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  • Ali Behdad — The Afterlife of Orientalism (Review of Leah Feldman’s On the Threshold of Eurasia)

    Ali Behdad — The Afterlife of Orientalism (Review of Leah Feldman’s On the Threshold of Eurasia)

    Review of Leah Feldman, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018)

    By Ali Behdad

    Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism has been one of the most influential works in modern literary studies. As a political critique of European representations of the “Orient,” this pioneering text galvanized into existence the vital fields of postcolonial theory and criticism in the United States academy. Orientalism not only riveted the attention of the intellectual establishment on the issue of colonial power by rigorously interrogating the ideological underpinnings of familiar scientific and artistic representations of “otherness” in modern European thought, but it also played a pivotal role in shifting the focus of literary, aesthetic, and cultural criticism from a concern with apolitical formalism to political history. To be sure, from the very moment of its publication, Said’s groundbreaking work attracted more than its fair share of critics. While reactionary commentators such as Bernard Lewis and Robert Irvine[1] attacked Said for misrepresenting the project of Orientalism, the more intellectually rigorous scholars like Ajaz Ahmad and James Clifford challenged Orientalism’s “high humanism,” while taking issue with its use of Foucault’s theory of knowledge-power and indicting its omission of German and Russian Orientalisms.[2]

    Despite this barrage of criticism, Said’s almost singularly generative text inspired a whole new generation of scholars who have developed his critique by exploring its implications in novel, and sometimes unexpected, arenas. Scholarly engagements with Orientalism initially were marked by critical revisionism. Lisa Lowe and I, for example, built on Said’s critique of the complicity of European knowledge about the Middle East in the history of Western colonialism by elaborating the complexities of power relations between French and British Orientalists and their objects of representation.[3] Rejecting the monolithic account of Orientalism as a reductive and one-directional discourse of power, we independently argued that difference, ambivalence, and heterogeneity are the fundamental attributes of Orientalist discourse that have ensured its cultural hegemony and political longevity to this day. Meanwhile other scholars set out to rectify Said’s neglect of German and Russian Orientalisms. For example, while Suzanne Marchand has traced the origins of German Orientalism to Renaissance philology and early modern biblical exegesis to address its development in the context of debates about religion and classical schooling during the nineteenth century,[4] David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Michael Kemper have explored Russian and Soviet Orientalisms as ambivalent, and at times anti-imperialist, modes of representation.[5]

    In recent years, scholarly engagement with Said’s Orientalism has been conspicuously marked by methodological and ideological orthodoxy. As Aamir Mufti laments, “At the present moment, at least in literary studies, attention to Orientalism seems to have reverted more or less exclusively to the form of cataloguing representations of this or that social collective in this or that body of Western literature.”[6] Such an approach, Mufti further observes, is partly the consequence of the dominance of an anglophone form of “world literature” in the Euro-American academy that perpetuates the hegemony of English as the language of critique and literary studies. “If Orientalism, despite its wide reputation, remains still a strangely misunderstood and underexplored book,” he explains, “this is possibly because readers in the literary-critical disciplines are generally still not trained to be at ease in at least some of ‘Orientalist’ archives with which it engages, and those readers who are professionally assigned the mastery of those archives in the division of labor in the humanities sometimes respond defensively to its relentless (and occasionally overreaching) criticism of their disciplinary methods and procedures” (28). Considering this predicament, Mufti cogently argues that “the critique of Orientalism must ultimately lead us to the Orientalized spaces themselves” (24).

    Leah Feldman’s On the Threshold of Eurasia[7] offers a compelling example of what the exploration of an “Orientalized space” by a scholar “trained to be at ease” in a non-Western Orientalist archive can productively yield. The book is chronologically organized in two parts. The first “recounts the story of Russian and Muslim cultural interactions” during the revolutionary transition and the second “chronicles the gradual disappearance of heterological networks that connected the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires with the creation of new forms of Bolshevik national consciousness” (25, 33-34). At first glance, Feldman’s book appears to be a narrowly focused study of a marginalized, if not marginal, body of literary works by Turkic Muslim writers positioned on the periphery of Russian Empire and Soviet Union, during the revolutionary period from 1905 to 1929 when an alternative or avant-garde Azari literary aesthetic emerged. But the book also offers a nuanced account of an unexamined interplay between Russian Orientalism and anticolonial Marxism. The book provides not only a rich portray of Eurasian literary modernity but “an opportunity to critically assess and develop postcolonial theory to accommodate a world literary scope” (26). In these ways, On the Threshold of Eurasia makes important contributions to recent debates in the field of comparative literature concerning translation studies and world literature.

    If, as Emily Apter urges us to do, one were to “imagine a program for a new comparative literature using translation as a fulcrum,”[8] On the Threshold of Eurasia would provide a perfect example of what such a program would look like. Like Apter, Feldman views translation studies and comparative literature as commensurable in that both challenge monolingualism to engage in transnational literary and cultural exchanges. In first part of the book, Feldman addresses the reception and translations of canonical Russian writers such as Nikolai Gogol and Alexander Pushkin by Azeri writers Celil Memmedquluzade and Mirze Feteli Axundov. In the opening chapter, Feldman adopts Said’s comparative methodology to read Gogol’s parodic prose contrapuntally alongside Memmedquluzade’s free translations to “illustrate the role of Russian imperial literature more broadly in forging cultural connections and anticipating ruptures between the Muslim South Caucasus, the Russian imperial metropole, and the transnational Turkic Muslim world” (41). In 1909, the Azari writer and critic introduced the figure of “Qoqol,” a transliteration of the Russian realist writer’s name, in the satirical, eight-page Azerbaijani periodical, Molla Nesreddin, which he edited. Memmedquluzade’s stories pivot around the figure of Molla Nesreddin, the infamous Sufi wise man-cum-fool, to create at once a parody of the imperial literature and a new literary language that fuses Turkic, Persian, and Russian references. Far from merely reproducing Gogol’s text, or even borrowing his plotlines, Feldman convincingly argues that Memmedquluzade’s translations of the Russian writer’s works constitute a political form of literary appropriation which “reframed Gogol’s critique of tsarist bureaucracy through the colonial context and reinvisioned the imperial canon through this Turkic translation of Russian prose” (45). The story “Qurbaneli Bey,” for example, which is a translation, or more accurately an adaptation, of Gogol’s 1836 short story “The Carriage,” is set in the South Caucasus and draws on Gogol’s formal devices such as sound repetitions and metonymy to satirize the class pretentions of landowning Russified Azari elite. In so doing, the story draws attention to the ways class and imperial power are imbricated in Russia’s periphery. As Feldman demonstrates, Memmedquluzade’s appropriation of Gogol’s “narrative about the Russian provinces in the context of the imperial Caucasus [thus] undermines the authority of the Russian imperial bureaucracy, while it offers a metacommentary on the unequal processes of linguistic and literary exchange that occur in translation” (60).

    In the second chapter, Feldman explores the literary relation of Azeri poets such as Axundov and Abbas Sehhet with Russian Romantic writers like Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. If the parodic works of Gogol provided Memmedqulzade with a model of social critique, the works of Russian romantics furnished Azeri poets with a “counterpoint” they used  both to imagine “a new civic identity and modern subjectivity” and to negotiate “the intertwining influences of Russian, Ottoman, and Persian poetics into an ethos of empathy, staged in a sublime Caucasus imaginary on the threshold of revolution” (83, 82). The process of translating the works of Russian romantics in this case entailed a multilingual form of textuality that “blended revolutionary politics with classical forms of mystical poetry” (86). Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of translation and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, Feldman discusses Axundov’s and Sehhet’s intertextual dialogues with Russian Orientalists, an engagement that generated “a new type of cultural identity based in part on Russian romantic poetics but oriented toward pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic forms of cultural and civic identity” (86). Sehhet’s 1912 translations of European and Russian classics, for example, appropriated Orientalist representations of Caucuses to “render the figure of the Muslim Other with dignity and heroism in his native tongue” (102). As a scholar equipped with knowledge of several languages, including Russian, Persian, and Azeri Turkish, as well as being trained to work in non-Western archives, Feldman is able to insightfully identify Sehhet’s translations as the site of a multi-lingual exchange that draws on Persian and Ottoman literary forms such as ghazal and qaṣīda to “provide a vision of poetic intuition, which reinscribes the search for esoteric knowledge onto the sublime poetic topography of the Russian orientalist canon” (104). Feldman’s reframing of “Azeri literary modernity through spaces of critical dialogue” can serve as a model for a new comparative literature that avoids encoding the kind of neocolonial geopolitics that Anglo-centric or Franco-centric studies of world literature often do, however inadvertently (110). Complicating the postcolonialist binaries of center/periphery and power/resistance, Feldman’s discussion of the dialogical nature of modern Azeri poetry thoughtfully attends to “the interlingual, intercultural, and intersubjective experience of being in the world of the text exposed at the threshold sites of intertextual dialogue” (119).

    In the second part of On the Threshold of Eurasia, Feldman demonstrates the broader reach of her argument about the heterodoxy of Azeri poetry in the context of the Soviet annexation of its eastern frontier after the October revolution of 1917. Scholars of early Soviet Russia like Michael Kemper and Boris Groys[9] have demonstrated the continuity between Soviet “red Orientalism” and classical Russian Orientalism on the one hand, and pre- and post-revolutionary Russophone aesthetics on the other. Following their lead, Feldman examines the revolutionary vision of literary modernity of Russian and Russophone Azeri writers in Baku where avant-garde Russian poets immigrated during its annexation from 1919-1920 to avoid censorship, and where Azeri poets fashioned a new Turkic poetry marked by a fusion of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and Arabo-Persian and Ottoman poetic traditions. In chapter 3, Feldman complicates our understanding of Soviet Orientalism which, like its Russian precursor, relied on the work of literary artists, linguists, and social scientists for its discursive power. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s critical genealogy of avant-garde art and politics in the Politics of Aesthetics, and mining a wide range of Soviet writers and intellectuals, including Sergei Gorodetsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Tatiana Vechorka, and Grigory Zinoviev, Feldman elucidates the contours of the Janus-faced project of Soviet Orientalism. While much of the scholarship on Soviet Orientalism focuses either on its opposition to the bourgeois Russian tradition of Oriental scholarship or its support for the liberation of East from Euro-American imperialism, Feldman offers a more nuanced understanding of it as a paradoxical discourse that simultaneously celebrates and rejects the past. She shows that much of the Soviet avant-garde poetry produced between 1919 and 1920 relied on a Russian romantic Orientalist imaginary of the Caucasus while simultaneously aiming to create a Muslim communist subjectivity to free the “brave” Caucasian from the shackles of Euro-American imperialism. As Feldman puts it, “while the image of the Caucasus as the center of the new Soviet Orient formally denounced the imperial imaginary, it simultaneously drew on its discursive power to instrumentalize Muslim support for the Bolshevik revolution, mapping imperial Eurasian geopolitics onto a Marxist-Leninist anti imperial ideological platform” (127).

