• LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    by LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun

    This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.

    A subtle chain of countless rings

    The next unto the farthest brings;

    The eye reads omens where it goes,

    And speaks all languages the rose;

    And, striving to be man, the worm

    Mounts through all the spires of form.

    ——Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be “excluded” from circulation.

                                          ——Marjorie Perloff

    When a mother gives an egg to her child and says “egg” at the same time, she is helping her child establish “a link” between language and the world. But what is the nature of this link? As the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explained, langue (by which he meant particular languages, like French, or English, or Mandarin Chinese) is a system of signs which parcels out the world of sense into discretely sayable things. The signs that comprise this system are complex: they are composed of a signifier – the acoustical image, as he called it, that is formed from a combination of a given language’s phonemes – and a signified – the conceptual image or item recalled and indivisibly linked with that string of phonemes. The linguistic sign is not the thing in the world which it names.[1] In the scene described, the mother teaches the child the link between all three elements in a single stroke, bringing the child irrevocably into the world of language – both the particular language, through which this introduction is made, and language in general, what Saussure called langage. Eventually, the child will learn to draw a self-conscious distinction between language and the world which it denominates, between what is sometimes called the linguistic functions of use and mention, as when he refers to ‘egg’: not the reproductive ovum and its nutriment, but the three-letter word spelled /e/g/g/. The creation of these links is the foundation for all human thinking, upon and out of which all of our most complicated thoughts are built. It is from the perspective of these links that we can examine some of the most pressing questions concerning what I will call international poetics, the communication of innovations and norms within and between the poetry of particular languages and cultures, and beyond.[2]

    The best recorded story to demonstrate how the first links between a signified, a signifier, and the real world are created is that of Helen Keller. As she recalled: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”[3 In this passage, Keller vividly describes the moment when “the link” between the word “water”, and the wonderful cool flowing water of the world that was impressed upon on her mind. Though the signifier of the linguistic sign is objective, common to all speakers of a language, the cognitive image to which it is linked, and the emotional associations it bears, are personal, subjective and changeable. The significance of this division between the objective elements of language, and the subjective half to which they are bound and supported, is significant to the study of poetics.

    T.S. Eliot’s theory of an “objective correlative” is a case in point. He states: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”[4] Eliot is correct in suggesting that such an emotion can be “evoked”. However, it is mistaken to assume that “the link” between “the evoker” and “the evoked” is objective. In fact, as exemplified in the case of Helen Keller above, the emotional association with the image of a particular object in one’s mind is formed by a combination of personal experience and collective instruction, the results of which are at once common enough to allow communication among speakers, yet irreducibly individual, and variable among one another, such that we can never know if our signifieds are identical to each other’s. This is indeed one of the great mysteries and miracles of language. Beyond this brute difference of other minds, there are the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of experience that contribute to the formation of our sense of our language. For Helen Keller, the emotional response evoked by the word “water” included the unique joy and enlightenment she experienced when she learned the word. The word retained for her a sense of the discovery of its link to the world. Another reader, one perhaps not deprived of their senses in the way Keller was, might have a completely different emotional response to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” not only with respect to other readers, but to the artist endeavoring to evoke the objective correlative itself.

    Yet people do share certain common experience, which is what makes Eliot’s theory possible in the first place. All human beings, being human, share certain life experiences and outlooks upon the world that enable them to enjoy the same literary works. The notion of a classic work, enjoyed by people of all nations around the world, is tacit proof of the commonalities across regional differences that make international literary and artistic success possible. People of the same national or cultural background will of course share more personal experience than those of different national or cultural backgrounds. There are artistic works that are highly favored in one culture while not well regarded in others. A good example is the novel A Dream of Red Mansions (《红楼梦》,1744-1754)[5] which is regarded as the best novel ever written in Chinese, yet hardly read in the west.

    Literature often serves a pedagogical function. The degree to which works are read, and continue to enjoy success, often depends on their ability to continue to teach readers something about themselves, and their world. Ezra Pound, another remarkable theorist of literature (and poet), is among the most vociferous exponents of this theory of literary efficacy. He vividly describes the rewards a fruitful reading experience offers as “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[6] Indeed, rewarding reading experiences are those that enlighten and develop our minds, stimulating them to great satisfaction. At the root of any literary judgment, the overall motive force by which literary traditions are sustained, is this affective dimension of reading. To read in an engaged way, to persist in reading, is to be somehow moved by it.

    How does this affective core of reading, which binds traditions and communities together in spite of their differences and distances, hold for the international communication of modern poetry, not least when even the most highly experienced reader of one culture can feel lost in the works of another. Bewilderment occurs not just with respect to the idiomatic sense of another language and culture but, when it comes to poetry especially, the ways in which an artist plays and puns with every level of that language. A story told by the distinguished scholar Huang Yunte about his colleague Zhang Ziqing, is illustrative. Reading Charles Bernstein’s poem “Fear of Flipping,” Zhang persistently asked the poet for the lexical meaning of the words in the poem. Huang explained, “the poet is more invested in the ring of echoes of wall, ball, fall, all, and even the half- rhyming repel, than the lexical meaning of these words. The ricochet of sounds and syllables, creating the titular fear of flipping, like a flip or slip of tongue, looks to walls to keep it inside or floors to hold it up.”[7] In other words, Bernstein is experimenting with the sonic dimension of poetic lines; indeed, one could say that the ‘meaning’ of his verse here is produced by his play effects with the reverberation of rhyming syllables across the poem. Poetic meaning is therefore not restricted to, or even primarily, lexical here. The title of the poem sets the terms for this play by punning on the phrase “fear of falling,” a substitution of one term / phobia for another, which flips the sense of the phrase on its head. The echoing internal rhymes create a verbal image which gives shape and body to this gesture of flipping, retaining the ghost of the original phrase even as it ricochets across the altered soundscape of the lines. This practice will no doubt be recognizable to readers who are familiar with the poetics of the Language School. The play serves as a framework for linking mind and world beyond and between the confines of individual languages, and is definitive of Bernstein’s practice.

    Huang Yunte’s interpretation is not difficult to understand. However, it was wholly foreign to Zhang Ziqing, and would almost certainly be to anyone who did not come to Bernstein’s work with the framework of sound and cognitive play in mind. Modern poetry like his is not unique in being theory-laden – that is, constructed and expounded according to the unique poetics of its practitioners. Nevertheless, modern poetry and poetic theories are two sides of a coin; they stand by working together – all the more so as poetry becomes esoteric in form, further removed from the conventions of ordinary language use, and governed increasingly by rules of composition unique to it. Without knowledge of the theories which govern such an esoteric art, therefore, one can find oneself at sea while reading a modern poem.[8] This is especially true of poetry where innovation does not occur at the lexical level either: indeed, where the poetry at stake is not a matter of lexical play. The divergence of modern poetry from the rules which governed previous traditions – rules of a more subtle kind of artifice intelligible to a broader literate class – has made the dissemination of its doctrines and theories a necessary part of its reception and interpretation. The difficulty a lay but native reader faces with work like Bernstein’s is exacerbated in the international context, where neither fluency in the language of composition, nor education within a broadest concept of the originating culture, can serve as sure guides. It is paramount that Chinese scholars introduce both modern poetry and modern poetic theories together, teaching them as two facets of the same literary phenomenon.

