive proximity, and this closing movement of the book’s final chapter might be regarded as itself a kind of methodological sign: any and all signs of what came to be called modernism are available for reconsideration of their significance, and of the way they snap the most profound depths of our history into altered focus.
Together, these books are a massive contribution not only to modernist studies but to our understanding of modernity. In their passage across two centuries, across the breadth of international modernism, across the arts and experimental practices located among their interstices, History of a Shiver and Acrobatic Modernism show us just how much typical scholarly protocols tend to occlude the profusion of modernist practices. In particular, the acrobatic agility of Rasula’s writing—a compositional style willing to risk immersion in the materials to the point of saturation—enables the kind of alacrity urged by a figure like Friedrich Schlegel: an associative field of intelligence and attention constantly mutating, expanding its limits, frequently turbulent but at times settling into regions of meditative continuity. These are books that display a ferocious determination to know or at least to gather as much as possible, yet also a light touch that makes so much research and learning amenable to enjoyment and play. To read them is a difficult pleasure, teeming as they are with so many encounters and new prospects. As we contemplate the vexed energies they trace, they draw us near the most distant, and they suffuse what we thought with knew with intimations of the unknowable.
While discussing the composition of these two books in a forthcoming volume of essays and conversations, Wreading: A Potential Intelligence (University of Alabama Press, 2021), Rasula notes, “The fact that these people were alive means a great deal to me.” You can tell. For it to mean a great deal that such people were alive requires us to encounter their works as refractory to the museum, to the catalog, to the backward gaze of the scholar. For it to matter that they were alive, they have to be brought to life. It means a great deal because the history of a shiver those lives transmit, of the luminous sores their works display, remains our own.
a review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley; Joanne McNeil, Lurking; Ellen Ullman, Life in Code; Wendy Liu, Abolish Silicon Valley; Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, eds., Voices from the Valley; Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, Seeing Silicon Valley
“Fuck all that. I have no theory. I’ve only got a story to tell.”
– Elizabeth Freeman, “Without You, I’m Not Necessarily Nothing”
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Everyone’s eager to mine Silicon Valley for its hidden stories. In the past several years, women in or adjacent to the tech industry have published memoirs about their time there, ensconcing macrolevel critiques of Big Tech within intimate storytelling. Examples include Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, Joanne McNeil’s Lurking, Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code, Susan Fowler’s Whistleblower, and Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley, to name just a handful.[1] At the same time, recent edited volumes curate workers’ everyday lives in the ideological and geographical space that is Silicon Valley, seeking to expose the deep structural inequalities embedded in the tech industry and its reaches in the surrounding region. Examples of this trend include Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel’s Voices from the Valley and Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner’s Seeing Silicon Valley, along with tech journalists’ reporting on unfair labor practices and subsequent labor organizing efforts. In both cases, personal accounts of the tech industry’s effects constitute their own form of currency.
What’s interesting about the juxtaposition of women’s first-hand accounts and collected worker interviews is how the first could fit within the much derided and feminized “personal essay” genre while the latter is more explicitly tied to the Marxist tradition of using workers’ perspectives as an organizing catalyst, i.e. through the process of empirical cataloging and self-reflection known as workers’ inquiry.[2] In this review essay, I consider these two seemingly unrelated trends in tandem. What role can personal stories play in sparking collective movements, and does presentation matter?
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Memoirs of life with tech provide a glimpse of the ways that personal experiences—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are mediated by information technologies themselves as well as through their cascading effects on workplaces and social worlds. They provide an antidote to early cyberlibertarian screeds, imbued with dreams of escaping fleshly, earthly drudgery, like John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: “Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.” But in femme accounts of life in code, embodiment is inescapable. As much as the sterile efficiencies of automation would do away with the body’s messiness, the body rears its head with a vengeance. In a short post, one startup co-founder, Tracy Young, recounts attempting to neutralize her feminine coded body with plain clothes and a stoic demeanor, persevering through pregnancy, childbirth, and painful breastfeeding, and eventually hiding her miscarriage from her colleagues. Young reveals these details to point to the need for structural changes within the tech industry, which is still male-dominated, especially in the upper rungs. But for Young, capitalism is not the problem. Tech is redeemable through DEI initiatives that might better accommodate women’s bodies and needs. On the other end of the spectrum, pregnant Amazon warehouse workers suffer miscarriages when their managers refuse to follow doctors’ recommendations and compel pregnant workers to lift heavy boxes or prevent them from taking bathroom and water breaks. These experiences lie on disparate ends of the scale, but reflect the larger problems of patriarchy and racial capitalism in tech and beyond. It is unclear if this sliver of common ground can hope to bridge such a gulf of privilege.
Sexual harassment, workplace misogyny, pregnancy discrimination: these grievances come up again and again within femme tech memoirs, even the ones that don’t at face value seem political. At first glance, Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User is not at all about labor. Her memoir is to some extent a celebration of the early internet, at times falling into the trap of nostalgia—the pleasure of the internet being “a place,” and the greater degree of flexibility and play afforded by usernames as opposed to real names policies. “Once I spoke freely and shared my dreams with strangers. Then the real world fastened itself to my digital life…My idle youth online largely—thankfully—evaporated in the sun, but more recent-ish old posts breeze along, colliding with and confusing new image of myself that I try to construct” (McNeil 2020, 8-9). Building on earlier feminist critiques of techno-utopian libertarianism, such as Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish (2000), in McNeil’s estimation, the early web allowed people to be lurkers, rather than users, even if the disembodied libertarian imaginaries attached to cyberspace never panned out. With coerced participation and the alignment of actual identities with online profiles, the shift to “the user” reflects the enclosure of the web and the growth of tech corporations, monetization, and ad tech. The beauty of being a lurker was the space to work out the self in relation to communities and to bear witness to these experimental relationships. As McNeil puts it, in her discussion of Friendster, “What happened between <form> and </form> was self-portraiture” (McNeil 2020, 90). McNeil references the many early internet communities, like Echo, LatinoLink, and Café los Negroes, which helped queer, Black, and Latinx relationships flourish in connection with locally situated subcultures.