    In the concluding chapter, Feldman engages the formal and ideological ambivalences of post-revolutionary poetry produced by the Azari Writers’ group Red Pens, created by the Soviet Council of Propaganda in 1925. Borrowing Fredric Jameson’s model of narrative as a socially symbolic act, presented in his 1981 The Political Unconscious, Feldman considers a series of works, including Huseyn Cavid’s play Ibis, Nazim Hikmet’s Song of the Sun Drinkers, and Süleyman Rüstam’s From Sadness to Happiness, to trace their role in the formation of a “national Bolshevik political unconscious” and to invent a new Turkic poetics (207). Like their pre-revolutionary counterparts, these poets retained “ties to the romantic symbolism of the Arabo-Persian-Ottoman lyric tradition” (178). Yet, Feldman argues, what distinguishes the works of these writers from those of Memmedqulzade, Axundov and Sehhet is the instrumentality of their art as they repurposed the pan-Turkic oral cultural tradition for propagandist revolutionary purposes. Culturally influenced, if not politically pressured, by the aesthetic materialism of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who considered art a “hammer with which to shape society,”[10] Rüstam and his Red Pen colleagues saw their work as a vehicle to move the supranational Pan-Turkic community towards a Muslim communist future. Both Rüstam and Hikmet, for example, deployed the genre of the Turkic folk ballad to “excite and organize the Muslim worker-reader as central to the creation of postrevolutionary Azeri poetry under the first years of Soviet control” (177).

    In “Traveling Theory,” Said warned us that a theoretical or methodological “breakthrough can become a trap, if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly,” reiterating Raymond Williams’ prescient observation that “once an idea gains currency because it is clearly effective and powerful, there is every likelihood that during its peregrinations it will be reduced, codified, and institutionalized.”[11] It is ironic, but hardly surprising, that this predicament characterizes much of scholarship that has engaged with Said’s Orientalism. Against this background, reading On the Threshold of Eurasia feels like a breath of fresh air, both intellectually and politically. What is refreshing about Feldman’s book is that it avoids the trap of Saidian orthodoxy which would have resulted in an application of Orientalism to the Eurasian context. Instead, Feldman broadens Said’s theoretical insights by attending to the complex “imbrications of imperial and anti-imperial discourses that animate literary representations across the empire and their role in the formation of Russian and Soviet literary modernity” (26). Reading together the poetic representations of the Caucasus by Azeri and Russian/Soviet writers, Feldman thus provides readers with an intricate understanding of not only the “orientalist vision of Eurasia and its attendant Bolshevik Eastern International but also the ways in which these discourses informed the creation of a modern Turkic literary subjectivity” (215).

     

    Ali Behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Duke University Press, 1994), A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Duke University Press, 2005), Camera Orientalis: Reflections on photography of the Middle East (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and the co-editor of A Companion to Comparative Literature (Blackwell, 2011) and Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Getty Research Institute, 2013).

     

    [1] Bernard Lewis, “the Question of Orientalism,” Islam and the West, (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 99-118; Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

    [2] Ajaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in Predicaments of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988), 225–76.

    [3] Lisa Lowe, Critical terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

    [4] Susan Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

    [5] David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia,” Die Welt des Islams 50 (2010): 435-476; Michael Kemper, “The Soviet Discourse on the Origin and Class character of Islam, 1923-1933,” Die Welt des Islams 49 (2009): 1-48.

    [6] Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 23.

    [7] Leah Feldman, On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).

    [8] Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 243.

    [9] Michael Kemper, “Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia,” Die Welt des Islams 50 (2010): 435-476; Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, Trans. Charles Rougle, (London: Verso, 2011).

    [10] As Feldman notes, this statement has been attributed to both Bertolt Brecht and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and further elaborated by Leon Trotsky in his 1924 treatise Literature and Revolution, 179. The Azeri post-revolutionary poets, Feldman further observes, were also inspired by the Marxist spiritualism of the Polish polymath Alexander Bogdanov who in his 1918 essay “The Proletariat and Art” theorized the function of art as the “weapon or tool of the social organization of people” (183).

    [11] Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 239.

  • Peter Valente — The Body’s Prehistories (Review of Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink)

    Peter Valente — The Body’s Prehistories (Review of Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink)

    The Body’s Prehistories: On Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink

    by Peter Valente

    One of the many pleasures of reading Hervé Guibert’s collection of stories, Written in Invisible Ink (Semiotext(e), 2020), is following his development as a writer from the earliest  stories in this volume, which date from the late 1970s, to the latest (which were collected in 1988’s Mauve Virgin). According to his widow Christine Guibert, he did not write any stories after 1988 and focused more on longer works such as the novel To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).[1] Several of the stories published in this present volume have never been published before. Interestingly, the ones collected here, chosen by the translator Jeffrey Zuckerman, coincide with Guibert’s time as a journalist; many of the texts have the journalist’s attention for details that will capture a reader’s attention.

    The stylistic difference between Propaganda Death, the earliest of his books, and the later stories is between the raw passionate writing of the former and the more controlled prose of the latter. Guibert was one of first French writers of “autofiction,”: he used writing from his diary as well as memoir and fiction to complicate the narrative “I.” The writing in Propaganda Death is almost cinematic in its cataloguing of physical violence to the body mixed with an unbridled sexual urge: “My body, due to the effects of lust and pain, has entered a state of theatricality, of climax, that I would like to reproduce in any manner possible: by photo, by video, by audio recording” (27). Its scenes of the savage torturing and disemboweling of the human body, amidst slaughterhouses and hospitals, exhibit the frightening transparency of what lies beneath the skin, revealing its secrets: “no need for candles to brighten this night of the body; its internal transparency illuminates all” (27). In “Final Outrages” Guibert imagines himself as the young girl Ophelia, “stolen away in the bloom of youth by an ailment gnawing slowly at her interior (while making her exterior radiate!)” (81). In “Five Marble Tables”, he writes, imagining himself dead: “I won’t let go of my body, I cling to it, I push out everything I can inside but it all stops immediately, I’m clean forever now, my muscles tear apart, I can’t go back in myself anymore and I leave this deserted place, all the fight gone, all the fury slain” (70). Death in life is imagined as transformative; in a later work, Crazy for Vincent (Semiotext(e), 2017), published in 1989, a year after the latest stories in this volume, Guibert writes: “I struggle with the mystery of the violence of this love…and I tell myself that I would like to describe it with the solemnity of the sacred, as if it were one of the great religious mysteries…I don’t have too many sexual thoughts, of fucking or of defilement, violent hallucinations that would bring sex or lechery into play, but rather the suspended grace of bearing witness to a transfiguration” (85). The thrust of these stories is away from materiality, and toward a refiguring of the male body as a site for spiritual transformation.[2]

    Propaganda Death is also an ecstatic fantasy of destruction, desecration, and horror, calling for nothing less than the annihilation of the petit-bourgeois world through a complete reversal of cherished mores and customs, and its obsession with good hygiene, both physical and mental: “I’d like to smear my gonorrhea over the entire world, infect the planet, contaminate dozens of asses at a go, …my bed every morning is a field of carnage, a slaughterhouse” (51).  He continues: “Let’s open abscesses in all this stupid flesh!…Let’s love ourselves and hate them! Let’s orgasm as we pull our heads from our bodies!” (47). Wayne Koestenbaum writes:

    Filth is Guibert’s passport to infinity. Filth, as literary terrain, belongs to de Sade, but Guibert reroutes s/m through the pastoral landscape of religious interiority, as if ghosted by hungry Simone Weil, or by Wilde’s scarified, Christological denouement. (To skeptics, such spirituality might seem papier-mâché, but I’m a believer.) Guibert sees a cute young man at a party and “instead of imagining his sex or his torso or the taste of his tongue, in spite of myself it’s his excrement I see, inside his intestines.” (Kostenbaum 2020)[3]

    These passionate, anarchic early texts are difficult to read. They are unpolished, raw, unedited, obsessed with the violence of desire, and with orifices; but nevertheless, they are works of great intensity, written when Guibert was 21 years old, and likely to shock a reader into a recognition of his/her own body, and its impermanence, and the weakness of the flesh. They are performance, spectacle, and indeed, propaganda in defense of homosexuality and the violence of desire.

    Guibert seeks to “to uncover my body’s prehistories,” the traces of the animal inside the human. In the story, “Flash Paper,” he writes that while kissing Fernand, he imagines that “Out of the extended, warm pleasure of the kiss came other visions: we were two animals that had met on the terreplein, each from our own half of the forest, two horned beasts, two giant snails, two unhappy hermaphrodites” (Invisible Ink 230-31). And, continuing with this theme in the same story: “His wide-opened eye had awakened mine and did not leave it: we had become insects” (232). He and Fernand are, “two poor shameful animals” (233). Finally, he writes: “we danced like two spider crabs being boiled, destroying everything in their path” (234). The erotic charge of an encounter turns men into animals searching for their release. There is danger and excitement in the kill, the sexual energy of it: “If I fuck him, if I decide to fuck him, it’s first to annihilate him.”[4] This is “no simple sadism…no simple equation of fucking and killing, of penetrating and violating – instead, the wish to fuck or be fucked…is a sensation of being voided, chiseled, scalded, disemboweled. Is this consciousness a queer privilege? Is it shamanistic? Is it in fact not trans or queer or anything of the sort, but simply poetic?” (Kostenbaum 2014). Guibert could certainly be melodramatic, as well as poetic. Sex in his work is theatrical; he plays a game of hide and seek with a reader; but he doesn’t sugar coat desires that are complex or grotesque and this is what makes his work so valuable as a document of honest writing in a time such as ours when the line between truth and falsity has been blurred.                            

    In the section, “Personal Effects” Guibert examines objects rather than bodies and reveals their hidden meanings or forbidden histories. About the “Cat o’Nine Tails”, for instance, he writes: “The cat o’ nine tails has been hung, among the cobwebs dusters, from ceiling hooks, in the dim backroom of the hardware store. It carries within itself, in its unmoving straps, the screams of battered children, it exhales the pleasure of perverted lovers” (Invisible Ink 97). Gloves are a normal part of winter wear or when working in the garden, or in construction et cetera, but Guibert reminds us that “it should never be forgotten that the hands they’re keenest to help are those of thieves and stranglers” (103). With regard to the “vibrating chair,” he notes that the dukes of Pomerania found “extravagant” uses for it, including attaching a large dildo to its seat (107). This section of the book is representative of Guibert’s poetics. As a journalist, he was accustomed to examining the forbidden histories behind things which elude the eye of the observer. In “Newspaper Clipping,” he talks about certain facts concerning the death of a person and cautions about imaginatively reconstructing the scene. “Let’s come back to reality!,” he writes, concluding that “…everything, for now, remains purely hypothetical” (56). The secret will not reveal itself easily and it requires patient and research to reveal a truth perhaps stranger than fiction.