    Many modern poems make good sense in a lot of ways other than the traditional lexical one, which is why they seem quite difficult to understand. T. S. Eliot once said: “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”[9] Indeed, modern poetry is as difficult to comprehend as modern civilization. The difficulties are comparable, mimetic even, in so far as the poet is driven, in Eliot’s reasoning, by a vocational maxim to both reflect and train the sensibility of his audience to his work through the dislocations of language he performs. The difficulty of modern poetry is a difficulty inherent in its context: modern civilization. What of its value, the other aspect (ever present) of Eliot’s judgment. A difficult poem is good not because it is difficult. In fact, the difficulty of many poems is not that difficulty of modernity refracted, but rather a failure to adequately make sense of the incoherence the poet intuits. It is a subtle difference, one with which Eliot was principally concerned. A difficult poem is good only when it creates one more possibility, “forcing language into meaning,” in an unconventional way. Again,“Fear of Flipping” is exemplary. From the perspective of linking, it is an exploration of more possible ways to make new, and possibly more efficient, thought ways and patterns. The poem’s difficulty is likewise a function of the way in which it is approached. Though Eliot would demur to such a consequentialist proposition, perhaps the test of a difficult poem’s quality may be the very satisfaction of mind, its inspiration and development, that has affectively and cognitively bound generations of poetry readers to one another in a tradition millennia-old, and world-wide.[10]

    What then of the transposition of these difficult poems into foreign contexts. From one perspective, it would be easy to conclude that poems like“Fear of Flipping” simply cannot be translated into Chinese. Semantics are not what a translator ought to target here, yet there are no characters in the Chinese language that reproduce the poem’s soundscape either: wall, ball, fall, all, and repel, are constructions of the sound system of English. Chinese phonology simply does not permit their formation. Yet this perspective is impoverished, for the link the poem creates (the link which is its essential, creative practice and energy) is certainly “translatable.” The poem’s signature effect, its ‘fear of flipping’ so to speak, can be reached in the target language of Chinese, and the minds of readers from this or another culture, like those of its author and his native culture, can be enlightened and developed by a translation which ‘translates’ those effects. From the linking perspective, the reward for reading a poem is to build up some new and better links, so that the minds of its readers can grow. In bringing, i.e., “translating”, poems like “Fear of Flipping” to readers in China, we need to explicate them in detail, line by line, giving more detailed interpretations than what Huang Yunte does in his essay; but we also must consider the general theory and framework of mind that the poem conjures. For it is only by doing both that Chinese readers will be rewarded in their encounter with the difficulty of works like those of Bernstein, or his Language School peers. This is the true project and mission of translation.[11] To deal with such poems that stand closely with the linguistic features of the particular language in which it is written that cannot be replicated in Chinese, the strategy for translation is not to focus on the technical details of linguistic features, but on helping readers in China in understanding the ways, i.e., the frameworks of mind presented in the poems, so that they could not only understand them but also create links in Chinese in the same spirit – and to replicate the features where possible, according to the rules of Chinese.

    Marjorie Perloff has noted: “Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be ‘excluded’ from circulation.”[12] In other words, the contribution Bernstein’s works have made is not only to serve an individual reader by promoting his/her intellectual and emotional growth, but also, and more importantly, to serve contemporary American language and culture as a whole. With poems like“Fear of Flipping”, Bernstein has been constructing and reconstructing some delicate links to promote the growth of contemporary American thought capacity. That is to say, his work has contributed to the growth of the thinking capacity of the American cultural being, which, if well “translated”, can help other cultural beings develop in similar, relevant areas too.

    Different from lyrics, narrative works, both in verse and prose, tell stories that define the formation of certain links, as well as the associated emotions, so that they can often be translated in the traditional way. Story travels across cultural borders much more freely than poetic technique.

    In the field of international cultural communications, a mind, or a culture at large, grows in two ways: one is of transplantation, the other of inspiration. The key difference between these two learning ways is that the former offers something that cannot be logically developed out of the exercise of the learner’s own mind or the recipient culture’s institutional self-renewal, while the latter brings something that can be logically achieved by the recipient person or culture.

    Here are a few examples to further demonstrate the difference. When Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China in 1911, he attempted to “transplant” the whole American political system into China, which was a failure because it did not function well in the Chinese culture by then. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919 (五四运动), the western ideology of free love and free marriage were introduced into China, which inspired many young people, who totally understood them, cherished them and were willingly guided by them, because in Chinese history there had been many people who had fought for their freedom of love and marriage, though they had not developed the theory of these practices to the degree the west had. In some cases, the transplantation model and the inspiration model are combined together, such as in the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; Socialism was transplanted from the former Soviet Union, while Chinese Characteristics refers largely Chinese people’s own innovation, partly on basis of traditional Chinese political practice, and partly inspired by Western political practices.

    When a Chinese student learns English, s/he needs to learn a vocabulary and a grammar / syntax (words, and the rules for their formation and combination). In this way, his/her mind grows by “transplantation”. When a Chinese scholar learns Charles Bernstein’s poetics, acquiring a totally new way of thinking, it is also of transplantation. Inspiration, by contrast, is the event of learning something that can be interpreted, understood, and made good sense of in the context of one’s already established knowledge. For example, all traditional western poetry, especially Romanticist’s works, such as those by William Wordsworth, can be easily understood by Chinese readers, as they share much of the spirit with traditional Chinese poetry.

    Where do these processes of transplantation and inspiration fit in the current world of international poetics? Among the most interesting instances in the communication of inspirational learning is what one may call mis-interpretive innovation. These are cases defined by a fortunate mistake, in which the application of a norm in the target language and culture to the translation of a work produces something incongruous with the original cultural perspective. One famous example is Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method”. As Xie Ming said, “This etymological, compositional theory of the ideogram, from which Pound derived his ‘ideogrammic’ method, had an enormous impact on his thinking about poetry and other cultural matters, and on the writing of the Cantos.”[13] The method has influenced many poets in the west: “An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an ‘ideogrammic method’ that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be.”[14] Indeed, it is for this reason that Pound is said, in a well-known oxymoronic idiom, to have ‘invented Chinese poetry in English”. And yet, as explained on the back cover of the book The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the Chinese language is just a set of signifiers, like the English language or any other languages.[15] This now seems to be common knowledge to most English readers. However, Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method” made perfect sense in its context, and it was a wonderfully productive method for the composition of his works. It was an extremely valuable invention in poetics in English, inspired indeed.

    There are many more examples of mis-interpretive innovation. Let us offer a personal one. When Li Zhimin was invited to give a talk on Ezra Pound’s lyric “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”, Li found the other three panelists interpreted the poem as a war poem, the context for which was England’s involvement in WWI.[16] This appeared quite strange to him, as Li had been accustomed to interpretating the poem in the cultural context of its original author, the great Chinese poet Li Bai (701-762). In the traditional Chinese cultural context, this poem is normally taken as a love poem that romanticizes the mutual love and devotion of a young couple, which is considered a key virtue of the family ethics highly valued by Confucianism. Li found his American colleagues’ new (to me) interpretation compelling, making good sense as it does of the historic context in which the poem was translated and read in England. In fact, this new interpretation is inspiring and fascinating, and has contributed to the growth of Li’s understanding of the original and translated poem. What we can see from this example is that poetry not only exists in its original or translated context, but between them, in the historical and cultural rhymes that mutually illuminate diverse regions of the literary tradition.

    Let us give another example that illuminates the importance and shifting influence of context. A famous Chinese scholar prof. Yue Daiyun once held a seminar and discussed a novel entitled “Marriage of Xiao‘erhei (小二黑结婚)” with her American students. In the novel, there is a character named Sanxiangu (三仙姑) who often makes herself up to look more beautiful, which is meant to be inappropriate as she is of the working class, so that the conventional comments in the proletarian literary circle in China on this character is always negative. However, Yue Daiyun found all her American students were supporting Sanxiangu, as they thought there was nothing wrong with her making herself up. On the contrary, they considered Sanxiangu to be an admirable woman, as she seemed to them to love life.[17] Yue Daiyun came to agree with her American students’ comments, and has been retelling their views to her students and colleagues back in China, which is surely a contribution to the interpretation of the character Sanxiangu as well as the whole novel in China.

    The purpose of international interactions is not to make all cultures the same. Rather, international interactions can make all parties more perfect in their own way. We learn from each other in the transplantation model only when there is no alternative. We apply the model of inspirational learning in most cases. The overriding principle to decide whether any international communication is fruitful or not is whether it makes good sense in terms of the recipient individual or culture, indeed, whether it enriches the recipient through the change it rings.

    In the model of inspirational learning, the exchange can move in both directions: the innovative knowledge produced by the recipient may depart from the codes and conscience of the original culture, and yet in doing so inspire something novel in return, within the original culture. With the back and forth of such international communications, human knowledge on the whole is greatly expanded. In fact, the method of international communication, especially of the mind-expanding forms of poetry, is perhaps the best way for humanity to develop itself by diversifying itself: that is, to resist the pull of sameness.