In a brief moment, while reflecting on the New York media world built around websites like Gawker, McNeil ties platformization to her experiences as a journalist, a producer of knowledge about the tech industry: “A few years ago, when I was a contractor at a traffic-driven online magazine, I complained to a technologist friend about the pressure I was under to deliver page view above a certain threshold” (McNeil 2020, 138). McNeil, who comes from a working class background, has had in adulthood the kind of work experiences Silicon Valley tends to make invisible, including call center work and work as a receptionist. As a journalist, even as a contractor, she was expected to amass thousands of Twitter followers. Because she lacked a large following, she relied on the publication itself to promote her work. She was eventually let go from the job. “My influence, or lack thereof, impacted my livelihood” (McNeil 2020, 139). This simply stated phrase reveals how McNeil’s critique of Big Tech is ultimately not only about users’ free labor and the extraction of profit from social relationships, but about how platform metrics are making people’s jobs worse.
Labor practices emerge in McNeil’s narrative at several other points, in reference to Google’s internal caste system and the endemic problem of sexual harassment within the industry. In a discussion of Andrew Norman Wilson’s influential Workers Leaving the Googleplex video (2011), which made clear to viewers the sharp divisions within the Google workforce, McNeil notes that Google still needs these blue-collar workers, like janitors, security guards, and cafeteria staff, even if the company has rendered them largely invisible. But what is the purpose of making these so-called hidden laborers of tech visible, and for whom are they being rendered visible in the first place?[3] If you have ever been on a tech campus, you can’t miss ‘em. They’re right fucking there! If the hierarchies within tech are now more popularly acknowledged, then what? And are McNeil’s experiences as a white-collar tech journalist at all related to these other people’s stories, which often provide the scaffolding for tech reporters’ narratives?
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Other tech memoirs more concretely focus on navigating tech workplaces from a femme perspective. Long-form attention to the matter creates more space for self-reflection and recognition on the part of the reader. In 2016, Anna Wiener’s n+1 essay, “Uncanny Valley,” went viral because it hit a nerve. Wiener presented an overtly gendered story—about body anxiety and tenuous friendship—told through one woman’s time in the world of startups before the majority of the public had caught wind of the downside of digital platforms and their stranglehold on life, work, and politics. Later, Wiener would write a monograph-length version of the story with the same title, detailing her experiences as a “non-technical” woman in tech: “I’d never been in a room with so few women, so much money, and so many people chomping at the bit to get a taste” (Wiener 2020, 61). In conversation with computer science academics and engineers, her skepticism about the feasibility of self-driving cars isn’t taken seriously because she is a woman who works in customer support. Wiener describes herself as being taken in by the promises and material culture of the industry: a certain cashmere sweater and overall look, wellness tinctures, EDM, and Burning Man at the same time she navigates taxicab gropings on work trips and inappropriate comments about “sensual” Jewish women at the office. Given the Protestant Work Ethic-tinged individualism of her workplace, she offers little in the way of solidarity. When her friend Noah is fired after writing a terse memo, she and the rest of the workers at the startup fail to stand up to their boss. She laments, “Maybe we never were a family. We knew we had never been a family,” questioning the common myth that corporations are like kin (Wiener 2020, 113). Near the end of her memoir, Wiener wrestles with the fact that GamerGate, and later the election of Trump, do not bring the reckoning she once thought was coming. The tech industry continues on as before.
Wiener is in many respects reminiscent of another erudite, Jewish, New York City-to-San Francisco transplant, Ellen Ullman. Ullman published an account of her life as a woman programmer, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, in 1997, amid the dotcom boom, when tech criticism was less fashionable. Ullman writes about “tantric, algorithmic” (1997, 49) sex with a fellow programmer and the erotics of coding itself, flirting with the romance novel genre. She critiques the sexism and user-disregard in tech (she is building a system for AIDS patients and their providers, but the programmers are rarely confronted with the fleshly existence of their end-users). Her background as a communist, along with her guilt about her awkward class position as an owner and landlord of a building in the Wall Street district, also comes through in the memoir: At one point, she quips “And who was Karl Marx but the original technophile?” (Ullman 1997, 29). Ullman presciently sees remote, contracted tech workers, including globally situated call center works, as canaries in the coal mine. As she puts it, “In this sense, we virtual workers are everyone’s future. We wander from job to job, and now it’s hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments are contractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is spreading outward from us” (Ullman 1997, 146). Even for a privileged techie like Ullman, the supposedly hidden global underclass of tech was not so hidden after all.
Ullman’s Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, a collection of essays published twenty years later in 2017, reflects a growing desire to view the world of startups, major tech companies, and life in the Bay Area through the lens of women’s unique experiences. A 1998 essay included in Life in Code reveals Ullman’s distrust of what the internet might become: “I fear for the world the internet is creating. Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses” (Ullman 2017, 89). Ullman at various points refers to the toxic dynamics of technoculture, the way that engineers make offhand sexist, racist remarks during their workplace interactions. In other words, critics like Ullman had been around for decades, but her voice, and voices like hers, carried more weight in 2017 than in 1997. Following in Ullman’s footsteps, Wiener’s contribution came at just the right time.
I appreciate Sharrona Pearl’s excellent review of Wiener’s Uncanny Valley in this publication, and her critique of the book’s political intentions (or lack thereof) and privileged perspective. When it comes to accounts of the self as political forces, Emma Goldman’s Living My Life it is not. But some larger questions remain: why did so many readers find Wiener’s personal narrative compelling, and how might we relate its popularity to a larger cultural shift in how stories about technology are told?