    In the world of these stories, love is essentially a complex power game, where the weak person is always at a disadvantage. Guibert is not a psychological writer, concerned with exploring in depth the subjective feelings of lovers. There is no utopian idea about love in these stories. Love is often deceptive, leading to betrayals and even violence. “For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink,” concerns a young writer who has complex desires toward an older, more established writer, and is called upon to help him write a book. At the end of the story, the young writer speaks of their erotic dynamic in the following way:

    The king of the jungle had been tamed, or maybe it was the lion that subdued its tamer, but one or the other, at his point of submission, attacked the other in hopes of breaking him, and these visits grew increasingly rare. The break-up happened over the course of the seventh year, bit by bit, as if by blows, and neither the assailant nor the stronghold, at risk of breaking their necks, wanted to bow down. (159)

    Love often begins with a kind of “tacit contract” that one or the other eventually betrays. In one of the central stories, “The Sting of Love,” love is imagined as a liquid that is injected in the lover. The story traces its various effects on those who have been “infected” and concludes:

    A happiness so great becomes unbearable unless one is shackled, or better yet, in bed, because the effect of this injected liquid doesn’t end with any climax, it persists all the way into sleep. It is impossible here to determine the specific link between consciousness and dreams. Anyone who wants to fight against this surreptitious transition with conscious effort, who is afraid because the dream, at first still just as wholly gentle, slowly turns into nightmare, flickering with swift animal shapes, anyone who wants to prolong this amorous stupor indefinitely with a second injection is struck with melancholy, as with a tarantula’s bite, and loses speech, nails, job. (135)

    Physical attraction is just as capricious and mysterious and not necessarily the result of erotic language: “We sat facing each other in the small, unlit kitchen, and I immediately felt within his physical presence a sense of elevation, adventure, freedom. The words he had said had nothing overtly erotic about them, but they suddenly, mysteriously had my penis swelling” (182). There is no attempt to seek a reason for his desire which would amount to a kind of defense; Guibert was open about his homosexuality and its relation to danger as well as pleasure. Furthermore, this physical excitement can suddenly turn into potential violence: “two years earlier, walking behind him, I had suddenly wanted to use all my force to hit the back of his neck with the heft of the camera hanging by a strap around my wrist” (178). In “For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink”, Guibert writes, “My feelings about this man were skewed: even as I could have said that I loved him, when I found myself before him, at long last, I wanted to go for his throat” (153).

    Danger extends to sexual encounters in the park. In “A Lover’s Brief Journal,” Guibert relates an incident in the Tuileries, where, after “a guy whispers the word cop,” he and another man get dressed, and leave the park; but Guibert is then assaulted: “the first one punches me in the face, another kicks me in the balls, right after a third guy takes a running start to headbutt me, I fall down, I get back up, I shout for help without thinking about it, they run off, I run in the other direction, I turn around, I see one of them hurrying to pick up the coins that fell out of my pocket, hungry, greedy” (48-49). The violence has as much to do with money as with sexuality: the link here is between capitalist greed and homophobia.  Though capitalism created the material conditions so that both men and women could lead independent sexual lives, it also, at the same time, imposed heterosexual norms on society to create an economic, ideological, and sexual regime, centered in the family. In the present time, when Trump, a symbol of capitalist greed, is seen as a spokesman for the white, heterosexual male, and encourages violence against marginalized groups on the basis of their skin color, religion or sexual preference, it is no surprise that we see a rise in violence against gay and trans men and women.

    For the narrator of “Flash Paper,” love is, “ a voluntary obsession, an unsure decision” (239). But Guibert writes of the man who died in “A Man’s Secrets,” “All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips, when exhaustion closed his eyes” (254). And the aging star in “The Desire to Imitate” says, “In this impossibility of love there will have been all the same a little love” (212). In these stories, love and cruelty are woven together; this unholy union was born of Guibert’s hatred of his own body, his self-pity, his anger, his theatricality, his passion for the grotesque. He is attacking bourgeoise values, and inherited ideas about morality, thus turning our assumptions about love and hate upside down. Men who knew him said he was cruel but he hated pity and charity; Marie Darrieussecq writes that he preferred real friendship and despised cowardly people (“Guibert’s Ghost” 2015). For Guibert, true love may be impossible, but all the same, he valued the love that was possible in genuine friendships. He sought the truth in himself by testing the limits of his body and of his desires. In a world where our freedoms are being assaulted by both far right conservatives and neoliberals, a writer like Guibert is necessary and should be read, because he questions our conventional ideas about the nature of sexuality, love and hate.

    Death hovers on the periphery of the stories in Written in Invisible Ink, and is often a central theme, and linked mysteriously with desire. In “Five Marble Tables,” Guibert imagines himself on a laboratory table, communing with other bodies, one of which is a young child. As I suggested earlier on, in the story Guibert feels in some way liberated: “I’m clean forever” (Invisible Ink 70). Guibert speaks of the dream, a kind of death-state in itself, as concealing, “a geography of pleasure, an itinerary with its impasses, its openings, its stairwells, its gulfs, its forbidden directions. Desire is there alone, idealized, freed of all materiality” (75). It can also contain, “desirable monsters,” such as the man whose “suffering was immense” because his “head is four times larger than his body” (129) and who believes the hand that gives him his food through a trapdoor is the hand of God. The monstrous, the forbidden, is a gateway to the spiritual.

    In this palace of desirable monsters are men with “dog’s or wolf’s heads” or with “scales or moss growing on their skin” (129, 128). The animal and the vegetal are mixed and the monstrous appears beautiful. A world based on reason, a human creation, gives over to the animal, the irrational, the monstrous. This space contains an alternate time that exists simultaneously with the real world. In “Posthumous Novel,” one of my favorite stories, Guibert writes of a space where, as a result of a “deatomization effort” in Holland, “countless words, incomplete sentences” are “hanging like clumps off of trees and, broken and sown over the ground” (143). Words are not necessarily attached to sentences but exist alone as fragments. In the story, Guibert writes that when one is travelling by train, one’s thoughts release, “more or less clouded and blinded” words into the air of the surrounding countryside and that they take root in the “roadside dust, a branch shaken by the wind, setting sun” (144). These words or sentences, cast into the world by the living, are “nourishment for the dead…a vital message of what happens in the hereafter” (144). By accessing these “sentences” through “x-raying” the “final trajectories” of the young writer in the story who committed suicide, the author is able to partly reconstruct the dead man’s novel (146). The narrator is like Orpheus, in Cocteau’s film, listening to the transmissions on the radio which are actually the voices of the dead. These words of the dead need to be remembered. History must be remembered in order not to repeat the same mistakes to the point of unconsciousness.

    It is in this forbidden space, this underworld that does not obey the laws of physics, that Guibert, a kind of Orphic figure, is able to imagine a language that is not bound to its materiality; it exists in the air, unrealized, incipient, spiritual, the image of a ghost. It is here where the monstrous, the aborted, the abject thoughts reside, and where the dead dwell. It is a land that “had never been described or transcribed on a map” (220). It is a forbidden and magical place, where one has the “courage to be oneself, to present oneself, and to liberate every secret, to invent them” (150). Guibert wrote this book in “invisible ink,” from that place, as if the stories themselves are only the visible traces of what lies behind them: the sexual encounters that produced them.[5]

    In January, 1988, Guibert was diagnosed with AIDS. As a result, he immediately found himself the focus of media attention and appeared on numerous talk shows. Early in his career, Guibert was openly gay and unashamed of his homosexuality and this, according to his translator Jeffrey Zuckerman, “was not meant as a provocation” but as “a quietly revolutionary stance in line with his particular brand of rebelliousness, in which, to quote a line from the end of “Ghost Image,” ‘secrets have to circulate” (“Translator’s Preface”13). Furthermore, Zuckerman writes, “When I began this project, all of Guibert’s translated novels were out of print – even To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. At the time, it felt symbolic yet saddening: if gay rights were moving so steadily forward toward equality with the broader population, why preserve this particular, liminal past? Indeed, such an unprecedented nationwide – and even global – sea change in attitudes toward gay marriage and adoption risked effacing the long struggle that came before it, from Oscar Wilde’s trials and Alan Turing’s cyanide-laced apple to the Stonewall riots and the ACT-UP movement” (“Translator’s Preface” 15). And for this reason, the stories in Written in Invisible Ink are a valuable addition to Guibert’s work in English, and a good starting point for the reader unfamiliar with his work.

     

    Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna  (Punctum Books 2014), which was nominated for a Lambda award, The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil 2014), Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers (Talisman House 2015) and Catullus Versions (Spuyten Duyvil  2017). He has also published translations from the Italian, Blackout by Nanni Balestrini (Commune Editions 2017) and Whatever the Name by Pierre Lepori (Spuyten Duyvil 2017), Two Novellas: Parthenogenesis & Plague in the Imperial City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). He is the co-translator of the chapbook Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud, 1945-1947 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs,2014), and has translated the work of Gérard de Nerval, Cesare Viviani, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His poems, essays, and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Mirage #4/Periodical, First Intensity, Aufgabe, Talisman, Oyster Boy Review, spoKe, and Animal Shelter. His most recent book is a co-translation of Succubations and Incubations: The Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945-1947). Forthcoming is a collection of essays, Essays on the Peripheries (Punctum 2020) and his translation of Guillaume Dustan’s Nicolas Pages (Semiotext(e) 2021).

    Works Cited

    Darrieussecq, Marie. “Guibert’s Ghost.” Tin House, 13 January, 2015: https://tinhouse.com/guiberts-ghost/

    Guibert, Hervé . 2020. Written in Invisible Ink. trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman. Los Angeles:  Semiotext(e).

    —-  2017. Crazy for Vincent. trans Christine Pichini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

    Kostenbaum, Wayne. “The Pleasures of the Text.” Book Forum, June-August, 2014: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/herve-guibert-s-unbridled-eroticism-13298

    Zuckerman, Jeffrey. “Translator’s Preface” in Written in Invisible Ink. trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman. Los Angeles:  Semiotext(e), 2020, 1-15.

     

    Notes

    [1] Guibert married Christine in 1989, so that she could protect his estate and so that the royalty from the sale of his books would go to her children. The publication of the mentioned novel, in which Guibert told the world he had AIDS, caused a scandal because in it he disguised Michel Foucault, who had the same disease, under another name (Muzil). However, the public discovered that this was Foucault; he had been dead for six years (reportedly from cancer) at the time of the publication of Guibert’s book.

    [2] For Bataille, the indulgence in “perversity” also contained a strong drive for the metaphysical, for that which lies beyond the body.

    [3] I would also add Artaud to the list above in his researches into “fecality.”

    [4]Quoted in Kostenbaum, The Pleasures of the Text,” accessed on May 17, 2020, https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/herve-guibert-s-unbridled-eroticism-13298

    [5] In “A Lover’s Brief Journal,” Guibert writes, “I got completely undressed, I write and that gets me hard, I jerk myself off with one hand…” Hervé Guibert, Written in Invisible Ink, 49.

  • Stephen Wright — Devising the Post-Capitalist Imaginary/A Device for the Post-Capitalist Imaginary

    Stephen Wright — Devising the Post-Capitalist Imaginary/A Device for the Post-Capitalist Imaginary

    The text below was initially presented at the “Algorithms, Infrastructures, Art, Curation” conference, organized by Arne De Boever and Dany Naierman, and hosted by the MA Aesthetics and Politics program (School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts) and the West Hollywood Public Library.

    The text is published here as part of a dossier including the lecture by Brian Holmes to which it was responding.