    International interaction follows more or less the same principles in other fields. For example, in the field of politics, China and the West have learned and benefited from each other, and will continue to do so in the future. Jacques Gernet has said: “China furnished the first example of a disciplined, rich, and powerful state which owed nothing to Christianity and seemed to be based on reason and natural law. It thus made a powerful contribution to the formation of modern political thought, and even some of its basic institutions were imitated by Europe.”[18] Indeed, he convincingly argues that what the West has learned from China it has learned in the inspirational model. In return, China has learned a lot from the West as it developed during the modern age, much of which has transformed Chinese society to a great extent, such as in the fields of education, industrialization, urbanization and so on. And again, perhaps in the future, some of modern China’s successful institutions might serve as good examples from which the West might learn, and so on in perpetuity.[19]

    Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that all forms of life are linked: “A subtle chain of countless rings/ The next unto the farthest brings”[20] as he writes in the poem which prefaces his essay “Nature.” Helen Keller’s story about the creation of the link between the signifier “water,” the concept water the signified on her mind, and the water out there in the world, is a story about the origination of thought, without which she would have lived in a kind of intellectual darkness all her life. But the story is general: if human beings could not create links between the world and the world of signs, human beings would have lived in the darkness as well. Without poetry to further enhance these links, or to break and remake them, and without its transposition between languages, in which it is once more remade into a monster of linguistic and cultural confusion (in the etymological sense of this word), our thought would be even darker. The linking is everything; it is, as Emerson reminds us, life itself.

                                              2022/04/18

    _____

    LI Zhimin is “Guangzhou Scholar” Distinguished Professor of English at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University (Guangzhou, China, 510006). He serves as President of Foreign Literature Society of Guangdong Province. His research interests focus upon studies on modern poetics, culture (philosophy) and English Education (Email: washingtonlzm@sina.com).

    Daniel Braun is English Lecturer with Special Honor at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. He got his PhD in English literature Studies in Princeton University in 2019.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 65-66.

    [2] More discussions on the formation, nature and functioning of such links are made in Li Zhimin’s monograph The Good and the True of Knowledge (Beijing: The People’s Press, 2011) [黎志敏:《知识的“善”与“真”》。北京:人民出版社2011年版。]

    [3] Helen Keller, Story of My Life (C. Rainfield, 2003), 11. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.

    [4] T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1920), 92.

    [5] TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo, A Dream of Red Mansions, Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994). TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo are of the Wade-Giles System. In modern Pinyin system, they are Cao Xueqin and Gao E respectively.

    [6] Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Toronto:George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968), 4.

    [7] Yunte Huang, “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 275.

    [8] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Modern English Poetry: Innovation through Theory,” Foreign Language and Literature Research, Vol. 35, No. 5, 2020, pp. 27-34. [黎志敏:《理论主导下英语诗歌的现代转型》,《外国语文研究》2020年第5期。] In this essay, Li argued that modern poetry and modern poetic theories have to be read side by side to make good sense of both of them.

    [9] T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 289.

    [10] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Innovative Spirit of Modern Poetry: To Develop Human’s Intellectual and Emotional Capacities,” Foreign Languages and Cultures, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2021: 1-8. [黎志敏:《现代诗歌的创新精神》,《外国语言与文化》2021年第2期。] In this essay, Li argues that one major function of modern poetry is to promote the development of human’s intellectual and emotional capacities.

    [11] In fact, this is what we have done in our on-line bilingual course on modern poetry in English. This on-line course can be reached at: https://www.ulearning.cn/course/25598. In this course, Charles Bernstein is invited to have given a talk on an excerpt from Dark City, in which he gives a line to line interpretation. This is indeed the best way to “translate” a difficult modern poem.

    [12] Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 86.

    [13] Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 236-237.

    [14] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 162.

    [15] See the note on the back cover in the book: Ernst Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936).

    [16] A discussion of Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife” by Al Filreis, Emily Harnett, Josephine Park, and Li Zhimin. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/app/public/watch.php?file_id=208367

    [17] Yue Daiyun and others, “Feminism and Literary Criticism,” Free Talks on Literature, No. 6, 1989, p. 19. [乐黛云等:《女权主义与文学批评》,《文学自由谈》1989年第6期。]

    [18] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 523.

    [19] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “The One Way Model of Cultural Interaction: Literary Interactions between China and Cambridge,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012: 111-127.

    [20] R.W. Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2009), 18.

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    Works Cited

    • Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, edited by T. S. Eliot, 281–291. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
    • ——. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, edited by T. S. Eliot, 87–94. London: Methuen, 1920.
    • Emerson, R.W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2009.
    • Gernet, Jacques. A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
    • Huang, Yunte. “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 255–278.
    • Keller, Helen. Story of My Life. C. Rainfield, 2003. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
    • Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
    • Perloff, Marjorie. “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 85-90.
    • Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot, 3-14. Toronto: George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968.
    • Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. NY: Philosophical Library, 1959.
    • Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.
    • Yue, Daiyun and others. “Feminism and Literary Criticism.” Free Talks on Literature, no. 6 (1989): 18–24.

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    Additional Reading

    Read more about Charles Bernstein’s writing and see responses to translations of his work in the boundary 2 special issue “Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences” (volume 48, issue 4).

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    by Sora Han

    Res Nulla Loquitur: A Multimedia Essay in Seven Parts is an experiment in the study of how sound decomposes the words of law. The sound recordings used here were taken from evidence collected during investigations into the deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, Terence Crutcher, Samuel Debose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling. While legal interpretation of these recordings strip them of self-evidentiary meaning, their recomposed repetition here force an encounter with a form of evidence I call, res nulla loquitur, ‘the no-thing speaks.’ Their indestructible questions refuse to settle for and in whatever the law offers as justice.

    Click on the image below to use the essay:

    Photo of the interactive sound sculpture, American Monument, by lauren woods
    Photo of the interactive sound sculpture, American Monument, by lauren woods, the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine, October 5, 2019 to March 16, 2020. Image credits: Photo by Will Yang; courtesy of lauren woods, the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irivne, and the University of California Regents

    Res Nulla Loquitur is a prelude to the article, “North County Jail,” forthcoming in boundary 2.

    Sora Han is Chair of the Department of African American Studies, and Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society, the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program and the School of Law at UC Irvine. She is the author of Mu: 49 Lines of Flight (forthcoming) and Letters of the Law (2015), and a co-author of Lacan and Mahayana Buddhist Thought (2022) and the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, 3rd Edition (2020).

     

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    The Pandemic and Contemporary Capitalism: An Interview with Tuo Li

    The following is an authorized English translation of a Chinese language interview originally published in the Beijing Cultural Review, no.4 August 2020. The original version was published with the title “Puzzles of the Twenty-First Century.”

    Beijing Cultural Review: The current pandemic is transforming from a public health crisis into an all-around economic and social one, and it surely will have a major impact on the functioning of the global capitalist system. What kind of changes do you think this shock will bring about in the world? The contemporary international community is facing a neoliberal order in chaos and retreat, as well as confronting the rise of anti-globalization. There is, on the other hand, a cooperative, inclusive, and diverse international order and “new type of globalization” based on the ideal of “a community of shared destiny” promoted by emergent powers of which China is representative.[i] What do you make of the post-pandemic prospects for this “new type of globalization?”

    Tuo Li: There have been many devastating pandemics in the past. Each time people managed to pull through them and take stock of things, they found their world completely transformed. After this pandemic, are we going to be confronted with a similarly strange new world? Quite possibly. Those from the right like Henry Kissinger to leftists like Slavoj Žižek have been making prognostic statements and there have been all sorts of assessments of the situation, mostly pessimistic and a few optimistic. I have been struck by how nearly all of them take familiar concepts, knowledge, or theories as their point of departure (intellectual resources derived from political science, economics, history, new technologies, international politics, etcetera), many seemingly unaware that these forms of analysis and reflection are bounded by their language and discourse. Their intellectual horizon is more or less predetermined and fixed, regardless of what concrete conclusions they draw by way of forecasts and predictions.