Another woman’s memoir of a life in tech offers one possible answer. Wendy Liu started as a computer science major at a prestigious university, worked as a Google intern, and co-founded a startup, not an uncommon trajectory for a particular class of tech worker. Her candid memoir of her transformation from tech evangelist to socialist tech critic, Abolish Silicon Valley, references Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” essay. Wiener’s account resonated with Liu, even as a software engineer who viewed herself as separate from the non-technical women around her— the marketers, program managers, and technical writers. Liu is open about the ways that ideologies around meritocracy and individual success color her trajectory: she viewed Gamergate as an opportunity to test out her company’s tech capabilities and idolized men like Elon Musk and Paul Graham. Hard work always pays off and working 80 hours a week is a means to an end. Sometimes you have to dance with the devil: for example, Liu’s startup at one point considers working for the Republican Party. Despite her seeming belief in the tech industry’s alignment with the social good, Liu has doubts. When Liu first encounters Wiener’s essay, she wryly notes that she thought n+1 might be a tech magazine, given its math-y name. Once she reads it, “The words cut like a knife through my gradually waning hopes, and I wanted to sink into an ocean of this writing” (Liu 2020, 111). Liu goes on to read hundreds of leftist books and undergo a political awakening in London. While Wiener’s memoir is intensely personal, not overtly about a collective politics, it still ignites something in Liu’s consciousness, becoming enfolded into her own account of her disillusionment with the tech industry and capitalism as a whole. Liu also refers to Tech Against Trump, published by Logic Magazine in 2017, which featured “stories from fellow tech workers who were startled into caring about politics because of Trump” (Liu 2020, 150). Liu was not alone in her awakening, and it was first-hand accounts by fellow tech workers who got her and many others to question their relationship to the system.
Indeed, before Liu published her abolitionist memoir, she published a short essay for a UK-based Marxist publication, Notes from Below, titled “Silicon Inquiry,” applying the time-honored Marxist practice of workers’ inquiry to her own experiences as a white-collar coder. She writes, “I’ve lost my faith in the industry, and with it, any desire to remain within it. All the perks in the world can’t make up for what tech has become: morally destitute, mired in egotism and self-delusion, an aborted promise of what it could have been. Now that I realise this, I can’t go back.” She describes her trajectory from 12-year-old tinkerer, to computer science major, to Google intern, where she begins to sense that something is wrong and unfulfilling about her work: “In Marxist terms, I was alienated from my labour: forced to think about a problem I didn’t personally have a stake in, in a very typically corporate environment that drained all the motivation out of me.” When she turns away from Google to enter the world of startups, she is trapped by the ideology of faking it until you make it. They work long hours, technically for themselves, but without achieving anything tangible. Liu begins to notice the marginalized workers who comprise a major part of the tech industry, not only ride-hail drivers and delivery workers, but the cafeteria staff and janitors who work on tech campuses. The bifurcated workforce makes it difficult for workers to organize; the ones at the top are loyal to management, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy are afraid of losing their jobs if they speak out.
Towards the end of her memoir, Liu describes joining a picket line of largely Chinese-American women who are cleaners for Marriott Hotels. This action is happening at the same time as the 2018 Google Walkout, during which white-collar tech workers organized against sexual harassment and subsequent retaliation at the company. Liu draws a connection between both kinds of workers, protesting in the same general place: “On the surface, you would think Google engineers and Marriott hotel cleaners couldn’t be more different. And yet, one key component of the hotel workers’ union dispute was the prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace…The specifics might be different, but the same underlying problems existed at both companies” (Liu 2020, 158). She sees that TVCs (temps, vendors, and contractors) share grievances with their full-time counterparts, especially when it comes to issues over visas, sexual harassment, and entrenched racism. The trick for organizers is to inspire a sense of solidarity and connection among workers who, on the surface, have little in common. Liu explicitly connects the experiences of more white-collar tech workers like herself and marginalized workers within the tech industry and beyond. Her memoir is not merely a personal reflection, but a call to action–individual refusal, like deleting Facebook or Uber, is not sufficient, and transforming the tech industry is necessarily a collective endeavor. Her abolitionist memoir connects tech journalism’s use of workplace grievances and a first-hand account from the coder class, finding common ground in the hopes of sparking structural change. Memoirs like these may act as a kind of connective tissue, bridging disparate experiences of life in and through technology.
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Another approach to personal accounts of tech takes a different tack: Rather than one long-form, first-hand account, cobble together many perspectives to get a sense of contrasts and potential spaces of overlap. Collections of workers’ perspectives have a long leftist history. For decades, anarchists, socialists, and other social reformers have gathered oral histories and published these personal accounts as part of a larger political project (see: Avrich 1995; Buhle and Kelley 1989; Kaplan and Shapiro 1998; Lynd and Lynd 1973). Two new edited collections focus on aggregated workers’ stories to highlight the diversity of people who live and work in Silicon Valley, from Iranian-American Google engineers to Mexican-American food truck owners. The concept of “Silicon Valley,” like “tech industry,” tends to obscure the lived experiences of ordinary individuals, reflecting more of a fantasy than a real place.
Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner’s Seeing Silicon Valley follows the leftist photography tradition (think Lewis Hine or Dorothea Lange) of capturing working class people in their everyday struggles. Based on a six-week Airbnb stay in the area, Meehan’s images are arresting, spotlighting the disparity within Santa Clara Valley through a humanistic lens, while Turner’s historically-informed introduction and short essays provide a narrative through which to read the images. Silicon Valley is “a mirror of America itself. In that sense, it really is a city on a hill for our time” (Meehan and Turner 2021, 8). Through their presentation of life and work in Silicon Valley, Turner and Meehan push back against stereotypical, ahistorical visions of what Silicon Valley is. As Turner puts it, “The workers of Silicon Valley rarely look like the men idealized in its lore” (Meehan and Turner 2021, 7). Turner’s introduction critiques the rampant economic and racial inequality that exists in the Valley, and the United States as a whole, which bears out in the later vignettes. Unhoused people, some of whom work for major tech companies in Mountain View, live in vans despite having degrees from Stanford. People are living with the repercussions of superfund sites, hazardous jobs, and displacement. Several interviewees reference union campaigns, such as organizing around workplace injuries at the Tesla plant or contract security guards unionizing at Facebook, and their stories are accompanied by images of Silicon Valley Rising protest signs from an action in San Jose. Aside from an occasional direct quote, the narratives about the workers are truncated and editorialized. As the title would indicate, the book is above all a visual representation of life in Silicon Valley as a window into contemporary life in the US. Saturated colors and glossy pages make for a perfect coffee table object and one can imagine the images and text at home in a gallery space. To some degree, it is a stealth operation, and the book’s aesthetic qualities bely the sometimes difficult stories contained within, but the book’s intended audience is more academic than revolutionary. Who at this point doesn’t believe that there are poor people in “Silicon Valley,” or that “tech labor” obscures what is more often than not racialized, gendered, embodied, and precarious forms of work?