    –Arne De Boever

     

    by Stephen Wright

    Above all, what I take away from Brian Holmes’s Cascadia project, and from the broad conceptual and affective setting that informs it — both nicely laid out in his user-friendly paper — is this: that we don’t so much lack a critique of capitalist globalization; we don’t even so much lack theories of communism; what we lack is a post-capitalist or post-globalization imaginary. We need, in other words — and those words will prove crucial in their own way — to experimentally implement full-scale (even if on a modest scale) devices to give embodiment to that imaginary. We need, that is, to devise a post-capitalist imaginary. And the good news is — at least, this is what I would like to be able to assert! — that this is precisely what his new projects on Bioregionalism put forth. But the reality is far more complex and it really does him no service to portray his critical cosmovision as incurably optimistic. Brian’s texts have always exuded a sense of pessimism, and delving deep into his findings over the course of detailed conversation where his critical edge is unchecked or unaccompanied by concrete experience of boots on the ground, one often feels that more critical knowledge in and of itself doesn’t lead to the heuristic elation one might expect; it sometimes feels more like backsliding into a wormhole — as if too much critical lucidity alone, or too much disembodied critical distance, occasions a kind of paralysis. This would be the sterility of critical theory for its own sake — fine for those of use who like that sort of thing, but not at all on a par with Brian’s demanding ethics of engagement.

    Let me quickly but systematically unpack some of those remarks which I admittedly draw as much from my several decades long friendship (and occasional collaboration) with Brian as from the paper he has just presented.

    When I first met Brian in Paris where he lived until 2008, he was a translator — he still is, in an expanded sense of course, but I mean in those days he was making a good living translating texts between one language and another. This obviously couldn’t last because, however one may learn by the more-than-intimate contact with the translated subject (I mean the internal merging with their perspective), one is inevitably frustrated by a kind of paradoxal algorithm of translation: the better the translation in a sense, the more one’s own subjectivity disappears.

    So Brian began to inject his writing skills into political activism, working with groups on the fringe of art and activism in Barcelona, Paris, London and elsewhere, and working as a core member of collectives as different (and hard-hitting) as the conceptual design activist group Ne Pas Plier, the critical cartography collective Bureau d’études, or the post-operaist journal Multitudes, amongst many others. I’m saying this stuff not because I’m planning to write Brian’s Wikipedia page (which presumably already exists, I don’t know) but because I want to draw out what are the underlying ethics of his practice as it evolved over time.

    Even as he was engaged in these collectives, another more ambitious but more personal investigative project was developing — in keeping with the rise of the continental trading blocks that were the jugulars of globalizing capitalism. In those years, Brian (and not only him) kept feeling like he was waking up on the wrong side of capitalism — no matter where on Earth he woke up! That graffitied slogan became the logo to the website Continental Drift, as the project came to be known. It was a staggeringly ambitious project, but simple in its conceit. As economic and financial power was usurped from sovereign states and concentrated on continental scales, then it was fair to assume that subjectivity was henceforth also being produced at that same macro- or mega- scale: NAFTA subjectification, EU subjectification, China-Japan-Korea subjectification. And Brian wanted to mobilize a critical analysis of the former to investigate the latter, and vice versa. So, Situationist style, Brian began to self-organize with a host of likeminded comrades and local informants, drifts across the continental subjectivity-production zones, in the Americas, Asia, etc. Rather than approach the macroeconomic and macropolitical exclusively on the level of critical analysis, he would do cartography with his feet. As if there were a need to feel, see, smell, hear — affect the affects — to keep things from being overwhelming.

    Perhaps for this reason too — or perhaps another — Brian chose as his lens of predilection for these drifts (their subsequent restitution, but on the ground too) the most micro-configurations he could find: artworks. Artworks are perhaps the pithiest, the most affect-intense and knowledge-energized symbolic configurations there are, and from their material can be teased out any number of insights, to which they themselves are often partially blind. Actually, this is the only thing that redeems art at all; the only justification for an other unjustifiable pursuit (I mean that in a good way!).

    Continental Drift was and was not an art project: it was an art usership project, not in any explicit way an artist-initiated endeavour.  But one can see all the methodology in germination of the current projects: the vertiginous confrontation of disparate scale, the paramount importance of clarity, the imperative to make territory palpable, pedestrian. Of Continental Drift one might say that although its ontology was not of art, its coefficient of art was already high.

    It came as no surprise that it was often taken as art, though not performed as such. Brian had become as he wrote to me “una suerte de artista que sabe de libros”. When he finally did become an artist in 2015, it was less of a coming out — though with hindsight one can see a logic unfolding — than a tactical choice for a site of engagement. For this is what it has always been about: not the specificity of some mode of doing or being, but its compatibility with other modes of doing and becoming. More precisely, about social engagement. In his text, he writes, “One of the most important things that artists and intellectuals can do is to express and analyze the constituents, forms, desires and aims of a bioregional culture.” Importantly, there is no conceptual distinction between “artists and intellectuals”; maybe just a slight shift in focus.

    Important too is the plural form. Brian didn’t spell it out in his text so I will (though it is abundantly implicit and should not really require emphasis): critical engagement of any kind cannot be done meaningfully alone; it is an inherently collective undertaking. That is the lesson of the avant-garde — the mutualization of competence and incompetence. Even the most strikingly original turn of phrase or analysis is never anything more than a collective enunciation in disguise. So people, work together! It’s at once the ways and means of devising the post-globalization imaginary…

    After Continental Drift, after the exhaustion of globalization, Bioregionalism appears a logical deduction — though that is an illusion due as more to the clarity of Brian’s exposition than to the reality of it — since it remains, precisely, an imaginary to be built. That clarity of exposition may be the upshot of years of writing, but it also embodies a deep-seated ethical imperative — a commitment to popular education, the exigency to vulgariser and render accessible — the essence of Brian’s ethics of engagement, which could more simply be described as generosity.

    Inseparable from this — and no less important, especially in this setting today — is the fact that all of these broad-scoped extradisciplinary investigations were done without any of the epistemic high-tailings and legitimation of academia. But they have all been informed — and Brian is inflexible on this — by a standard of rigor to which academia could rarely hold itself. We are talking about an emblematic instance of autonomous knowledge production — not the only one, to be sure, but one that is particularly exemplary. Like Continental Drift, we can look forward to finding in Bioregionalism a voracious appetite for theory and often dense analysis, crunched and if not quite digested, reformatted in reader- and user-friendly fashion. What a great way to practice theory! Make it palatable; make it palpable, make it useful.

    For sure there’s something of the escapologist in Brian’s work: Escaping the Overcode (2009) was the title of his third and most comprehensive collection of essays; escaping epistemic and academic capture; escaping institutional framing; escaping ontological capture as “just art”. But the singular temporality that in each of those cases characterizes escapology is that escape precedes capture — indeed only from the perspective of power is capture primary. Escape is always already underway; we never know when people may choose to escape; but we can be sure that they already are — which is what renders power so paranoid — and provides such traction to embodied projects of devising a new imaginary, rather than merely falling back on the disengagement of critique.

    A few years ago, my son Liam and I used to watch a mainstream TV show called Prisonbreak. It was a bit of a dudefest of a show, but beyond the action-packed episodes, there was something about the conceit that attracted my attention — and that in a way reminds me of Brian’s work. It’s the story of a man who wants to spring his brother from high-security prison, where he has been unjustifiably put by none other than a Wyoming-based vice president of the United States… So in order to orchestrate the escape, the protagonist first has to get into the prison himself, as a prisoner, and then use a sophisticated map of the super-max establishment to find the way out. The map, it turns out, is an incredibly detailed tattoo on his own body… This is the paradoxical and dialectical relation between the need to penetrate to the very core of the oppressive system, in order to embody the map out. On a wholly different scale with utterly different collaborators, but with a similar logic, this is the plan for Cascadia. Our bodies and practices as devices of the becoming bioregional imaginary.

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

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

    by Anthony Bogues

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

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

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

    Liberalism and colonialism

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

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

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

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

     JJ Thomas and the struggle for recognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The rule of Crown Colony

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Works Cited:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    by Andrew Zimmerman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    By Christian Thorne

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Christian Thorne is a professor of English at Williams College.

    References

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

    by Joseph R. Slaughter

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

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

    –Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

     

    Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • Sareeta Amrute — Sounding the Flat Alarm (Review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

    Sareeta Amrute — Sounding the Flat Alarm (Review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

    a review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019)

    by Sareeta Amrute

    Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism begins badly: the author’s house burns down. Her home is struck by lightning, it takes Zuboff a few minutes to realize the enormity of the conflagration happening all around her and escape. The book, written after the fire goes out, is a warning about the enormity of the changes kindled while we slept. Zuboff describes a world in which autonomy, agency, and privacy–the walls of her house–are under threat by a corporate apparatus that records everything in order to control behavior. That act of monitoring and recording inaugurates a new era in the development of capitalism that Zuboff believes is destructive of both individual liberty and democratic institutions.

    Surveillance Capitalism  is the alarm to all of us to get out of the house, lest it burn down all around us. In making this warning however, Zuboff discounts the long history of surveillance outside the middle class enclaves of Europe and the United States and assumes that protecting the privacy of individuals in that same location will solve the problem of surveillance for the Rest.

    The house functions as a metaphor throughout the book, first as a warning about how difficult it is to recognize a radical remaking of our world as it is happening: this change is akin to a lightning strike. The second is as an indicator of the kind of world we inhabit: it is a world that could be enhancing of life, instead it treats life as a resource to be extracted. The third uses the idea of house as protection to solve the other two problems.

    Zuboff contrasts an early moment of the digitally connected world, an internet of things that was on a closed circuit within one house, to the current moment, where the same devices are wired to the companies that make them. For Zuboff, that difference demonstrates the exponential changes that happened in between the early promise of the internet and its current malformation. Surveillance Capital argues that from the connective potential of the early Internet has come the current dystopian state of affairs, where human behavior is monitored by companies in order to nudge that behavior toward predetermined ends. In this way, Surveillance Capitalism reverses an earlier moment of connectivity boosterism, exemplified by the title of Thomas Friedman’s popular 2005 book, The World is Flat, which celebrated technologically-produced globalization.[1] The decades from the mid to late 2000s witnessed a significant critique of the flat world hypothesis, which could be summed up as an argument for both the vast unevenness of the world, and for the continuous remaking of global tropes into local and varied meanings. Yet, here we are again it seems in 2020, except instead of celebrating flatness, we are sounding the flat alarm.

    The book’s very dimensions–it is a doorstop, on purpose–act as an inoculation against the thinness and flatness Zuboff diagnoses as predominant features of our world. Zuboff argues that these features are unprecedented, that they mark an extreme deviation from capitalism as it has been. They therefore require both a new name and new analytic tools. The name
    “surveillance capitalism” describes information-gathering enterprises that are unprecedented in human history, and that information, Zuboff writes, is used to predict “our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours” (11). As tech companies increasingly use our data to steer behavior towards products and advertising, our ability to experience a deep interiority where we can exercise autonomous choice shrinks. Importantly for Zuboff, these companies collect not just data willingly giving, but the data exhaust that we often unknowingly and unintentionally emit as we move through a world mediated by our devices. Behavioral nudges mark for Zuboff the ultimate endpoint for a capitalism gone awry, a capitalism drives humans to abandon free will in favor of being governed by corporations that use aggregate data about individual interactions to determine future human action.