    In my conversation with the scholar Li Ling in Beijing last October (prior to the pandemic), we discussed the future of the world, and I suggested the following: the current developments exhibited clear signs of East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia coming into closer economic and cultural relations and interchanges. There was a real possibility that Asia could be integrated into some kind of shared community or a single entity. Suppose we push the implications of this possibility further: what would happen if that momentum were to continue? I would say that it would most likely have a profound impact on Africa, bringing about further decolonization and modernization so that Africa would join the march toward the xiaokang (achieving a decent and dignified living for all people). Is that possible? Quite probable, even though it could be a journey with many detours and occasional interruptions.  To push the thought further, would this lead to the emergence of some new community or interconnections founded in the shared interests between the two major blocks of Asia and Africa? If we take the shared historical experience of these two world regions seriously (our anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles for independence, our painful experience with economic underdevelopment) as well as the exigencies of economic development, the scenario I have imagined is not only possible, but inevitable.

    We might push this thought a bit further. If what I have described were to take shape, what then would become of Europe? Keep in mind, the combined GDP of China, Japan, and South Korea has already surpassed that of the European Union. Once the two sizeable continents of Asia and Africa become integrated, their economy will certainly attain an even greater size and scale. At such a time, how would the “continent” of Europe respond? What options would it even have? And how many options? Is it possible that the tide of history will have sucked Europe into its great whirlpool, ultimately making Asia, Africa, and Europe into a single integrated entity? If this were to happen, would our world be completely transformed? How much would our understanding of the world be transformed as well? To what extent would our existing knowledge be shattered, especially the fundamental ground of our knowledge about the world today? Looking back, for instance, how would people reassess Eurocentrism? What about the Atlantic and Atlanticism? Would there be an East and West even to speak of?

    Undoubtedly, I am picturing an imaginary scenario, a kind of possibility. Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in recent months, however, the imaginary scenario appears to find powerful support in the worldwide developments that are unfolding before our eyes. Within a short time, not only have the legitimacy, functioning, and capability of nation-states been tested and questioned at multiple levels, but the constant interactions between China, Japan, and South Korea seem to imply the following in an objective sense: the economic force of geoeconomics, more than geopolitics, is fundamentally transforming Asia. Driven by the motor engine of the three East Asian countries, the integration of the two massive continents Asia and Africa will charge forward and cannot but continue. What will happen next, it seems to me, is that Europe cannot but be drawn into this process of integration, sooner or later.

    To imagine the world historic transformations and to let the imaginary scenario guide our thought and reground our understanding of the world will require a few conditions. For example, can we step away, if even temporarily, from the perspective of the nation-state? Can we stop talking about the rise of China and consider the possibility of the rise of Asia? Can we temporarily free ourselves from the predetermined, binary opposition of East/West, a dubious conceptual framework? The realities in the twenty-first century are gradually eroding the stereotypical implications of “advanced” and “backwards” within the East/West binary. Can we propose new frameworks for thinking, alternative possibilities with greater depth of foresight? This isn’t easy. We must dare to interrogate familiar forms of knowledge, especially the theories and concepts that have structured our intellectual frameworks–dare to innovate our fields of knowledge.

    To take your big question seriously “what kind of changes do you think this shock will bring about in the world”, I think we need to start from some new premises, a new conceptual map suitable for our reality, and new directions for thinking, to be able to ask new questions or invest old questions with new significance. For example, is the formulation of “a new type of globalization” appropriate? Does it suit our reality? Are we talking about a self-contained system when we speak of the “operating system of global capitalism,” or does the system contain ruptures and fissures, allowing for the space in which new systems could emerge or flourish (or endowing the word “system” with a new meaning)? What are the historical conditions for achieving the “community of shared destiny”? Does the new impetus for this undertaking exist outside the scope of known capitalist development? Where can we locate the impetus? And which of our current theories and knowledge will serve as our intellectual resources for new questions and reflections? Which ones can only limit our perspective, restraining the movement of thought, even to the point of preventing us from thinking about or coming to know the fast-changing reality and the novel circumstances? These questions require painstaking work and discussion.

    BCR: There’s imaginative power in your line of thinking, but behind your “conceptual map suitable for our reality,” there seems to be a greater concern over the clash between old forms of knowledge and a new reality. So, if we want to come to fully know the world’s transformations following the pandemic, then the first thing to attend to is that we cannot maintain or proceed according to concepts and outlooks which are already unsuited to or in opposition with reality. Instead, we should question existing knowledge and theories. Only this way can we keep pace with the rapid changes of today’s world. Otherwise, we’re unable to raise new questions and cannot see the new reality. Is that right?

    TL: Theory comes in shades of grey, and how could knowledge be any different? It often happens that our knowledge and theory have difficulty keeping pace with reality. Even before the pandemic, the world was already in the midst of a great rupture. The twenty-first century began not so long ago, but there have been signs pointing toward what appears like a huge earthquake separating the new century from the old. The changes in the lay of the land after the quake are more profound than the differences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s as if the earth were sundered here and there into fragments, like so many ravines cutting across each other; but the split was not along a single fissure. The pandemic will not only deepen and remold extant crises of the twentieth century, but it will also bring to the fore new crises that erupted at the start of the twenty-first century. Under these circumstances, we won’t have a choice but consider first and foremost whether the concepts/knowledge/theories we have inherited from the last century remain valid or effective in coming to know our present reality.

    Take Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Drawing on the method of data analysis, the author proposes to fix the problem of inequality in contemporary society by means by a global wealth tax. His argument appears fresh and inspires all sorts of daydreams at a time when the extreme disparity between rich and poor has caused widespread consternation the world over. Piketty’s work has created quite a stir amongst academics and many believe that his is a good, viable solution–through democracy, not revolution–to mitigate the frightening standoff between the 99% and 1%. Consider for a moment what has become of the US government’s first coronavirus bailout, adopted to alleviate the crisis of the pandemic in 2020—some of the forgivable loans for small business fell right into the hands of big corporations and publicly traded companies. The whole thing makes such a mockery of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century! Think about it: even at such a critical juncture of life or death, has the American capitalist system given an inch for Piketty’s suggestions? And keep in mind that this relief bill was solemnly passed by both the US House and Senate strictly according to democratic procedure.

    What is new about a book that many have touted as theoretical innovation? It seems that it is “new” primarily in its use of data analysis to research contemporary economic disparity. In fact, there is nothing new about using mathematical modeling and mathematical analysis in economics. The rise of game theory in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, already set off major transformations in economics. It was from this that the discipline qualified as a “science,” taking the lead in a vogue of scientism. When Piketty takes this approach to studying wealth disparity, he employs the concepts and language of economics in numerous analyses of capitalist accumulation and concentrations of wealth,  but his logical conclusion merely manages to indicate the lack of a transparent mechanism for the accumulation process. It follows that resolving wealth inequality would require establishing a transparent mechanism for distribution amidst operations of the market and capital. This is totally unlike Marx’s analysis, which sought to critique political economic categories like the commodity, relations of production, surplus value, the logic of capital’s movement, etcetera. Piketty’s work offers no more than the semblance of a new way of thinking which would use capitalism to free us from our current difficulties.

    If we recall the critique of capitalism and its history, the idea of implementing “wealth equalization” through some redistributive scheme in order to achieve human equality–it’s not new at all. All you have to do is revisit Marx’s critique of Proudhon’s petty bourgeois socialism and view of equality; the links between Piketty and Proudhon are quite clear except that Piketty’s thinking better conveys the characteristic weaknesses of the new middle class. Contemporary theory and academia have come up with many “innovations” of this type: they don’t dare offend Capital on the one hand (compare for a moment with Proudhon’s bold stance in his day, which was quite fresh for his time. Although Piketty has made some revisions in his argument, there are no substantial modifications to the book’s overall point) and, on the other, they want to uphold justice. So they end up adopting a respectful, dutiful attitude toward capitalism whose self-inflicted wounds they claim to heal. Though Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an example, its meteoric rise and fall shows that if theoretical reflection is unable or unwilling to begin from reality, from new questions and new circumstances, it’s going to be an artifice of theoretical innovation. Current analyses of the world transformations which the novel coronavirus pandemic will bring about must address theory to reality; otherwise, it will be difficult to avoid making hollow predictions and deductions.

    BCR: With the outbreak of this crisis, thinkers across the world have been moved to formulate various intellectual responses. How would you evaluate the discussions which have occurred amongst thinkers and academics amidst the crisis? What are the more pressing issues which you think we must attend to and examine?

    TL: The intellectual responses you’re referring to reflect the complexity of the crises which this pandemic has brought down upon the entire world. Some crises were already there such as the sudden collapse of a global order directed and organized by an outmoded form of finance capital which has been around since the end of World War II (this destruction was a necessary condition for subsequent globalization); other crises, however, are altogether new. It’s as if a great earthquake created a new fault line, like the total bankruptcy of neoliberalism and the crisis of democratic governance.