A second volume takes a different approach, focusing instead on the stories of individual tech workers. Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, co-founders of Logic Magazine, co-edited Voices from the Valley as part of their larger Logic brand’s partnership series with FSG Originals. The sharply packaged volume includes anonymous accounts from venture capitalist bros as well as from subcontracted massage workers, rendering visible the “people behind the platform” in a secretive industry full of NDAs (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 3). As the book’s title suggests, the interviews are edited back-and-forths with a wide range of workers within the industry, emphasizing their unique perspectives. The subtitle promises “Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It.” This is a clear nod to Studs Terkel’s 1974 epic collection of over one hundred workers’ stories, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, in which he similarly categorizes them according to job description, from gravedigger to flight attendant. Terkel frames each interview and provides a description of their living conditions or other personal details, but for the most part, the workers speak on their own terms. In Tarnoff and Weigel’s contribution, we as readers hear from workers directly, although we do catch a glimpse of the interview prompts that drove the conversations. The editors also provide short essays introducing each “voice,” contextualizing their position. Workers’ voices are there, to be sure, but they are also trimmed to match Logic’s aesthetic. Reviews of the book, even in leftist magazines like Jacobin, tend to focus as much on the (admittedly formidable) husband and wife editor duo as they do on the stories of the workers themselves. Even so, Tarnoff and Weigel emphasize the political salience of their project in their introduction, arguing that “Silicon Valley is now everywhere” (2020, 7) as “tech is a layer of every industry” (2020, 8). They end their introduction with a call to the reader to “Speak, whoever you are. Your voice is in the Valley, too” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 8).
As in Meehan and Turner’s visually oriented book, Tarnoff and Weigel’s interviews point to the ways that badge color as class marker, along with gender, immigration status, disability, and race, affect people’s experiences on the job. Much like Meehan and Turner’s intervention, the book gives equal space to the most elite voices as it does to those on the margins, spanning the entire breadth of the tech industry. There are scattered examples of activism, like white collar organizing campaigns against Google’s Dragonfly and other #TechWontBuiltIt manifestations. At one point, the individual known as “The Cook” names Tech Workers Coalition. TWC volunteers were “computer techie hacker cool” and showed up to meetings or even union negotiations in solidarity with their subcontracted coworkers. The Cook notes that TWC thinks “everybody working for a tech company should be part of that company, in one sense or another” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 68). There is an asterisk with a shorthand description of TWC, which has become something of a floating signifier of the tech workers’ movement. The international tech workers labor movement encompasses not only white collar coders, but gig and warehouse workers, who are absent here. With only seven interviews included, the volume cannot address every perspective. Because the interviews with workers are abbreviated and punctuated by punchy subheadings, it can be hard to tell whose voices are really being heard. Is it the workers of Silicon Valley, or is it the editors? As with Meehan and Turner’s effort, the end result is largely a view from above, not within. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a place for this kind of aggregation, or that it can’t connect to organizing efforts, but is this volume more of a political work than Wiener’s or Ullman’s memoirs?
In other interviews, workers reveal gendered workplace discrimination and other grievances that might prompt collective action. The person identified as “The Technical Writer” describes being terminated from her job after her boss suspects her pregnancy. (He eliminates the position instead of directly firing her, making it harder for her to prove pregnancy discrimination). She decides not to pursue a lawsuit because, as she puts it, “Tech is actually kind of a small industry. You don’t want to be the woman who’s not easy to work with” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 46). After being terminated, she finds work as a remote contractor, which allows her to earn an income while caring for her newborn and other young child. She describes the systemic misogyny in tech that leads to women in non-technical roles being seen as less valuable and maternity leave factoring into women’s lower salaries. But she laments the way that tech journalism tends to portray women as the objects, not the subjects of stories, turning them into victims and focusing narratives on bad actors like James Damore, who penned the infamous Google memo against diversity in tech. Sensationalized stories of harassment and discrimination are meant to tug at the heartstrings, but workers’ agency is often missing in these narratives. In another striking interview, “The Massage Therapist,” who is a subcontracted worker within a large tech campus environment, says that despite beleaguered cafeteria workers needing massages more than coders, she was prohibited from treating anyone who wasn’t a full-time employee. The young women working there seemed sad and too stressed to make time for their massages.
These personal but minor insights are often missing from popular narratives or journalistic accounts and so their value is readily apparent. The question then becomes, how do both personal memoirs and these shorter, aggregated collections of stories translate into changing collective class consciousness? What happens after the hidden stories of Silicon Valley are revealed? Is an awareness of mutual fuckedness enough to form a coalition?[4]
*
A first step might be to recognize the political power of the personal essay or memoir, rather than discounting the genre as a whole. Critiques of the personal essay are certainly not new; Virginia Woolf herself decried the genre’s “unclothed egoism.” Writing for The New Yorker in 2017, Jia Tolentino marked the death of the personal essay. For a time, the personal essay was everywhere: sites like The Awl, Jezebel, The Hairpin, and The Toast centered women’s stories of body horror, sex, work, pain, adversity, and, sometimes, rape. In an instant, the personal essay was apparently over, just as white supremacy and misogyny seemed to be on the rise. With the rise of Trumpism and the related techlash, personal stories were replaced with more concretely political takes. Personal essays are despised largely because they are written by and for women. Tolentino traces some of the anti-personal essay discourse to Emily Gould’s big personal reveal in The New York Times Magazine, foregrounding her perspective as a woman on the internet in the age of Gawker. In 2020 essay in The Cut revisiting her Gawker shame and fame, Gould writes, “What the job did have, and what made me blind to everything it didn’t, was exposure. Every person who read the site knew my name, and in 2007, that was a lot of people. They emailed me and chatted with me and commented at me. Overnight, I had thousands of new friends and enemies, and at first that felt exhilarating, like being at a party all the time.” Gould describes her humiliation when a video of her fellating a plastic dildo at work goes viral on YouTube, likely uploaded by her boss, Nick Denton. After watching the infamous 2016 Presidential Debate, when Donald Trump creepily hovered behind Hillary Clinton, Gould’s body registers recognition, prompting a visit to her gynecologist, who tells her that her body is responding to past trauma:
I once believed that the truth would set us free — specifically, that women’s first-person writing would “create more truth” around itself. This is what I believed when I published my first book, a memoir. And I must have still believed it when I began publishing other women’s books, too. I believed that I would become free from shame by normalizing what happened to me, by naming it and encouraging others to name it too. How, then, to explain why, at the exact same moment when first-person art by women is more culturally ascendant and embraced than it has ever been in my lifetime, the most rapacious, damaging forms of structural sexism are also on the rise?