    Zuboff’s flat alarm usefully takes the reader through the philosophical underpinnings of behaviorism, following the work of B.F. Skinner, a psychologist working at Harvard in the mid-twentieth century who believed adjusting human behavior was a matter of changing external environments through positive and negative stimuli, or reinforcements. Zuboff argues that behaviorist attitudes toward the world, considered outré in their time, have moved to the heart of Silicon Valley philosophies of disruption, where they meet a particular kind of mode of capital accumulation driven by the logics of venture, neutrality, and macho meritocracies. The result is a kind of ideology of tools and of making humans into tools, that Zuboff terms instrumentarianism, at once driven to produce companies that are profitable for venture capitalists and investors and to treat human beings as sources of data to be turned toward profitability. Widespread surveillance is a necessary feature of this new world order because it is through that observation of every detail of human life that these companies can amass the data they need to turn a profit by predicting and ultimately controlling, or tuning, human behavior.

    Zuboff identifies key figures in the development of surveillance capitalism, including the aforementioned Skinner. Her particular mode of critique tends to focus on CEOs, and Zuboff reads their pronouncements as signs of the legacy of behaviorism in the C-Suites of contemporary firms. Zuboff also spends several chapters situating the critics of these surveillance capitalists as those who need to raise the flat world alarm. She compares this need to both her personal experience with the house fire and the experience of thinkers such as Hanah Arendt writing on totalitarianism. Here, she draws an explicit critique that conjoins totalitarianism and surveillance capital. Zuboff argues that just as totalitarianism was unthinkable as it was unfolding, so too does surveillance capitalism seem an impossible future given how we like to think about human behavior and its governance. Zuboff’s argument here is highly persuasive, since she is suggesting that the critics will always come to realize what it is they are critiquing just before it is too late to do anything about it. She also argues that behaviorism is in some sense the inverse of state-governed totalitarianism, since while totalitarianism attempted to discipline humans from the inside out, surveillance capitalism is agnostic when it comes to interiority–it only deals in and tries to engineer surface effects. For all this ‘neutrality’ over and against belief, it is equally oppressive, because it aims at social domination.

    Previous reviews have provided an overview of the chapters in this book; I will not repeat the exercise, except to say that the introduction nicely lays out her overall argument and could be used effectively to broach the topic of surveillance for many audiences. The chapters outlining B.F. Skinner’s imprint on behaviorist ideologies are also useful to provide historical context to the current age, as is the general story of Google’s turn toward profitability as told in Part I. And, yet, the promise of these earlier chapters–particularly the nice turn of phrase, the “‘behavioral means of production” yield in the latter chapters to an impoverished account of our options and of the contradictions at work within tech companies. These lacunae are due at least in part to Zuboff’s choice of revolutionary subject–the middle class consumer.

    Toward the end of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff rebuilds her house, this time with thicker walls. She uses her house’s regeneration to argue for a philosophical concept she calls the “right to sanctuary,” based largely on the writings of Gaston Bachelard, whose Poetics of Space describes for Zuboff how the shelter of home shapes “many of our most fundamental ways of making sense of experience” (477). Zuboff believes that surveillance capitalists want to bring down all these walls, for the sake of opening up our every action to collection and our every impulse to guidance from above. One might pause here and wonder whether the breaking down of walls is not fundamental to capitalism from the beginning, rather than an aberration of the current age. In other words, does the age of surveillance mark such a radical break from the general thrust of capital’s need to open up new markets and exploit new raw materials? Or, more to the point, for whom does it signify a radical aberration?  Posing this question would bring into focus the need to interrogate the complicitness of the very categories of autonomy, agency, and privacy in the extension of capitalism across geographies, and to historicize the production of interiority within that same frame.

    Against the contemporary tendency toward effacing the interior life of families and individuals, Zuboff offers sanctuary as the right to protection from surveillance. In this moment, that protection needs thick walls. For Zuboff, those walls need to be built by young people–one gets the sense that she is speaking across these sections to her own children and those of her children’s generation. The problem with describing sanctuary in this way is that it narrows the scope for both understanding the stakes of surveillance and recognizing where the battles for control over data will be fought.

    As a broadside, Surveillance Capitalism works through a combination of rhetoric and evidence. Zuboff hopes that a younger generation will fight the watchers for control over their own data. Yet, by addressing largely a well-off, college-educated, and young audience, Zuboff restricts the people who are being asked to take up the cause, and fails to ask the difficult question of what it would take to build a house with thicker walls for everyone.

    A persistent concern while reading this book is whether its analysis can encompass otherwheres. The populations that are most at risk under surveillance capitalism include immigrants, minorities, and workers, both within and outside the United States. The framework of data exhaust and its use to predict and govern behavior does not quite illuminate the uses of data collection to track border crossers, “predict” crime, and monitor worker movements inside warehouses. These relationships require an analysis that can get at the overlap between corporate and government surveillance, which Surveillance Capitalism studiously avoids. The book begins with an analysis of a system of exploitation based on turning data into profits, and argues that the new mode of production makes the motor of capitalism shift from products to information, a point well established by previous literature. Given this analysis, it astonishing that the last section of the book returns to a defense of individual rights, without stopping to question whether the ‘hive’ forms of organization that Zuboff finds in the logics of surveillance capital may have been a cooptation of radical kinds of social organizing arranged against a different model of exploitation. Leaderless movements like Occupy should be considered fully when describing hives, along with contemporary initiatives like tech worker cooperatives and technical alternatives like local mesh networks. The possibility that these radical forms of social organization may be subject to cooptation by the actors Zuboff describes never appears in the book. Instead, Zuboff appears to mistranslate theories of the subject that locate agency above or below the level of the individual to political acquiescence to a program of total social control. Without taking the step considering the political potential in ‘hive-like’ social organization, Zuboff’s corrective falls back on notions of individual rights and protections and is unable to imagine a new kind of collective action that moves beyond both individualism and behaviorism. This failure, for instance, skews Zuboff’s arguments toward the familiar ground of data protection as a solution rather than toward the more radical stances of refusal, which question data collection in the first place.

    Zuboff’s world is flat. It is a world in which there are Big Others that suck up an undifferentiated public’s data, Others whose objective is to mold our behavior and steal our free will. In this version of flatness, what was once described positively is now described negatively, as if we had collectively turned a rosy-colored smooth world flat black. Yet, how collective is this experience? How will it play out if the solutions we provide rely on bracketing out the question of what kinds of people and communities are afforded the chance to build thicker walls? This calls forth a deeper issue than simply that of a lack of inclusion of other voices in Zuboff’s account. After all, perhaps fixing the surveillance issue through the kinds of rights to sanctuary that Zuboff suggests would also fix the issue for those who are not usually conceived of as mainstream consumers.

    Except, historical examples ranging from Simone Browne’s explication of surveillance and slavery in Dark Matters to Achille Mbembe’s articulation of necropolitcs teach us that consumer protection is a thin filament on which to hang protection for all from overweaning surveillance apparati–corporate or otherwise. One could easily imagine a world where the privacy rights of well-heeled Americans are protected, but those of others continue to be violated. To reference one pertinent example, companies who are banking on monetizing data through a contractual relationship where individuals sell the data that they themselves own are simultaneously banking on those who need to sell their data to make money. In other words, as legal scholar Stacy-Ann Elvy notes (2017), in a personal data economy low-income consumers will be incentivized to sell their data without much concern for the conditions of sale, even while those who are well-off will have the means to avoid these incentives, resulting in the illusion of individual control and uneven access to privacy determined by degrees of socioeconomic vulnerability. These individuals will also be exposed to a greater degree of risk that their information will not stay secure.

    Simone Browne demonstrates that what we understand as surveillance was developed on and through black bodies, and that these populations of slaves and ex-slaves have developed strategies of avoiding detection, which she calls dark sousveillance. As Browne notes, “routing the study of contemporary surveillance” through the histories of “black enslavement and captivity opens up the possibility for fugitive acts of escape” even while it shows that the normative surveillance of white bodies was built on long histories of experimentations with black bodies (Browne 2015, 164). Achille Mbembe’s scholarship on necropolitics was developed through the insight that some life becomes killable, or in Jasbir Puar’s (2017) memorable phrasing, maimable, at the same time that other life is propagated. Mbembe proposes “necropolitcs” to describe “death worlds” where “death” not life, “is the space where freedom and negotiation happen” where “vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring on them the status of living dead” (Mbembe 2003, 40). The right to sanctuary appears to short circuit the spaces where life has already been configured as available for expropriation through perpetual wounding. Crucial to both Browne and Mbembe’s arguments is the insight that the study of the uneven harms of surveillance concomitantly surfaces the tactics of opposition and the archives of the world that provide alternative models of refuge outside the contractual property relationship evoked across the pages of Surveillance Capitalism.

    All those considered outside the ambit of individualized rights, including those in territories marked by extrajudicial measures, those deemed illegal, those perennially under threat, those who while at work are unprotected, those in unseen workplaces, and those simply unable to exercise rights to privacy due to law or circumstance, have little place in Zuboff’s analysis. One only has to think of Kashmir, and the access that people with no ties to this place will now have to building houses there, to begin to grasp the contested politics of home-building.[2] Without an acknowledgement of the limits of both the critique of surveillance capitalism and the agents of its proposed solutions, it seems this otherwise promising book will reach the usual audiences and have the usual effect of shoring up some peoples’ and places’ rights even while making the rest of the world and its populations available for experiments in data appropriation.

    _____

    Sareeta Amrute is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Her scholarship focuses on contemporary capitalism and ways of working, and particularly on the ways race and class are revisited and remade in sites of new economy work, such as coding and software economies. She is the author of the book Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016) and recently published the article “Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects” in Feminist Review.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] Friedman (2005) attributes this phrase to Nandan Nilekani, then Co-Chair, of Indian Tech company Infosys (and subsequently Chair of the Unique Identification Authority of India).

    [2] Until 2019, Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution granted the territories of Jammu and Kashmir special status, which allowed the state to keep on it’s books laws restricting who could buy land and property in Kashmir by allowing the territories to define who counted as a permanent resident.. After the abrogation of Article 370, rumors swirled that the rich from Delhi and elsewhere would now be able to purchase holiday homes in the area. See e.g. Devansh Sharma, “All You Need to Know about Buying Property in Jammu and Kashmir“; Parvaiz Bukhari, “Myth No 1 about Article 370: It Prevents Indians from Buying Land in Kashmir.”

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    • Elvy, Stacy-Ann. 2017. “Paying for Privacy and the Personal Data Economy.” Columbia Law Review 117:6 (Oct). 1369-1460.
    • Friedman, Thomas. 2005. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
    • Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15:1 (Winter). 11-40.
    • Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    • Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

     

  • D. Gilson — From Haiti to Georgia, With Skulls and Scotch (Review of Colin Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost)

    D. Gilson — From Haiti to Georgia, With Skulls and Scotch (Review of Colin Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost)

    This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.

    a review of Colin Dayan, In the Ghost of her Belly (LARB 2019)

    by D. Gilson

    Death hung around my house. No way around fate, that’s what my mother told me.