    Coming to know such complexity hasn’t been easy to begin with, but we’re facing a new difficulty: within and behind a bewildering array of kaleidoscopic opinions are the diverse dialogic relationships amongst political positions and amongst disciplinary knowledges which are at times evident, at times obscured. This chaotic jumble of dialogues is then taken up by old and new media networks to be reproduced, reworked, remolded, amplified, and inserted into other dialogues under the auspices of reliable knowledge when in fact many of them are a sham. This invasion comes to make up a whole secondary level of confusing information and discourse in which ideas get crisscrossed every which way, heaped into jumbles. This constitutes an unprecedented difficulty in coming to know the real world: serious knowledge on the one hand and media information blurring true and false on the other have all been mixed up and piled together to the point where it’s all congealed. This brings us to a bizarre circumstance in which the very bases and starting points of what we’d call knowledge are all mixed into a totally indistinguishable lump; and so we can’t stop most people, including scholars and thinkers, from letting the media lead them by the nose. The bases of their thinking, even if we’re not speaking of knowledge in the strictly traditional sense, do not reflect truly reliable facts; what we have instead is a kind of processed goods created by an amalgam of old and new media, online news, and a whole variety of social media. This leads to extremely intense conflicts amongst thinkers, confused and mistaken as they may have been from the outset, resulting in so many irreconcilable “divides.” The omnipresent forces of capital and politics, at the same time, take every opportunity to insert themselves, using all sorts of strategies to steer and manipulate things so that what were initially false divides eerily assume true substance.

    The intellectual conflicts instigated by Capital in the Twenty-First Century are indeed a representative example of this “divide” in which the false becomes true. At its core, Piketty’s so-called theoretical contribution just wants to shore up capitalism; it’s an intellectual effort to squeeze blood from a stone without an iota of innovation. The title of his book got connected to Marx’s Capital as a purely commercial strategy, owing to the commotion kicked up in the media along with a dose of shameless manipulation and fraud. As a result, intellectual circles on the left and right were all compelled to come out with a flurry of pronouncements, leading to a muddled debate which counted as neither big nor small and ultimately of no meaning at all.  This is the twenty-first century’s unique brand of the absurd; and this absurdity constitutes a major feature of contemporary ideological struggles.

    To return to the global pandemic, the absurd reigns supreme here, too, and in how the West came to understand and critique the Chinese government’s drastic lockdown of Wuhan; the bizarre theatricality of cooperation (or opposition to cooperation) in the epidemic prevention between countries under the auspices of “facemask diplomacy”; the conflicts over human rights and freedom ignited by “stay-at-home orders” in the West, especially when it comes to humanism’s sacred “universal values,” leading to the chilling question of whether one should “prioritize human life or the economy” in the midst of a pandemic, debasing such values in the name of order or even ethics to the point where they are utterly worthless…the instances of the absurd are endless. While of course the media have gotten right wingers up on their toes, it’s been really shocking for us to see European and American intellectuals facing this normalization of the absurd right down to its penetration into daily life with astonishing apathy. Even when there is a voice of dissent, it amounts to hushed, private whispers. All of this really makes you wonder whether they’ve completely forgotten that great author of the absurd who emerged from their own history– of course I mean Kafka.

    For this reason, the first question we need to consider when discussing the consequences of the pandemic is what practical difficulty we are facing here. Does our knowledge support our thinking, or does it in fact prevent us from knowing reality? Philosophically speaking, have we arrived at an epistemological obstacle without knowing it?

    BCR: Since the outbreak of the Covid crisis, Western media has almost collectively chosen to present China’s measures for combatting the epidemic in a negative light, with objectively rational reports in the extreme minority. Amongst them, apart from long-establish prejudices in thinking fixed by ideology, there has truly been an “epistemological obstacle.”  Confronted with the phenomenon of China’s rise, with that of Trump, with the whole wave of populism sweeping the world, Western thinkers (no matter whether they are left or right) seem to have progressively lost their grip on an ability to process things in an objective way. They always presuppose a set of values which are out of touch with objective facts. What is ultimately the reason for this?

    TL: In general, knowledge must be tested by social practice to demonstrate its validity (although it gets more complicated when we get into philosophical thought). Now an interesting set of circumstances has emerged: the pandemic seems to have given us a scanning device to examine the validity of knowledge. After a few months of crudely scanning about, we have made the terrible discovery that what you call “progressively losing grip on an ability to process things in an objective way” is not only extremely widespread but has reached a level of global proportions rarely seen in history. It’s the case for average people just as it is for experts and scholars, to the point where we can ask: is there a problem with our human collective capacity for grasping the truth? This is a grave issue; it won’t be easy to find an answer. I just mentioned the “epistemological obstacle” (an idea from Gaston Bachelard’s The Formation of the Scientific Mind which I’m appropriating for our purposes); perhaps this is a possible perspective on the problem. Now, where is this obstacle? What is it an obstacle to? What constitutes this obstacle? If you keep pursuing questions like this, you can go on at some length.

    We discussed in the above the online super-factory made up of old and new media which is working every second of every minute to process, distort, and remold actual information and discourse. It takes the processed goods or “pseudo-knowledge” and jams it or mixes it into our actual thinking. Do not underestimate the destructive effect this creates. A concrete example would be efforts to trace the origins of the novel coronavirus. In the past, such a task would have fallen upon the medical and scientific community. The intellectual authority of medical and scientific specialists would have acted as a kind of guarantee. They would have final say over the inquiry’s conclusions, irrespective of the methods or means used in the process. But over the last few months, the involvement of different kinds of media has led to truly bewildering developments. It seems the experts have been cast aside while new and old forms of media are making a big racket, with a whole lot of chatter about taking responsibility for finding the origins of the virus. Lots of officials and politicians, along with public intellectuals plus a big number of online hecklers somehow all became decisive figures, with all the confidence and arrogance to take themselves as authorities capable of disclosing the truth.

    Under such circumstances, Western media has fully entered a Cold War mode in which it no longer moves along with or aims to “run” general developments; rather, the media outright sets the course (the various political machinations behind this have abandoned all reticence, no longer playing at the coy ingénue, but this is a different topic). If all you do in the face of such absurdity is denounce it as absurd, what’s the point? Has something gone horribly wrong with the modes of knowledge centered in universities and research institutions? Are they degenerating? Does it mean that the military-industrial-academic complex consolidated during the Cold War is becoming increasingly important for contemporary academic knowledge production? In broader terms, have the circumstances of knowledge undergone fundamental changes? If this is the case, how do the new circumstances factor into today’s epistemological obstacle?

    Regarding major transformations in the circumstances of knowledge, one important aspect has been the increasingly fine distinctions drawn in knowledge by disciplines over the twentieth century. I will confine myself to just a few remarks. Academic disciplines have evolved over the past two or three hundred years to achieve greater precision in the twentieth century. This has brought about numerous great advantages, but the refinement of knowledge has also caused serious issues. Chief amongst them is that each discipline cannot avoid an extreme narrowing of the intellectual perspective, incessantly parceling out fields of knowledge so that they are ultimately like little occupied mountaintops. It’s like a whole bunch of European medieval strongholds all separated by deep trenches and towering walls (each one an ivory tower unto itself). Yet at the same time, the scholars and theorists holed up in their respective forts want to take their disciplinary research findings and invest them to the utmost with universal importance. Even if they are not recognized as true, they can at least offer a key to explaining some dimension of people and the world. So not only are nature, humanity, and society no longer the totality of objects for understanding and knowledge, but knowledge itself has been fragmented like a shattered mirror–– although most people proceed as if the mirror has not been broken and diligently cast about its glimmering shards in search of truth and reality.

    As a result, many consequential figures in contemporary knowledge production, including professors, scholars, theorists, media figures, and scientists disregard objects of knowledge in their totality. They don’t see the forest for the trees. Perhaps if we meticulously research and understand something in the forest – some stretch of swamp or some rare plant very thoroughly–then it will make a great contribution to our understanding of the forest. But where is the forest? And where does knowledge of the forest in its totality reside?