Gould has understandably lost her faith in women’s stories, no matter how much attention they receive, overturning structural sexism. But what if the personal essay is, in fact, a site of praxis? Wiener, McNeil, Liu, and Ullman’s contributions are, to various extents, political works because they highlight experiences that are so often missing from mainstream tech narratives. Their power derives from their long-form personal accounts, which touch not only on work but on relationships, family, personal histories. Just as much as the more overtly political edited volumes or oral histories, individual perspectives also align with the Marxist practice of workers’ inquiry. Liu’s memoir, in particular, brings this connection to light. What stories are seen as true workers’ inquiry, part of leftist praxis, and which are deemed too personal, or too femme, to be truly political? When it comes to gathering and publishing workers’ stories, who is doing the collecting and for what purpose? As theorists like Nancy Fraser (2013) caution, too often feminist storytelling under the guise of empowerment, even in cases like the Google Walkout, can be enfolded back into neoliberalism. For instance, the cries of “This is what Googley looks like!” heard during the protest reinforced the company’s hallmark metric of belonging even as it reinterpreted it.
As Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi note in their detailed history of workers’ inquiry for Viewpoint Magazine, Marx’s original vision for worker’s inquiry was never quite executed. His was a very empirical project, involving 101 questions about shop conditions, descriptions of fellow workers, and strikes or other organizing activities. Marx’s point was that organizers must look to the working class itself to change their own working conditions. Workers’ inquiry is a process of recognition, whereby reading someone else’s account of their grievances leads to a kind of mutual understanding. Over time and in different geographic contexts, from France and Italy to the United States, workers’ inquiry has entailed different approaches and end goals. Beyond the industrial factory worker, Black feminist socialists like Selma James gathered women’s experiences: “A Woman’s Place discussed the role of housework, the value of reproductive labor, and the organizations autonomously invented by women in the course of their struggle.” The politics of attribution were tricky, and there were often tensions between academic research and political action. James published her account under a pen name. At other times, multi-authored and co-edited works were portrayed as one person’s memoir. But the point was to take the singular experience and to have it extend outward into the collective. As Haider and Mohandesi put it,
If, however, the objective is to build class consciousness, then the distortions of the narrative form are not problems at all. They might actually be quite necessary. With these narratives, the tension in Marx’s workers’ inquiry – between a research tool on the one hand, and a form of agitation on the other – is largely resolved by subordinating the former to the latter, transforming inquiry into a means to the end of consciousness-building.
The personal has always been political. Few would argue that Audre Lorde’s deeply personal Cancer Journals is not also a political work. And Peter Kropotkin’s memoir accounting for his revolutionary life begins with his memory of his mother’s death. The consciousness raising and knowledge-sharing of 1970s feminist projects like Our Bodies, Ourselves, the queer liberation movement, disability activism, and the Black Power movement related individual experiences to broader social justice struggles. Oral histories accounting for the individual lives of ethnic minority leftists in the US, like Paul Avrich’s Anarchist Voices, Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro’s Red Diapers, and Michael Keith Honey’s Black Workers Remember, perform a similar kind of work. If Voices from the Valley and Seeing Silicon Valley are potentially valuable as political tools, then first person accounts of life in tech should be seen as another fist in the same fight. There is an undeniable power attached to hearing workers’ stories in their own words and movements can emerge from the unlikeliest sources.
EDIT (8/6/2021): a sentence was added to correctly describe Joanne McNeil’s background and work history.
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Tamara Kneese is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her first book on digital death care practices, Death Glitch, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. She is also the co-editor of The New Death (forthcoming Spring 2022, School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press).
[1]I would include Kate Losse’s early, biting critique The Boy Kings, published in 2012, in this category. Losse was Facebook employee #51 and exposed the ways that nontechnical women, even those with PhDs, were marginalized by Zuckerberg and others in the company.
[2] Workers’ inquiry combines research with organizing, constituting a process by which workers themselves produce knowledge about their own circumstances and use that knowledge as part of their labor organizing.
[3] Noopur Raval (2021) questions the “invisibility” narratives within popular tech criticism, including Voices from the Valley and Seeing Silicon Valley, arguing that ghost laborers are not so ghostly to those living in the Global South.
[4]With apologies to Fred Moton. See The Undercommons (2013).
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Works Cited
Paul Avrich. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Paulina Borsook. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech. New York: Public Affairs, 2000.
Paul Buhle and Robin D. G. Kelley. “The Oral History of the Left in the United States: A Survey and Interpretation.” The Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (1989): 537-50. doi:10.2307/1907991.
Susan Fowler, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
Nancy Fraser. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. New York: Verso, 2013.
Emma Goldman. Living My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.
Michael Keith Honey. Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. Oakland: University of California Press, 2002.
Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro. Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Peter Kropotkin. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
Wendy Liu. Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
Audre Lorde. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
Katherine Losse. The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Alice Lynd and Robert Staughton Lynd. Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.