    “Once something bad happens, it will happen again.”

    “My mother’s indifference dismantled my life,” Colin Dayan writes in her new memoir, for “out of the dust and confusion of my childhood, only the desire to escape emerges” (109). In the Belly of Her Ghost (LARB True Stories, 2018) is at turns a gentle meditation on escape and a violent exorcism of that constant, thrumming, haunting Oedipal yank, that tide that brings us back again and again to our mothers. Or, as Saeed Jones ends his own recent memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives (2019), “Our mothers are why we are here” (190). They are, he’s right. How could we, whether we want to or not, ever escape them?

    The market of mother-fixated memoirs bubbles over. These include those written by celebrities, such as Melissa Rivers’ The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation (2015) and Wishful Drinking (2008) by Carrie Fisher. The seminal of the literary memoir itself has often been mother-obsessed, such as Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995) and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle (2005). Also, gorgeous tomes that break with conventional form, such as the graphic Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama (2012) by Alison Bechdel, or the comic-reveling Running With Scissors (2002) from Augusten Burroughs. There are lyric meditations on mothers in prosody coming from poets, such as Saeed Jones’ aforementioned How We Fight for Our Lives (2019) and The Long Goodbye (2008) by Meghan O’Rourke. There are those memoirs penned by the children of famous literary mothers, like Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother (1994) by Linda Gray Sexton and I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This (2016) by Nadja Spiegelman. And this is all not to mention the glut of memoirs by mothers themselves.

    This list is hardly exhaustive, though even in its brevity, it begs the question: do we need another memoir about a mother, however extraordinary the circumstances between mother and child might have been. I might have been wont to answer, “Probably not,” but then Colin Dayan’s trailblazing memoir arrived in my mailbox, and I’ve been forced to reverse this impulsive answer completely. For Dayan’s slim memoir “doesn’t read like a conventional narrative,” Jane Tompkins explains in her Los Angeles Times review of the book, “It’s about a woman who tries to exorcise the ghost of her deceased mother through writing.” Tompkins is right; In the Belly of Her Ghost is an inherited reckoning. But I want to take the space offered by this longer review to talk about the book’s delightfully complicated existence. For “I know that I will never be free of the past,” Dayan chants, “that it will never quit feeding on the present” (79). Thank God we get to live in Dayan’s menacing, always-feeding, gorgeous, complicated present, a present that cannot shake off the past.

    Namely, I believe Colin Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost generatively complicates four questions to which too many memoirs offer ready-made answers: 1) what is a mother? 2) what is a child? 3) what is race? and 4) what is the act of creative nonfiction-ing?

     

    I: What is a mother?

    “What has availed

    Or failed?

    Or will avail?”

    —Robert Penn Warren, “Question and Answer”

    Penn Warren’s poem is not about mothers or mothering or being mothered. But the questions he asks offer us an interesting entry into considering how the mother functions as a narrative device. Many memoirs celebrate the triumphant mother, the one who has availed; mourn the disastrous mother, the one who has failed; or imagine alternative pasts or futures of the one who will avail. In the Belly of Her Ghost offers no simple progenitor for us to instantly recognize and digest. Instead, Dayan offers us a complex figure who defies our recognition, queers it, and makes us re-approach the mothers in our own lives and in the other texts we consume. Aren’t we all always, after all, consuming mothers one or another? Or perhaps, instead, we find ourselves being consumed?

    “Who was the sacrifice,” Dayan wonders, “my mother or me?” (43) The question comes early, but haunts the life, and afterlife, of the memoir, for sacrifice is always central to how Dayan and her mother relate, at times failing to relate, to one another. “As a child, I was in awe of the woman,” Dayan begins, “She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider” (3). But who was this woman-cum-spider, and who is she still? The web of her identity confuses Dayan, and thus us, and draws one in. This mother was born in Haiti and could never, or would never, articulate her biracialness, though so much of her life was spent attempting to pass for white in public, while privately conjuring the songs of her childhood Caribbean home. Soon after this mother’s family immigrated to New York, she, aged 17, went on a date with man twenty years her senior. This man, “took her to the circus. He tried to teach her to ride horses and eat mussels” (7). Dayan never knows if her mother wanted to go with her father to the circus in the first place, but

    That same year, my mother traveled from Brooklyn to a honeymoon in Mexico. They traveled around for two years, then to Nashville and, finally, to Atlanta. The South must have seemed to her like a cross between Haiti and New York. ‘I would have been an actress,’ she told me. ‘Then I met your father.’ But she never stopped acting. She lived to be looked at. (8)

    By the time Dayan joined this cross-cultural family – her mother, a biracial Haitian immigrant, and her father, a Jewish immigrant from X – they were living in the cultural capital of the Jim Crow South. They were passing for white, or an acceptable shade of off-white, a type of sacrifice in and of itself that allowed them access to many, if not all, of Atlanta’s institutions. The family’s origin was thus muddled. For “in the south,” Dayan argues, “domesticity and chatter and ease are almost always accompanied by something gross. The sweetest memory depends on the shattered life of whatever is granted neither leisure nor mercy” (30).

    We are almost always seeking out our origins, often to our betterment, and often to our detriment. In August of 2019, The New York Times launched the 1619 Project in observation of the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves arriving to Point Comfort, Virginia; the project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” This is a worthwhile endeavor, to be sure. Conversely, in late 2018 Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren joined a swath of white Americans taking home DNA tests – such as Ancestry or 23andMe – in attempt to prove valid her claims of “authentic” Native American heritage; CNN reports that Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamante, who analyzed Warren’s results, “places Warren’s Native American ancestor between six and 10 generations ago, with the report estimating eight generations.” Such focus on race’s chimerical and arbitrary nature is dangerous. Or to echo Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin, Jr., “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It… [dishonors] legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.” On the one hand, our search for our very origin can be a productive act of cultural and artistic reckoning; and on the other, our search can lead us to the abyss of reinforcing the appropriative violence that is certainly one of our American heritages.

    Thankfully, Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost does not become the former. And though it is certainly an origin story, the book succeeds, in part, because I believe Dayan is seeking not her origin, per se, but to understand, and to reckon with, the remaining ghost of her mother, or mothers, because, she writes, “the dead remain hidden in us. But from time to time they make themselves known” (127). I say mothers in the plural in the most literal sense possible. For yes, Dayan’s biological mother was the Haitian woman passing for white in Atlanta, the thwarted actress, the doll in a beaded gown who would pass by (and through) Dayan’s ear singing Sinatra or bits of songs in the haunting lilt of French Creole. But there was another mother in Dayan’s life, the one I find too few reviews of the book have given her due. This mother was the charged with keeping the household in order like a fine-tuned engine. This mother was a black woman named Lucille.

    “Only two people mattered to me, and they are still on my mind,” Dayan writes (31). One was Thomas, the family’s yardman. And the other? “Lucille, the woman who raised me,” Dayan admits, “and, I almost wrote, ‘the love of my life’” (31). Whereas Dayan’s biological mother was, in many ways, a ghostly figure moving violently through Dayan’s childhood, Lucille offered corollary: “Lucille gave me joy… She taught me the kind of dread that as also desire: the longing to go out of this world and know what can’t be seen” (33). The caricature of the black “mammie” is all-too alive and well in Southern literature; one need only look as far back as Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 book The Help, which became a star-studded film. But even if Lucille might become such a caricature in lesser hands, in Dayan’s thoughtful, careful prose she is the mother Dayan needed — not perfect, but not ghostly, which is to say, present.

    “Lucille told me bedtime stories,” (36) Dayan explains, and “she saved me from the Lord’s fury, even though she scared the living daylights out of me” (40). This both-and-ness, the story teller and the fear maker, existed holistically in the relationship between Lucille and Dayan, a mixture I suspect should exist between every mother and child, especially those of the American South. And lest we forget: though Lucille was black, it is clear Dayan was not exactly white, no matter how hard her biological mother tried to hide this fact. Lucille, thankfully to Dayan, did not try to hide this fact, but let the color of their lives pass over them as if it was a quilt not to be hidden away in the humid heat of Atlanta. Lucille “must have known my mother was not really white,” Dayan explains, “but it didn’t matter anyway, and she called me her baby. It was all confused.” The memoir relishes in that confusion – particularly of who is the mother, and of what race even means at every corner – and it is the better for relishing in that very space of perplexity.

    And as with her biological mother, Dayan continues to be haunted by Lucille, too, a haunting that places the woman less as family servant, and more as competing matriarch, even in her various reincarnations in the afterlife. “Lucille died,” Dayan writes, “My story begins. She was never gone, but stayed with me in the dirt or in the wind, surprising me just when I thought I had survived the night terrors… She came before me just as she told me she would” (39).

    It is perhaps easy to read both mothers as failing, and indeed, in many ways they “fail.” But they also persist, and as Jack Halberstam argues, “if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards” (2011: 3). Dayan’s matriarchal origins are so out-of-focus, they fail on the level of absolute knowledge; but is that a failure? Or instead, does the slippery nature of motherhood in In the Belly of Her Ghost offer us different, perhaps better, rewards? In short, yes, resoundedly yes. Or as Dayan’s mother tells her, “We’re in a hole. I cannot exactly catch onto the rope to get out without hurting you. So we’ll never find each other, but maybe there are other ways to make our lives mean something when words are dead” (139). In the Belly of Her Ghost offers us a completely unique and appropriately complex vocabulary to discuss mothers, mothering, and motherhood, a vocabulary we lack because the words are coming to us already dead, and the book, in its conjuring of the ghostly, brings them back to life. And as the slim volume centralizes the ghostliness of mothers, it also brings into question the existence of children.

     

    II: What is a child?

    “Between the dark and the daylight,

    When the night is beginning to lower,

    Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,

    That is known as the Children’s Hour.”

    —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Children’s Hour”

    Longfellow argues, oddly enough for the nineteenth century, that the night and all its mysteries belong to children. The night, that time full of mystery, yes, but also the unknown, and the unknown danger, and the unknown danger that you know is there and yet cannot name. In In the Belly of Her Ghost, Colin Dayan works in this lineage, queering the line between child and adult, daughter and mother at every turn.

    And what is Dayan’s childhood, or better said, how do we come to spiritually experience it? For as Longfellow argues, Dayan’s childhood is lived “between the dark and the daylight.” We know Dayan’s childhood is perpetual, as she is always haunted by both her mother and Lucille, despite how much she ages. And despite where she visits or lives — Philadelphia, New York, Paris, Haiti, Nashville — it is always and forever a Southern childhood of Atlanta. For Dayan, and thus for us, that Southerness is palpable; “pussy and possum,” she writes, almost prays, “that’s about as close as I can get to my sense of the South: sticky, hot, and unusually cruel” (24). The comparison to other great Southern memoirs — especially Dorothy Allison’s semi-autobiographical Bastard Out of Carolina—would be easy to make, given Dayan’s shared focus on the potential and often simultaneous beauty and cruelty of Southern childhoods in their specificity. But whereas Bastard and other memoirs of the Southern canon enlighten readers to that particular brand of Southern poverty, Dayan offers us a unique vision of childhood in the South that I’ve yet to experience: one where glamour is always on the edges.