    Maybe you will object that others have already said all of this before, that it’s a bunch of platitudes. So let’s make what I’m saying a bit more concrete by taking up Foucault for a moment. In truth, Foucault has had the biggest influence on my efforts to study and comprehend both the contributions and advances of semiotics, structuralism, and poststructuralism in the latter part of the twentieth century, especially the wave of academic and theoretical innovations (which a lot of people consider to be “postmodern” but that’s inaccurate) constituting trends and the general experience of the 70s and 80s. Whenever I examine other intellectual luminaries from that period’s currents, I always evaluate and compare them from Foucault’s theoretical perspective. On the one hand this helps me find my footing in understanding these theories; on the other, I’ve gradually come to a deeper understanding of his thinking, to the point where I feel that even amongst those who boldly ventured into perilous terrain, he yielded the greatest contributions.

    But here we are, already in the twenty-first century, caught unawares. The break between this new century and the old one has ushered in problems of such acute prominence that we are now past the point of no return. The most urgent amongst them is: what finally is the relationship between the many crises we are facing (“like so many ravines all cutting across each other,” as I said above) and contemporary capitalism? On a related note, if the formation and mechanisms of capitalism today clearly differ from those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the classic capitalism of old was incapable of today’s gigantic expansion in global wealth disparity, but this is merely the first symptom amongst the new problems of contemporary capitalism), where are the differences? What is the relationship between these differences and the crises we are facing? And what is the necessity in said relations? Do all of these questions urgently require a response? What could we gain if we turn to Foucault to pursue these concerns? I’m afraid the results would be quite limited.

    Foucault’s deepest critique of capitalism is found in his work on biopolitics. He conducted a historical investigation of methods and strategies for state governance as they relate to controlling life, investigating the gradual formation of biopolitics under the modern state’s adaptations to capitalism’s development, indicating that this special technology of governance was both unprecedented and challenging to perceive. Furthermore, he linked this technology with a twentieth-century capitalism enveloped by neoliberalism, revealing how neoliberalism provides a framework for the domination of life by economic and political systems, exerting the maximal extractive pressure upon life. He also showed how biopolitics are constituted under neoliberal governmentality. Of course, these arguments are a major theoretical contribution to the broader critical history of capitalism, adding novel perspectives to our understanding of new forms and mechanisms of capitalist domination.

    If you continue with Foucault’s thought, however, you’ll wind up a bit discouraged. You’ll find that his criticism ultimately persists along the route of subjectivity (following the figures of Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan), or that its core theme is the question of the subject: asking how does the method of capitalist domination “enter deep into the heart and mind” so as to construct each individual subject, bundled into an “ego” which is more easily and efficiently “governed.” From there, this domination sets about smoothly conducting the whole of the social body, from the micro to the macro. Quite brilliant, isn’t it? But when your thinking adopts such strategies, it can only help us understand one level of capitalist domination. And once you enter this level, you’ll find that it’s filled with sideroads and crossroads, each little route tangled with proliferations of flora. It’s a sight that can mystify and make you lose your way.

    This has consequence: we don’t even realize that the object of our thinking is being shrunk down to a micro-perspective, fragmented or localized, such that we can no longer see the big picture. How does the structural transformation of twentieth-century capitalism bring about the “de-classicalization” of the capitalist tradition? How has finance capital’s expansion and evolution made it into the hidden headquarters of world governance? And how have science and technology become ideology (arguments of Habermas in this respect are also very important, though Foucault went much further)? How did this new ideology surpass neoliberalism to construct a new, contemporary order within the last twenty years? All of these macrocosmic, possible objects of knowledge have been subtly diminished. Of course Foucault is important, but if we situate him amongst such reflections, then this importance must be reevaluated. Ultimately, this thinker’s foundation is a knowledge steeped in twentieth-century semiotics and structuralism. This brings us back to the previous problem of the excessive disciplinary parceling of knowledge. Regardless of whether we’re speaking about semiotics, discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, or matters related to subjectivity within each intellectual position and school of thought, all of them are overtly or covertly bounded by said problem. Even though interdisciplinarity is extremely salient within Foucault’s theory and scholarship and he expresses a kind of awareness about breaking disciplinary boundaries, his critical perspective still falls short of responding to the colossal monstrosity presented by the abrupt transformations in contemporary capitalism.

    None of this is to diminish Foucault’s work; rather, it’s to emphasize that disciplinary specialization in the humanities today has already imposed formidable setbacks on intellectual activity and knowledge production. If the intellectual capacities of a thinker with such intense critical consciousness as Foucault are still limited by disciplinary specialization, then how far could other critiques ever hope to go? It’s by no means incidental that, with the start of the twenty-first century, people are beginning to appreciate Marx, with Capital becoming a “hot topic” once again. In truth, the amount of twentieth-century academic research and theory on capitalism hailing from both the left and the right has been quite substantial. If we compare this research with Marx, we feel as if it’s missing something. But what exactly is missing? This demands careful thought.

    BCR: How should we understand and analyze the movements of post-World War II capitalism amidst this global crisis? In your view, what are post-World War II capitalism’s major stages? What are the major characteristics distinguishing each stage?

    TL: These are all big questions, each requiring specific attention and research. I think I’d like to return to what we were just talking about from a different angle, posing instead the following: if we want to analyze capitalism’s contemporary development, what then are the essential conditions for this development? There are many things we can examine, but first and foremost, I insist that capitalism has never developed on its own; it is always shadowed by something else–that is socialism. Not only do capitalism and socialism share a history, not only have they been entangled in historical development, but this remains the case even today.

    Several northern European countries are receiving a lot of attention during this pandemic. People believe that these countries’ governments responded quite appropriately and that their responses are deeply connected to the “welfare state” of northern Europe. Let’s pursue this point a little further: how does the welfare state come about? For that, you must trace the history of the socialist movement and proletarian resistance all the way back to Europe’s 1848 revolution. Could something like the welfare state have come to be without the sustained working-class revolutions against the bourgeois domination over nearly a century, without prior instances of bloody repression (just how much insurrectionist blood was spilled in Paris alone? No need to mention the sacrifice of revolutionaries across Europe prior and subsequent to the First World War), as well as the horror inflicted on the bourgeois class amidst all of this reeking bloodshed, to say nothing of the more profound terror visited upon Capital with the success of the October Revolution? We cannot ignore the history of capitalism’s successive victories against socialism nor can we ignore the many concessions that capitalism has had to make to the demands of socialism. It is a history where socialism has imposed continuous self-reform on capitalism (if you neglect this self-reform, you would not be able to understand Capital’s twentieth-century reformulations, variations, and transformations). In short, these both constitute essential conditions for the historical development of Capital through much of the twentieth century.

    You could say that in its status as a capitalist country par excellence, Germany offers an even more compelling explanation. Why is it that Merkel’s administration has shown itself to be so competent in its management of this global crisis, providing such a stark contrast with the US government? I don’t think we can get a full account from just looking at Merkel’s abilities, nor from merely considering the remarkable performance on this occasion by Germany’s public health system. We have to return once again to history: workers’ movements rose, collapsed, and rose again in rapid succession throughout late nineteenth-century Germany; further, though the Weimar period was brief, it left enduring traces, not to mention the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s profound influence over the long course of its history as well as during its extended period in power after World War II. These all posed serious challenges, profoundly marking capitalism in contemporary Germany at the systemic level. These marks constitute elements of socialism within that country (though they are always avoided or selectively “forgotten”). It’s these elements that have played an essential function throughout the present crisis, keeping the government cool-headed.

    My point is that today’s capitalism does not issue from a pure, independent course of development. There has been no such a thing in history, nor is there any such thing now. No matter what capitalist system exists in our present world, it has arrived by facing socialism’s constant challenges. Socialism is indispensable for the understanding of capitalism in history and in reality. We cannot afford to overlook this if we want to understand or critique capitalism. Blind spots in this regard have led to the belief that there is some kind of pure, singular, independent capitalist development. It is from this supposition that many scholars have constructed their object of research, inventing all kinds of arguments and theories of democracy, human rights, globalization, and the end of history. This is not to say that things do not differ in traditions of socialist and leftist thought. From Marx to Hobsbawm, the “two histories” are precisely the requisite, basic condition for thinking modern history. This has been richly demonstrated in numerous books and documents, ever since the Communist Manifesto. If we examine twentieth-century research on capitalism, however, the longstanding, mutual entanglement between these “two histories” is diluted into a history of an increasingly insubstantial sort. It is no accident that in 1989 Fukuyama triumphantly declared “the end of history.” There are two implications buried deep in this “end” and similar theories from earlier texts: the first is to forget the history of the mutually entangled “two histories” in its entirety and forget the challenges and struggles waged by socialism against capitalism; and the second is to bring to an end all actual versions of socialism, irrespective of whether they be utopian or entail the implementation of real experiments.