Joanne McNeil. Lurking: How a Person Became a User. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner. Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
~
Sometime during the last week of May, 2021, my dear friend Qadri Ismail “shuffled off this mortal coil” in his apartment in Minneapolis. He was 59 years old and Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Shuffled off this mortal coil—this strained and irreverent Shakespearean diction would have, I think, pleased and amused him, because he (like me) had received an early education anchored in a colonial concept of English literature, a concept each of us had learned to revile and treat with heavy irony. But his love of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets, and mine of George Eliot and the Victorian novelists, was abiding. To be willing to love what you also hold in contempt—we recognized this strange cultural attitude in each other more or less instantaneously.
We met at Columbia University in 1989. I was a first year graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature after abandoning a graduate career in anthropology, and Qadri had just started an MA in international studies as a Fulbright scholar, which he himself abandoned two years later to move to English. Each of us recognized a kindred spirit in the other. We had grown up in different parts of South Asia, fifteen hundred miles and more away from each other and in very different cultural contexts—he in Colombo, me in Karachi. But we shared an almost physical revulsion for the nationalisms and nation-states of our region. As a political reporter and columnist in Sri Lanka, he had lived through the brutal civil war between militants of the Tamil-Hindu minority and the Sinhalese-Buddhist dominated state. And my entire life had been shaped by the partition of British India along religio-national lines many years before my birth, my family having been part of the accompanying transfer of populations.
I don’t think I’ve known anyone to take writing as a responsibility as seriously as Qadri did, with the possible exception of Edward Said. Soon after we met in New York, the editor of a locally based academic journal (which I later joined) asked Qadri and me to contribute essays concerning the so-called Rushdie Affair, the Islamic protests worldwide against the novelist for writing a novel, The Satanic Verses, which the protestors, and ultimately Ayatollah Khomeini, believed to be blasphemous toward the Prophet of Islam. (The invitation came at the post-midnight tail-end of a party—many of the most memorable experiences involving Qadri came at that witching hour.) I had an MA essay on the topic I could further develop. Qadri wrote from scratch at journalist speed and produced a hard-hitting piece defending Rushdie against his Islamist detractors, but I procrastinated in my usual way, taking months to sort out what I wanted to do with the essay.
One evening Qadri came for dinner to the Victorian rowhouse in Harlem where I rented a room and, on his way out, stopped in the dark hallway and started berating me for taking so long with the essay. “Why should I bother with you,” he said, “if you’re not going to do your work?” (The definite article and an expletive separated the first two words in that sentence.) It was not a casual remark. It was pointed, meant to have an effect, and effectual it certainly was: it shook me to the core. I returned to the essay with an almost panicked sense of urgency and completed it in a few weeks. It was my first academic publication—so, at the very beginning of my writing career, there was Qadri.
I was so traumatized by the brutal directness of his chastisement, it took me some time to realize that it was a gesture of friendship, a slap to the back of the head of a friend, an admonition to get my act together for my own sake. Qadri was equally legendary for making new friends with remarkable ease as he was for “abiding by” old ones. I take this phrase from his own writing, where he turned it into a concept of the complex political and ethical responsibilities of Global North scholarship concerning Global South societies.
This first academic book of his, Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality (Minnesota, 2005), examined the ways in which disciplines like history and anthropology conceive of “ethnic conflicts” in postcolonial societies like Sri Lanka and argued that in one way or another, they reproduce and enforce the dominant nationalist approaches to the question of identity and social cohesion. His second work, Culture and Eurocentrism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), takes as its focus the concept of culture as it appeared and became established in Anglo-America in the course of the long nineteenth century. Nationalisms worldwide have based their claim to represent society as a whole on the basis of a supposedly shared and uniform culture. Qadri’s work exposed this claim to reveal the colonial origins of the very concept of culture. His death left two more book projects at various stages of completion: one, a study of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as (fascinatingly) an immigrant document, and the other an extended essay, inspired by C.L.R. James’s magisterial book, Beyond a Boundary, on the relation of cricket to Sri Lankan culture and society.
Despite teaching in the U.S. and publishing his books with American publishers, Qadri seemed to care not a fig about the protocols of professional development in this country. Consequently, I suspect that most gatekeepers of the profession in America are largely unaware of his corpus of writing. But, for the Sri Lankan reading public he addressed often directly in both his journalism and the scholarship, and for a wider group of Global South humanities scholars in many parts of the world—India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa—his death means the premature removal from our midst of a first class and uncompromising critical mind.
He and I never explicitly discussed this, but I like to think that our academic writings constituted something like a shared project: a critique of the cultural claims and hierarchies of majoritarianism and the nation-state, a critique, in fact, of all identitarian logics, and an insistence on honoring the secular and worldly nature of human life. “Minority” was for Qadri, as it is for me, not the affirmation of this or that sectional identity but rather a space for the questioning of dominant ideas and narratives of social life, a space which, in principle, anyone can come to inhabit. Of course we had strong intellectual differences, expressed freely and often, in robust arguments. I felt that his enthusiasm for theoretical critique was not always accompanied by a skepticism about the lack of historical and political self-reflection in the institution of Euro-American theory. And he thought that I was sometimes hopelessly naive in the manner of my continued attachment to questions concerning the aesthetic, the philological, and the historical.
In our shared New York years, Qadri’s generosity was a fabled thing. Late evenings routinely gravitated toward Qadri’s tiny student apartment. Typically, sometime after midnight a group of us regulars would stagger in, Qadri having also picked up a straggler or two along the way. Then, in no time, after putting on some music, which, in my recollection, was often Bob Marley or Miriam Makeba, he would disappear into the kitchen and eventually produce a beautiful Sri Lankan meal for five, six, seven—a fiery curry, steamed rice or “string hoppers,” yellow “milk daal,” accompanied by a range of sambol and pachadi condiments. Somehow, he managed to do this without missing out on the many conversations going on at once in the apartment. From time to time, he would stomp out of the kitchen and, right arm pointedly raised, forcefully declaim to the entire company his position on the topic of the moment, before returning to work on the meal just as abruptly.