    Glamour rests on the edges like the photographs that punctuate In the Belly of Her Ghost, photographs that, in essence, spawn the writing of the memoir itself, which originates with Dayan receiving her mother’s earthly possessions and sifting through them (almost like a spider, the creatures that also punctuate the memoir). One photograph shows Dayan and mother on the flagstone patio of their northeast Atlanta home. “We look uncomfortable,” Dayan writes, “caught in a pose that tries to appear natural when everything about it is strained” (110). Dayan is dressed in a ballerinas’ outfit, replete with tutu and tiara, a look we are led to believe was not her usual finery. But then there’s her mother, within whom, Dayan describes, a grace and “lightness takes shape, as my eye follows her legs, taut and lean under her tight skirt, up to the hip casually slung, to the right arm, with bangles on the wrist and a cigarette held loosely in her hand” (110). It’s the picture, quite literally, of mid-twentieth-century Southern metropolitan elegance. But of course, for both mother and daughter, that elegance comes at a cost of mysterious measure: “the eyes are strained,” Dayan continues describing her mother, “too much of the eyebrow is plucked, and the face, though beautiful, looks dead, the smile held too long” (110-111). The cost, I suspect, as is the cost in many passing narratives of the American South in particular, is the desire to both belong and to be. Or as Dayan’s father tells her earlier with a sigh, “it’s no good to be too strange in a country you love” (8).

    Lucille and Dayan’s mother are not the only ghosts we reckon with here. That child in the ballerina get up, or that same child frying chicken in the kitchen with Lucille, or singing “Dixie” in Mrs. Guptill’s fifth grade class, later to irritate her parents and Lucille by taking the side of Civil Rights activists, that child that is Dayan herself, we reckon with her ghost, too, even though Dayan makes clear that “I hate my own nostalgia, [for] it goes against the grain of everything I believe in” (69). But what do we have beyond our nostalgia in the very act of writing a memoir? How do we answer the question of the children we were, and in many ways, will always be? This perpetual child is complex, admittedly, or as Kathryn Bond Stockton contends, “what a child ‘is’ is a darkening question. The question of the child makes us climb into a cloud… leading us, in moments, to cloudiness and ghostliness surrounding children as figures in time” (2009: 2). In the Belly of the Ghost forces us to face this cloudiness, this ghostliness, however, and shows us that we are all, as Dayan models, children or figures fallen out of time.

    Dayan allows us to unpack, consider closely, and make altars of her mother’s things alongside her because she’s not only a child fallen out of time, but, as Dayan confesses, she always “longed for [Mother’s]things as if they might magically transform my childhood irrelevance” (140). We are allowed to journey with her in attempt to transform the very tropes of childhood in literature itself. We are led, all-too-often, to believe that childhood itself is something we grow out of and shed; what is the twisted moral of Peter Pan, after all, if not that we all, every last one of us, must grow up? In the Belly of Her Ghost offers the lingering ghostliness of childhood to which Bond Stockton alludes. It is as if, Dayan seems to be learning, and thus we alongside her, we are playing dress up with decaying clothes, and yet clothes that never leave us entirely. Such as a heavily beaded outfit of her mother’s Dayan finds in a box after her mother’s death. “Things, like ghosts, know what they want,” Dayan writes when she finds the “evening gown and jacket, covered in blue and white sequins… I remembered how it held her body in its weight and beauty. The dress was more alive than my mother’s smile” (141). But when Dayan gives the dress to Goodwill, the dress, her mother, her childhood, is not done with her: “I walked back to the garage. There on the floor lay a small sequined belt. I picked it up and held my mother’s tight little waist in my hand. It is not easy to tell a ghost story that is not meant to frighten” (141). Childhood, like the belt, like the act of playing dress up, wants us to return to it, to be haunted by it, however frightening that prospect might be.

    Here, Dayan revels in the ghostliness of her childhood. She continues to live it, to face it, to make more and more life out of it. In the Belly of Her Ghost is “an elegy with a covert manifesto of hope,” Andrea Luka Zimmerman writes. This revelry, of both elegy and hope for the child that was, and yet, remains, is a necessary performance that too many memoirs are unable or not willing to take on. For this mixed-race child of immigrants always and forever on the edges of glamour and ruin is story that needs to be told.

     

    III: What is race?

    “The poet invents heroic moments where the pale black ancestor stands up

    on behalf of the race… She can see silent spaces

    but not what they signify, graphite markings in a forester’s code.”

    —Elizabeth Alexander, “Race”

    For those of us in the American South, whether by birth or migration, by choice or by necessity, and whether white or black or otherwise, we know race is key, albeit unstable centrality of our identity. Likewise, Roderick A. Ferguson contends that when “analyzed in terms of subjectivity, race helps to locate the ways in which identities are constituted” (207). Races constituted as non-white, at the height of Jim Crow in the South, nonetheless, are particularly analyzed and re-analyzed, subject to a haunting that will follow the body from birth well beyond death. Colin Dayan’s search for the ghost of her family’s — and thus her own — race is perhaps the squeaky mechanism that she must oil again and again. The pulley that, no matter how much she greases it, will not turn smoothly. In this way, In the Belly of Her Ghost becomes both a narrative of passing and of diaspora.

    Dayan’s mother, at the bequest of her wealthy husband — a prominent business owner of Atlanta society, perhaps despite his Jewishness — publicly played down her Haitian identity. Thus, her passing as white became a timely desire for Southern ease in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Or as Dayan writes, “this denial of her history was not anything like a grab for white power and privilege, but rather a casual act performed in exchange for a lifestyle of luxury, which just happened to be white,” adding that “this false if stylish veneer killed her spirit and destroyed any chance for happiness” (9). Though it perhaps “destroyed any chance for happiness,” it provided afternoons of sitting with friends in fabulous dresses drinking cocktails and listening to Frank Sinatra. Nights at The Standard Club, an Atlanta golf course and dinner society. But on the flipside of her easy white life, Dayan’s mother had in her employ two distinctly black bodies: Lucille and Thomas. “I hear my mother ringing the bronze bell my father brought back from Czechoslovakia in 1946,” Dayan remembers, “In the morning when she awakened, she called for Lucille to bring her breakfast in bed” (32). So of course, the mother’s passing had a cost not only for herself, but also for those around her, her competing matriarch Lucille, who could never pass as white, especially. But what strikes me in In the Belly of Her Ghost now is the effect her mother’s passing had on Dayan herself.

    This young Dayan, who craved, I believe, consciously or not, to align herself with the non-white bodies surrounding her. The Freedom Riders on television. The lunch counter protesters downtown near her father’s store. The Birmingham preachers on the radio. And of course, her other mother, Lucille, with whom Dayan created a secret, exclusive, and magical world all of their own. For, as Dayan recalls, Lucille

    figured I was in the enviable position of being not too white or too black, which meant that I could find out more things about such people than she could. That’s how we lived: she told me secrets about how to win the fight and sent me out into the world not exactly like bait, but pretty close to it, like an expendable spy. We waited. Waited until I got old enough to be mostly on my own, and by that time, as she knew, I’d have learned my lesson about which kind of people to fear, when to hate, and when to brawl. (114)

    For what are spies if not those who can pass (and what are children if not expendable)? As odd as it may be to claim, part of the magic—that strange concoction of glamour and tragedy always on the edges—of Dayan’s childhood is her role as expendable spy, the one who watches the world around her burn, figurative like Sherman’s Atlanta, and wraps herself “in a bundle of quotations…amulets stored up against my mother’s hatred and what I feared was a curse put on me” (45). For despite living in a seemingly white household, those curses brought from Haiti were always within arm’s reach.

    Thus, that house was not only a house of passing, but a house, too, of diaspora. For as Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin argue, “diaspora offers an alternative ‘ground’ to that of the territorial state for the intricate and always contentious linkage between cultural identity and political organization” (10). If we think of the nuclear family as an analogue for the territorial state (and on the very micro level, the family surely is, especially a family like Dayan’s with its often warring factions), then cultural identity and political organization were always in flux, at war, and fluid in such a household containing a removed father, an always-acting mother, a set-in-her-ways alternative mother, and a ghostly child, all of whom were constituted of different races. It became a site of diaspora, though one difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain. As Dayan admits, “It is difficult to explain the kind of distortion that such incongruous mixing ushered into my life. I found myself a willing prey to such inconsistency, torn between a singular, sad fantasy of the South and the need to keep on walking on the wrong side of white devils. Either way, I remained haunted by the chimaera of whiteness” (73). Such unclear but persistent haunting marks a very contemporary form of diaspora, for as Brent Hayes Edwards explains, “seen through the lens of diaspora… traditional, even paradigmatic concerns… are thrown into question or rendered peripheral” (78). Whereas Dayan’s parents might have found themselves, as non-white immigrants themselves, aligned with the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movements, they rejected their own diaspora. Dayan, however, even as a child, allowed herself to live in that place called Other, in alignment with Lucille, the mother she loved.

    And this diasporic life is not something that leaves Dayan as she ages. “Now that I’ve returned to the South,” she writes, having moved to Nashville to become the Robert Penn Warren Professor at Vanderbilt, “an old fear beckons. That’s why Lucille keeps coming back to me. The white men are still tall and proud and their eyes bold and fearless… Their gaze takes me to a place of comfort that I don’t understand” (115). She doesn’t understand that place is a return to the racial questions of her childhood, perhaps, though she concludes that it is “something that gives me a respite from sensing that I don’t belong, that I am not right in my skin… I have a hunch that it has a lot to do with terror. [Those white men] still do not like me” (116). I suspect she will never understand. But I also suspect that this non-understanding of racial being is, in large part, what produced In the Belly of Her Ghost, so in a way, I pray Dayan never reaches the fulfillment of knowing.

     

    IV: What is nonfiction-ing?

    “Most nonfiction writers will do well to cling to the ropes of simplicity and clarity.”

    —William Zinsser, On Writing Well

    For those of us who teach memoir and creative nonfiction more generally, we’ve likely invoked William Zinsser, that monarch of our genre, a duke, perhaps, many times. I certainly have, telling my students, especially in the beginning stages of their sequence of creative writing workshops, to always aim for simplicity and clarity. That it is of paramount importance that your read always, at any moment, understand what is happening. We are not wrong to do this. Young writers often need to focus on simplicity, particularly of sentence structure, and clarity, particularly as they are often wont to, at the learned age of 19 or 20, explore the deep mysteries of their lives upon the page. So on the one hand, we quote William Zinsser and move on to talk about “the best” ways to plot an essay. And though this is sound advice for the beginning writer, as soon as we cross that line from novice to whatever-it-is-we-are-calling-ourselves-who-toil-and-then-publish this murky genre called nonfiction, we often through this advice right out the window (a cliché I would likely tell one of my students to strike).

    Let me confess: there are moments within In the Belly of Her Ghost where I am utterly confused. “She answers me,” Dayan writes of her mother, long after her mother’s death, long after the professor is tucked into her Nashville home, “Still, in the morning, hanging by a thread at the edge of the window, she moves when I call her, ‘Hey, mother,’ with a lilt and depth that surprise me” (154). There is a photo of a spider, perhaps twisting in the light coming through that window by which she has built her web, that follows this paragraph. And where most writers would position the spider as a metaphor for their mother, Dayan believes the spider is her mother herself.