    The pandemic has given us an opportunity to draw back the curtains layer upon layer on the world stage, revealing the phony tap dance and momentarily expose the numerous mechanisms hidden backstage. The observer, whoever they are, has to use their intellect to understand and reflect anew on this world which they had taken to be familiar. One might be attracted by the novelties on this stage (artificial intelligence, for instance), but the most urgent matter that requires our attention is how to rethink capitalism–which has taken the rosy path to flourish in advancing to globalization (to borrow Hobsbawm’s words, “with the fall of the Berlin Wall capitalism could forget how to be frightened”) and declaring its ultimate victory in the final decade of the twentieth century.[ii] This is a new kind of capitalism that has gone through a process of self-renewal in its form and content. We need to identify and grasp it again.

    BCR: Why is it that the global 99% versus 1% movement which occurred under conditions of a worldwide crisis in capital didn’t bring about new directions for the socialist movement? How do we situate twenty-first century Latin American socialism and Sanders-style socialism within broader socialist movements? What course could we take to break new theoretical ground in socialism?

    TL: Frankly, your questions have hit the nail on the head. Each one of them urgently demands an answer, but I am unable to offer clear or reasonably complete responses. All I can speak to are the observations I have made over the past several years, as well as to several concerns they’ve inspired.

    First, let’s deal with the global 99% versus 1%  movement. The movement reached its peak with “Occupy Wall Street” in 2011. At the time, I had the opportunity to be an observer and take in the situation around Zuccotti Park for myself. Throughout the whole process, New York’s young people were animated with a spirited self-confidence, especially the ferocious zeal they displayed in setting their sights on Wall Street. Looking back today, the young people who occupied the park were by no means daydreaming; they wanted to imitate the tempest of May 1968. The students in Paris who occupied the Sorbonne had roused all of France, showing that the revolutionary tradition of 1848 had only fallen into a deep slumber. Red banners flew over Paris once again. American university students, similarly undertaking an occupation, did not, however, manage their goal of rousing the people. Though Zuccotti Park witnessed two months of fervent activity, they never managed to incite people like the May 68 protest. Just a few blocks away from the park, life in Manhattan was still aglow with its sumptuous indulgence and ceaseless hustle and bustle.

    There are many reminiscences and historical studies on these Occupy movements to assess their successes and failures, and they come to all sorts of different conclusions. Most authors concur that when it comes to the greater goal of overcoming capitalism, these youths have failed. Why did they fail? One factor of particular importance for me is that the core members of the Occupy Movement, like the youths in Paris before them, were more or less “children of the middle class” (to borrow the title of a book called Children of the Middle Class: the Sixties and Cultural Hegemony by Cheng Wei).[iii] The whole of the Occupy Movement was profoundly marked by the middle class, such that it never came up with a profound critique of the root cause for the 99% vs. 1%. What we had instead were battle cries and accusations, and such denunciations can easily fade into far-off echoes, unable to threaten so much as a single hair on capitalism’s head.

    You asked what course we could take to make a true breakthrough in the theory of socialism. That is also a big question! Look at the socialist movements in Latin America. something that our intellectuals in China often overlook. Those movements have staged some of the most spectacular and tragic moments of the twentieth century. Those who do pay attention have remarked on their setbacks and failures whereas, as a matter of fact, the experience of such failures could be extremely valuable toward enriching the development of socialist thought and theory, certainly deserving more consideration than the contemporary academic discussions within the Euro-American academy. My knowledge on these issues is rather limited and I would like to see more Chinese scholars devoting their time researching this, especially those who study Latin America. One scholar named Sao Sa published a book Fertile Hardships: Notes on Latin America in the 1990s that continues to be influential, but focused and in-depth research remains far too scarce.[iv] I think many of us continue to work under the shadow of Eurocentrism and are persuaded that the cutting edge of  the world of thought is still defined by Europe’s new concepts and theories. This is not confirmed by what’s on the ground. At the present, the cutting edge of the world of thought might be migrating to the “south,” Africa, Latin America, and to China.

    As for Sanders’s socialism, this is indeed a novel phenomenon for the United States. Garnering intense support amongst a sizeable number of young people, it has become quite a surging trend. But I see no fundamental difference between the ideas and positions of Sanders and those of Piketty. They both approach issues by focusing on mitigating wealth disparity while leaving the roots of inequality untouched. If we compare these voices to critics of capitalism such as Samir Amin, it becomes crystal clear that Sanders represents the demand for reform from the moderates of the middle-class whereas Amin’s direct and sharp critique is completely different. A salient feature of Amin’s theory is the conviction that the history of capitalism is the history of imperialism (he places particular emphasis on this distinction from Lenin’s theory of imperialism). This history constitutes the political economic structure of “center and periphery,” producing a relationship of dependency between those on the underdeveloped periphery and the imperialist countries. An unbounded, relentless exploitation that spans many centuries has advanced against peoples and regions across the world, continuing up to today. If you work through the many levels of Amin’s analysis, you’ll find exploitation at its core; that is to say, contemporary exploitation under the current conditions of capitalism. Amin does not limit the question of contemporary exploitation within a single country or region, nor does he take the nation-state as a unit for observation and analysis. In his perspective, China is included within a vast Third World “world factory” embedded within relations of globalized exploitation. And it is China’s massive working class and migrant workers who occupy the lowest rung of this modern system of exploitation and, on top of the relations of exploitation, globalization has erected its “superstructure.”

    My brief summary cannot do justice to Amin’s argument. It is merely intended to highlight the differences between Amin and Sanders at a glance. The polarization of the rich and the poor has been Sanders’s main concern; for Amin, inequality is but the material consequence of capitalism’s worldwide exploitation and looting. Sanders will not be able to explain how the 99% vs. 1% came into being. Does it have something to do with capitalism’s worldwide exploitation in our times? If the answer is no, where did the astronomical wealth of the 1% come from? If it is yes, what does the relationship of exploitation look like? Sanders cannot ask such questions, nor would he want to.

    On the other hand, one should not deny the positive significance of the socialist demands that Sanders represents. Decades after the “red thirties” of the twentieth century, such voices have been extremely feeble in American society, almost tainted by something like original sin. Being able to boldly call out like this and winning the ardent support of so many young people (the main part of which remain “children of the middle class”) is very important. It suggests a profound change in American society, which we may at the very least regard as part of what Amin termed a “movement toward socialism.” I want to reiterate, however, that such an appeal is stamped with the temperament of the American middle class who used to enjoy their happy days in the postwar era through the 1970s and are scared of a dim future where there are horrifying instances of those who drop down into the rungs of poverty with each passing day.

    BCR: This kind of evaluation of Sanders’s socialism, particularly comparing Sanders with Amin like that, really sharpens the question of how to innovate socialist theory. Upon the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was a completely capitalist world within Europe’s borders, but socialist concepts and demands were quite alive, with some space assured for the activities of socialist groups of all sorts and with leftist thinking leaning toward socialist thought (including Marxist thought). All of this has continued to develop over recent years and there have appeared important scholars and theorists. In the twenty-first century, especially following this pandemic, do you think that Europe can produce breakthroughs in socialist thought, given its history as having the oldest socialist movements, as well as being the site of the legendary Paris Commune and the glorious October Revolution?

    TL: As a writer and literary critic, literature is my primary field. But contemporary literature is confronted with many difficulties and impediments, all of which are deeply embedded in our current struggles in ideology and intellectual debates and closely bound up with the big issues of our century. The question of whether there can be “breakthroughs in socialist thought” seems to be at a certain distance from literature, but in actuality it is directly related to the development of literature and its future direction. Especially given the conditions under which worldwide consumerism has progressively diluted the relationship between literature and politics, this question also relates to whether we can redefine the position of literature amidst the intense transformations of our current reality. And more, it implicates the future of literary imagination. So I’m quite happy to engage with these questions.