Qadri Ismail (R), Aamir R. Mufti (L), and others, Colombo, Sri Lanka, Jan 2012 (Photo: Saloni Mathur)
He repeatedly told me and others over the years that he loved my beef nihari, a strangely alluring dish tied to the traditional culture of the historical, walled city of Delhi. And I adored these beef, lamb, fish, or chicken curry meals from Sri Lanka. Food was central to our friendship. For someone to “eat my food, machang,” as he often put it, using the beautiful Sri Lankan word for friend, mate, or companion, which he popularized among us—it is used by both Sinhala and Tamil speakers, I believe—was an almost sacred commitment to all the ties and obligations of friendship. At the center of his life, there was this ethics and politics of friendship. If there was anything truly sacred, that was it. It is not an accident that the one word all his non-Sri Lankan friends associate most with him is this (for us) foreign word meaning “friend.”
The conversations that took place in Qadri’s apartment were addictive and transformational. Funny though it may seem to those who were present, I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that he presided over a salon, but a sort of counter-salon, where discussion took “contrapuntal” form, in Edward Said’s sense of that word, restless and international, ranging across vast distances, histories, cultures. It seemed like we talked about the politics and culture of every nook and cranny of the world. The living room often resembled the forecastle deck of the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, different regions of the U.S., France, England, and many other places—it was as if every corner of the world had sent its representatives.
I met extraordinary people in that apartment—many, who were simply passing through, only once. As for our cohort of graduate students in different disciplines at Columbia, we were, as I see it, lasting influences on each other’s intellectual lives. These new friends and colleagues were some of the most brilliant people I had ever met, and Qadri brought us all together regularly through his extreme form of conviviality. I think it was an extraordinary and perhaps unrepeatable moment in the history of the English department and the humanities sector of the university. In later years, Said used to speak of this period that way—“when the graduate students started coming,” he would say. Each of us who came up through that period bears a responsibility to live up to its expectations. Qadri certainly did.
This entire experience of encounters in Qadri’s living room provided a remarkable education about the world, one for which you cannot but be grateful for the rest of your life. I learnt at least as much in these discussions and arguments as I did in the formal graduate seminars, and possibly more. The arguments could be fierce, even ruthless. Everyone had opinions. Of course there was competitiveness, and sometimes, feelings could be hurt. We also had to put up with the overflow from the toxic, baronial conflicts between some of the senior faculty. I personally didn’t care much about any of that and wasn’t affected by it, though that wasn’t true for all of us. In any case, Qadri’s apartment, and our other gathering places, were to a great extent a respite from that silliness. The point of the conversations was to challenge each other, test our ideas, share our bits of knowledge. One evening I flippantly said to a South African visitor I was meeting for the first time, “Afrikaans is the oppressor’s language.” (This was sometime during the transition from the apartheid regime.) The person was of the mixed-race community of Cape Town, and Afrikaans was his native tongue. What I got in response was a fiercely delivered lesson in the politics of language in South Africa, and by implication the colonial politics of language as such, that still informs my thinking on the subject. Qadri was amused by the thrashing I received.
Despite the accident of naming—to stay with the Moby-Dick analogy—Qadri was almost certainly the Ahab of this motley crew of women and men, than its Ishmael. We always joked about the hint of monomania to his personality, but that singularity of focus was directed toward the possibilities for joy in companionship, the creative energies and drives of human lives. When I met him, I was a bit at sea in the world and had, in particular, lost a creative relationship to my origins in South Asia. It was Qadri and another new friend of this period in my life, of Indian origin, who led me back bit by bit to a critical engagement with the question of origins. It was an incalculable gift for which I shall never stop being grateful to either of them. Like Qadri and I, many of us were displaced from our places of origin and struggling to recalibrate a relationship to home without succumbing to national sentimentality or aspiring to American cosmopolitanism.
A friend recently said to me that Qadri and I both affected each other’s lives in significant ways. But the truth is that he affected mine profoundly. I don’t know if I ever said that to him directly, though I doubt it. It feels so ridiculous now that we didn’t speak to each other that way, but I desperately hope that he knew it.
No doubt there was an element of the Rabelaisian about Qadri—big appetites, forceful rejection of primness, propriety, or pomposity, a raucous sense of humor, a fantastically foul mouth. The most baroque cuss involving one’s siblings or parents would leave his lips transformed into a profession of affection, even love. In all these years I didn’t once see anyone whose relatives were being thus maligned not smile or even grin and feel loved. It was commonplace in our relationship that one of us would start laughing in anticipation the very moment it was apparent that the other was about to make a funny remark or start telling an amusing story. Qadri’s spectacularly incongruent nickname for Said was Eddie Baby.
I mourn my friend, I rage at his absence, I am remorseful for all the missed opportunities. But no one who wishes to honor Qadri’s life can allow themselves to wallow in grief or self-pity for very long, as a mutual friend from Ireland rightly reminded me. Qadri’s real legacy for his friends is his profane love of life, love of friendship and conversation, love of food and the sharing of food. These were, as I see it, at the core of his being and inspired his writing. It is for this I want to remember him.
I shall never again be able to cook nihari without thinking of Qadri.
Uncanny Valley, the latest, very well-publicized memoir of Silicon Valley apostasy, is, for sure, a great read. Anna Wiener writes beautiful words that become sentences that become beautiful paragraphs and beautiful chapters. The descriptions are finely wrought, and if not quite cinematic than very, very visceral. While it is a wry and tense and sometimes stressful story, it’s also exactly what it says it is: a memoir. It’s the story of her experiences. It captures a zeitgeist – beautifully, and with nuance and verve and life. It highlights contradictions and complications and confusions: hers, but also of Silicon Valley culture itself. It muses upon them, and worries them, and worries over them. But it doesn’t analyze them and it certainly doesn’t solve them, even if you get the sense that Wiener would quite like to do so. That’s okay. Solving the problems exposed by Silicon Valley tech culture and tech capitalism is quite a big ask.