    This is a surprising move, but one that fills me, so unexpectedly, with an unbridled joy that I cannot adequately express. Within the world of academic creative writers, it is not sexy to admit to a spiritual practice, especially one that, like Dayan’s, is constituted by parts of Christianity and mysticism. Most of us, it seems, are atheists, perhaps agnostics, and our un-belief is legion within the Ivory Tower. But on a very guttural level, I find myself questioning my un-belief through reading and re-reading In the Belly of Her Ghost, for Dayan succeeds in making so beautiful the thing I thought I had lost: that the ghosts of our pasts can haunt us and in turn, comfort us, however oddly, and make us never truly alone. Which is, in a way, a path to which we might, as Dayan so superlatively demonstrates here, approach the act of creative nonfiction-ing itself.

    Dayan starts in failure, writing of her mother, and of her own writerly self:

    As a child, I was in awe of the woman. She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider.

    For years I’ve been writing her story. Much of it remains incomplete, pages with titles like “The Lady with Camellias,” “A Daughter’s Lament,” or “Blues in the Night.” I tried in vain to forget her, but she has stayed around as close to me as my breath, hovering like dust hanging in the air. (3)

    But as we’ve already seen, failure has its own unique benefits. By starting in failure, we are forced, thankfully, to take the spiritual journey this slim memoir requires of us. Lucille told Dayan the year before she died that “you can find God in an outhouse hole” (39). I believe, and how strange it is to even use that verb in this sense, that you can find God in In the Belly of Her Ghost. The ghost story Dayan so fears she is writing only to fright has, in surprising ways a levity we offered in our position as readers, hovering above the photos and the appropriately scattered collection of memories, the talisman and the bits of song in Creole and English, the devil’s bargains and the lord’s surprises and grit of things described so clearly we can almost feel them rough against our thusly bared skin.

    Madison Smartt Bell writes of the memoir that “here for the first time [Dayan] turns her rigorous intellect toward her own life, onto her vexed relationship with her mother and subsequent suffering.” Smartt Bell is certainly not wrong, and he joins a chorus of reviewers and blurbers offering similar praise; but I’m thankful for the space this long review essay has provided me because I think most reviewers have overlooked the utter, strange, often funny joys that also underlie the book. The turning of motherhood, and childhood, and race, and the very act of memoir on its head, spinning us something new, a stunning web into which we find ourselves, luckily, caught.

     

    REFERENCES

    Boyarin, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin. 2002. Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Dayan, Colin. 2018. In the Belly of Her Ghost. Los Angeles: LARB True Stories.

    Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2014. “Diaspora.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. 76-78. New York: New York University Press.

    Ferguson, Roderick A. 2014. “Race.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. 207-211. New York: New York University Press.

    Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Jones, Saeed. 2019. How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster.

    Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • David Newhoff — The Harms of Digital Tech and Tech Law (Review of Goldberg, Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls)

    David Newhoff — The Harms of Digital Tech and Tech Law (Review of Goldberg, Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls)

    a review of Carrie Goldberg (with Jeannine Amber), Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls (Plume, 2019)

    by David Newhoff

    ~

    During an exchange on my blog in 2014 with an individual named Anonymous—it must have been a very popular baby name at some point—I was told, “Yes, yes, David, show us on the doll where the Internet touched you, because we all know that all evil comes from there.”  That discussion was in context to the internet industry’s anti-copyright agenda, but the smugness of the response, lurking behind a concealed identity while making an eye-rolling allusion to sexual assault, is characteristic of the tech-bro culture that dismisses any conversation about the darker aspects of digital life.  In fact, I am fairly sure it was the same Anonymous who decided that I had “failed the free speech test” because I wrote encouragingly about the prospect of making the conduct generally referred to as “revenge porn” a federal crime.

    Those old exchanges, conducted in the safety of the abstract, came rushing into the foreground while I read attorney Carrie Goldberg’s Nobody’s Victim:  Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls, because Goldberg and her colleagues do not address conduct like “revenge porn” in the abstract: they deal with it as a tangible and terrifying reality.  It is at her Brooklyn law firm where the victims of that crime (and other forms of harassment and abuse) arrive shattered, frightened and suicidally desperate to escape the hell their lives have become—often with the push of a button.  These are people who can show us exactly how and where the “internet touched” them, and Goldberg’s book is a harrowing tutorial in the various ways online platforms provide opportunity, motive, sanctuary, and even profit for individuals who purposely choose to destroy other human beings.

    Nobody’s Victim reads like an anthology of short thriller/horror stories but for the fact that each of the terrorized protagonists is a real person, and far too many of them are children.  These infuriating anecdotes are interwoven with the story of Goldberg’s own transformation from a young woman nearly destroyed by predatory men to become, as she puts it, the attorney she needed when she was in trouble.  The result is both an inspiring narrative of personal triumph over adversity and a rigorous critique of our inadequate legal framework, which needlessly exacerbates the suffering of people targeted by life-threatening attacks—attacks that were simply not possible before the internet as we know it.

    Covering a lot of ground—from stalking to sextortion—Goldberg tells the stories of her archetypal clients, along with her own jaw-dropping experiences, in a voice that pairs the discipline of a lawyer with the passion of a crusader. “We can be the army to take these motherfuckers down,” her introduction concludes, and “What happened to you matters,” is the mantra of her epilogue.  It is clear that the central message she wants to convey is one of empowerment for the constituency she represents, but the details are chilling to say the least.

    Anyone anywhere can have his or her life torn apart by remote control—i.e. via the web.  All the malefactor really needs is basic computer skills, a little too much time on his hands, and a profoundly broken moral compass.  Psychos, stalkers, pervs, trolls, and assholes are all specific types of criminals in the “Carrie Goldberg Taxonomy of Offenders.”  For instance, the ex-boyfriend who uploads non-consensual intimate images to a revenge-porn site is a psycho, while the site operator, profiting off the misery of others, is an asshole.

    As Goldberg notes in Chapter 6, by the year 2014, there were about 3,000 websites dedicated to hosting revenge porn.  That is a hell of a lot of guys willing to expose their ex-girlfriends to a range of potential trauma—these include public humiliation, job loss, relationship damage, sexual assault, PTSD, and suicide—simply because their partner broke off the relationship.  This volume of men engaging in revenge porn does seem to imply that the existence of the technology itself becomes a motive or rationale for the conduct, but that is perhaps a subject to explore in another post.

    One theme that comes through loud and clear for me in Nobody’s Victim—particularly in context to the editorial scope of my blog—is that the individual conduct of the psychos, et al is only slightly less maddening than our systemic failure to protect the victims.  As a cyber-policy matter, that means the chronic misinterpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a speech-right protection and a blanket liability shield for online service providers.

    Taking on Section 230

    Goldberg’s most high-profile client, Matthew Herrick, was the target of a disgruntled ex-boyfriend named Juan Carlos Gutierrez, who tried, via the gay dating app Grindr, to get Herrick at least raped, if not murdered.  By creating several Grindr accounts designed to impersonate Herrick, Gutierrez posted invitations to seek him out for rough, “rape-fantasy” sex, including messages that any protests to stop should be taken as “part of the game.”  Hundreds of men swarmed into Herrick’s life for more than a year—appearing at his home and work, often becoming verbally or physically aggressive upon discovering that he was not offering what they were looking for.

    With Goldberg’s help, Herrick succeeded in getting Gutierrez convicted on felony charges, but what they could never obtain was even the most basic form of assistance from Grindr.  You might think it would be at least common courtesy for an internet business to remove accounts that falsely claim to be you—particularly when those accounts are being used to facilitate criminal threats to your safety and livelihood.  In fact, the smaller dating app Gutierrez had been using called Scruff eagerly and sympathetically complied with Herrick’s plea for help.  But Grindr told him to fuck off by saying, “There’s nothing we can do.”

    Herrick, through Goldberg, sued Grindr for “negligence, deceptive business practices and false advertising, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, failure to warn, and negligent misrepresentation.”  They lost in both the District Court and in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, principally because most courts continue to read Section 230 of the CDA as absolute immunity for online service providers.  This cognitive dissonance, which chooses to ignore the fact that a matter like Herrick’s plight is wholly unrelated to free speech, is emphasized in an amicus brief that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed in the Second Circuit appeal on behalf of Grindr:

    Intermediaries allow Internet users to connect easily with family and friends, follow the news, share opinions and personal experiences, create and share art, and debate politics. Appellant’s efforts to circumvent Section 230’s protections undermine Congress’s goal of encouraging open platforms and robust online speech.

    Isn’t that pretty?  But what the fuck has any of it got to do with using internet technologies to impersonate someone; to commit libel, slander, or defamation in his/her name; to deploy violent people (or in some cases SWAT teams) against a private individual; or to get someone fired or arrested—and all for the perpetrator’s amusement, vengeance, or profit?  None of that conduct is remotely protected by the speech right, and all of it—all of it—infringes the speech rights and other civil liberties of the victims.  Perhaps most absurdly, organizations like EFF choose to overlook the fact that the first right being denied to someone in Herrick’s predicament is the right to safely access all those invaluable activities enabled by online “intermediaries.”

    No, Grindr did not commit those crimes, but let’s be real.  What was Herrick asking Grindr to do?  Remove the conduits through which crimes were being committed against him—online accounts pretending to be him.  Scruff complied, and I didn’t feel a tremor in the free speech right, did you?   If we truly cannot make a legal distinction between Herrick’s circumstances and all that frilly bullshit the EFF likes to repeat ad nauseum, then, we are clearly too stupid to reap the benefits of the internet while mitigating its harms.

    Suffice to say, a fight over Section 230 is indeed brewing.  As it heats up, Silicon Valley will marshal its seemingly endless resources to defend the status quo, and they will carpet bomb the public with messages that any change to this law will be an existential threat to the internet as we know it.  There is some truth to that, of course, but the internet as we know it needs a lot of work.  Meanwhile, if anyone is going to win against Big Tech’s juggernaut on this issue, it will be thanks to the leadership of (mostly) women like Carrie Goldberg, her colleagues, and her clients.

    It is an unfortunate axiom that policy rarely changes without some constituency suffering harm for a period of time; and those are exactly the people whose stories Goldberg is in a position to tell—in court, in Congress, and to the public.  If you read Nobody’s Victim and still insist, like my friend Anonymous, this is all a theoretical debate about anomalous cases, largely mooted by the speech right, there’s a pretty good chance you’re an asshole—if not a psycho, stalker, perv, or troll.  And that clock you hear ticking is actually the sound of Carrie Goldberg’s signature high heels heading your way.

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    David Newhoff is a filmmaker, writer, and communications consultant, and an activist for artist’s rights, especially as they pertain to the erosion of copyright by digital technology companies. He is writing a book about copyright due out in Fall 2020. He writes about these issue frequently as @illusionofmore on Twitter and on the blog The Illusion of More, on which an earlier version of this review first appeared.

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