Wiener’s memoir tells the story of her accidental immersion into, and gradual (too gradual?) estrangement from, essentially, Big Tech. A newly minted graduate from a prestigious small liberal arts college (of course), Wiener was living in Brooklyn (of course) while working as an underpaid assistant in a small literary agency (of course.) “Privileged and downwardly mobile,” as she puts it, Wiener was just about getting by with some extra help from her parents, embracing being perpetually broke as she party-hopped and engaged in some light drug use while rolling her eyes at all the IKEA furniture. In as clear a portrait of Brooklyn as anything could be, Wiener’s friends spent 2013 making sourdough bread near artisan chocolate shops while talking on their ironic flip phones. World-weary at 24, Wiener decides to shake things up and applies for a job at a Manhattan-based ebook startup. It’s still about books, she rationalizes, so the startup part is almost beside the point. Or maybe, because it’s still about books, the tech itself can be used for good. Of course, neither of these things turn out to be true for either this startup, or tech itself. Wiener quickly discovers (and so do her bosses) that she’s just not the right fit. So she applies for another tech job instead. This time in the Bay Area. Why not? She’d gotten a heady dose of the optimism and opportunity of startup culture, and they offered her a great salary. It was a good decision, a smart and responsible and exciting decision, even as she was sad to leave the books behind. But honestly, she’d done that the second she joined the first startup. And in a way, the entire memoir is Wiener figuring that out.
Maybe Wiener’s privilege (alongside generational resources and whiteness) is living in a world where you don’t have to worry about Silicon Valley even as it permeates everything. She and her friends were being willfully ignorant in Brooklyn; it turns out, as Wiener deftly shows us, you can be willfully ignorant from the heart of Silicon Valley too. Wiener lands a job at one startup and then, at some point, takes a pay cut to work at another whose culture is a better fit. “Culture” does a lot of work here to elide sexism, harassment, surveillance, and violation of privacy. To put it another way: bad stuff is going on around Wiener, at the very companies she works for, and she doesn’t really notice or pay attention…so we shouldn’t either. Even though she narrates these numerous and terrible violations clearly and explicitly, we don’t exactly clock them because they aren’t a surprise. We already knew. We don’t care. Or we already did the caring part and we’ve moved on.
If 2013 feels both too early and too late for sourdough (weren’t people making bread in the 1950s because they had to? And in 2020 because of COVID?) that’s a bit like the book itself. Surely the moment for Silicon Valley Seduction and Cessation was the early 2000s? And surely our disillusionment from the surveillance of Big Tech and the loss of privacy didn’t happen until after 2016? (Well, if you pay attention to the timeline in the book, that’s when it happened for Wiener too). I was there for the bubble in the early aughts. How could anyone not know what to expect? Which isn’t to say that this memoir isn’t a gripping and illustrative mise-en-scène. It’s just that in the era of Coded Bias and Virginia Eubanks and Safiya Noble and Meredith Broussard and Ruha Benjamin and Shoshana Zuboff… didn’t we already know that Big Tech was Bad? When Wiener has her big reveal in learning from her partner Noah that “we worked in a surveillance company,” it’s more like: well, duh. (Does it count as whistleblowing if it isn’t a secret?)
But maybe that wasn’t actually the big reveal of the book. Maybe the point was that Wiener did already know, she just didn’t quite realize how seductive power is, how pervasive an all-encompassing a culture can be, and how easy distinctions between good and bad don’t do much for us in the totalizing world of tech. She wants to break that all down for us. The memoir is kind of Tech Tales for Lit Critics, which is distinct from Tech for Dummies ™ because maybe the critics are the smart ones in the end. The story is for “us;” Wiener’s tribe of smart and idealistic and disaffected humanists. (Truly us, right dear readers?) She makes it clear that even as she works alongside and with an army of engineers, there is always an us and them. (Maybe partly because really, she works for the engineers, and no matter what the company says everyone knows what the hierarchy is.) The “us” are the skeptics and the “them” are the cult believers except that, as her weird affectation of never naming any tech firms (“an online superstore; a ride-hailing app; a home-sharing platform; the social network everyone loves to hate,”) we are all in the cult in some way, even if we (“we”) – in Wiener’s Brooklyn tribe forever no matter where we live – half-heartedly protest. (For context: I’m not on Facebook and I don’t own a cell phone but PLEASE follow me on twitter @sharronapearl).
Wiener uses this “NDA language” throughout the memoir. At first it’s endearing – imagine a world in which we aren’t constantly name-checking Amazon and AirBnB. Then its addicting – when I was grocery shopping I began to think of my local Sprouts as “a West-Coast transplant fresh produce store.” Finally, it’s annoying – just say Uber, for heaven’s sake! But maybe there’s a method to it: these labels makes the ubiquity of these platforms all the more clear, and forces us to confront just how very integrated into our lives they all are. We are no different from Wiener; we all benefit from surveillance.
Sometimes the memoir feels a bit like stunt journalism, the tech take on The Year of Living Biblically or Running the Books. There’s a sense from the outset that Wiener is thinking “I’ll take the job, and if I hate it I can always write about it.” And indeed she did, and indeed she does, now working as the tech and start-up correspondent for The New Yorker. (Read her articles: they’re terrific.) But that’s not at all a bad thing: she tells her story well, with self-awareness and liveliness and a lot of patience in her sometimes ironic and snarky tone. It’s exactly what it we imagine it to be when we see how the sausage is made: a little gross, a lot upsetting, and still really quite interesting.
If Wiener feels a bit old before her time (she’s in her mid-twenties during her time in tech, and constantly lamenting how much younger all her bosses are) it’s both a function of Silicon Valley culture and its veneration of young male cowboys, and her own affectations. Is any Brooklyn millennial ever really young? Only when it’s too late. As a non-engineer and a woman, Wiener is quite clear that for Silicon Valley, her time has passed. Here is when she is at her most relatable in some ways: we have all been outsiders, and certainly many of would be in that setting. At the same time, at 44 with three kids, I feel a bit like telling this sweet summer child to take her time. And that much more will happen to her than already has. Is that condescending? The tone brings it out in me. And maybe I’m also a little jealous: I could do with having made a lot of money in my 20s on the road to disillusionment with power and sexism and privilege and surveillance. It’s better – maybe – than going down that road without making a lot of money and getting to live in San Francisco. If, in the end, I’m not quite sure what the point of her big questions are, it’s still a hell of a good story. I’m waiting for the movie version on “the streaming app that produces original content and doesn’t release its data.”