    So, how can we bring about breakthroughs in socialist thought under our present circumstances? There are many discussions of some aspects of this issue, and there’s theory and there’s practice. Earlier, you mentioned that socialist thought in Europe is a sustained practice, continually spurring on new developments. There, postwar leftist thought was vibrant, giving rise to a myriad of contending views, so that Marxist thought constituted its own discursive field. The liveliness and tensions within the field formed an important intellectual landscape in the academic circles of Germany, France, Italy, and so on. From today’s point of view, especially with regards to the new realities brought about by the transformation of global conditions since the pandemic, many aspects of the (postwar) Marxist tradition–their strengths and weaknesses–need to be rethought and reassessed.

    We talked earlier about the blind spots and limits in Foucault’s thinking. If we pursue the origins of these limits, we’d quickly discover that in spite of Foucault’s attempt to overcome and surpass the influence of received intellectual traditions and knowledge, his theories require  a great deal of disciplinary attention. It is his disciplinary knowledge that constitutes his analytic style and strategies as well as structures the hidden logic of his argument. The problem is that this is by no means unique to Foucault’s thought. The majority of the postwar left and Marxist theorists in the West appear to adorn themselves with a layer or layers of disciplinary soft armor, such that their movement is inevitably restrained by it. Even the theoretical activity of a Frankfurt School founder like Adorno self-consciously operates within the bounds of philosophy and aesthetics, not to mention Foucault’s contemporaries or the subsequent generation of leftist thinkers and theoreticians who come with a clear disciplinary background: psychology, sociology, history, semiotics, intellectual history, and so on. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a large number of them began to take up positions at universities, academic or semi-academic institutions as professors, researchers, or specialized producers of knowledge (with the exception of a few practitioners like Gramsci who threw themselves headlong into the frontline of revolutionary struggles).

    None of this could have happened overnight. When we reflect on how academic knowledge and Marxism developed, we can observe a process of transformation over the course of the twentieth century: a gradual shift in the center of gravity toward the critique of “hot” issues like modernity, subjectivity and its construction, the rational and the unconscious, identity politics, cultural semiotics, etcetera. Although the many theories and arguments produced amidst this shift maintained a more or less critical stance vis-a-vis capitalism, and some gave impetus for a more probing critique (postcolonialism stands out in particular), most of them have moved away to some extent from the direction of Marx’s Capital, whether it be in the object of these theories, in constructing an understanding of that object, or in the conceptual systems posed according to said object. This becomes a source of dilemma any time that we need to explain the opposition at a world-scale created by the massive wealth disparity between the 1% and 99%; or any time that we need to analyze how the relations of exploitation differ between contemporary capitalism and the capitalist system in the past; or any time that we need to draw on the relations of exploitation as a point for breaking through to the production of a theoretical account of contemporary capitalism’s newest developments and manifestations. All these moments will leave us feeling that these theories not only fail to be particularly helpful, but they fill us with doubts. When the youth in Zuccotti Park held high placards declaring “We are the 99%,” “Give us back our future,” or “Power to the people,” they were expressing their confusion and uncertainty at an unconscious level, unaware that they were actually asking: “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” This is because they did not know what historical objectives they wanted to write on their own protest banners.

    This reminds me of a few lines from Ouyang Jianghe’s poem, Autumn in Zuccotti Park:

    Were the puzzles of Capital to be

    as easily decipherable as 1+1

    the young people would spurn 2

    just as they spurn reality

    The question has gone bad, not the answer.

    The key is how to pose the right question. This bring me to Althusser. In Reading Capital, Althusser repeatedly discusses and analyzes a crucial topic: in order to understand and know a theory, it is essential first and foremost to grasp what “problematic” it presents. This means understanding and studying the object of knowledge’s theoretical determinations as well as the problems posed from said object’s determinations. To pose a problem like this necessitates establishing a series of fundamental concepts. The movement of these concepts as well as the shared movement amongst concepts naturally constitutes a space of thought with its own logic. Thus, the problematic’s presentation and determination are decisive, delimiting a kind of theoretical field of vision as well as boundaries of thought.

    Frederick Jameson’s thinking and research, for example, touches upon a broad number of fields with wide-ranging interests across the disciplines, aiming to overcome the limits of the academy. As we know, the most important facet of Jameson’s theoretical work is “the cultural logic of late capitalism” and “postmodern society” (though there have been some shifts in his most recent studies). The parameters of this object determine the fundamental concepts he studies such as late capitalism, consumer society, modernity/postmodernity, time and space, text/narrative, fragmentation, psychoanalysis, etcetera (a kaleidoscopic conceptual grouping). These all constitute a theoretical field that manages to scan the vast postmodern terrain of capitalist society’s cultural production and ideology: striving on the one hand as much as possible to discover the internal logics which thread through or mutually overlap within said terrain; and on the other hand, conducting a comprehensive and detailed analysis of how capitalism accomplishes the colonization of the heart, mind, and spirit (quite a few theorists have worked exhaustively on this problem, but I think Jameson’s is the most meticulous and penetrating). This has presented us with a new map for understanding twentieth-century capitalism.

    However, any attempt to rely on Jameson’s theories in order to formulate an understanding of how today’s globalized capitalism accomplished the miracle of the 1% versus 99% will only end in disappointment. How, you may ask, have we come back once again to this topic? My answer is that the 1% versus 99% is not a number; it’s at once a symbol or indicator of how unequal the contemporary world is, as well as a point of entry for thinking. The secret of contemporary exploitation is hidden in this number; the secret of how contemporary capitalism has come to dominate the world is hidden in it. The 1% versus 99% is a worldwide phenomenon–how did it come about? Is there a global network of exploitative relations that are omnipresent, extending to all regions? In our contemporary globalized world, how can we grasp the relationship between brutal exploitation and global capitalism? In my estimation, these are issues that those on the left and people pursuing socialist ideals cannot avoid or dodge in their thinking. So you will see why I became disappointed by Jameson’s research on “late capitalism,” even though I like his work very much and feel naturally drawn to it (this has to do with my many years of work on literary criticism).

    Returning to Amin, if we compare him with Jameson—perhaps some people will feel this doesn’t make for a good comparison, that it’s inappropriate. Since both are critiques of capitalism, they are in the lineage of Capital and I think there are areas where we can compare them. Between Jameson and Amin, who can better clear up our confusion? Who affords a better understanding or presents more penetrating reflections on capitalism in the late twentieth century and the newest developments in recent decades since the turn of the century? It’s Amin. I think Amin’s direction of thought is more closely aligned to the general direction indicated by Capital. This closeness warrants reflection. Amin not only has a background growing up in Egypt, during which he took active part in the Third World anti-colonial movement, but his academic engagements were never particularly academic. He participated in the practices of economic development in Egypt and other African countries, serving for example as specialist in Mali’s Ministry of Planning for three years. Such experience inevitably shaped Amin, lending an altogether different luster to his situation as a leftist intellectual.

    I spoke of Jameson as a mere example of academic thinkers. It often happens that disciplinary specializations (forms of knowledge production and standards for modernization are actually behind this­, and such specialization is the consequence of reforms in knowledge by capitalism’s evolution since the eighteenth century–scientific knowledge production has gradually become the model which the humanities must emulate) prevents us from explaining/revealing the obscured conditions of contemporary capitalist development. But this type of “prevention” cannot be wholly attributed to the problem of knowledge. If we analyze this further, we will find a more complex reason. Let me turn to another example: Sartre.

    I have a special respect for this philosopher. Following the tumultuous period of “Stalinism,” when many were talking about how horrendous socialism had become, he maintained a critical position toward capitalism while openly declaring support for socialism. During the years of protest in France, when the leftist youth publication La Cause du peuple was closed down by the state and its head editor arrested, Sartre not only sought to take responsibility as director of the publication, but also distributed it in the streets of Paris with Simone de Beauvoir, declaring support for the student rebellion. Such behavior was quite rare amongst leftist intellectuals of the era, truly uncommon. However, one cannot deny that Sartre’s existential philosophy, literary works, or his quotidian ethics and behavior also clearly bore the hallmarks of a middle-class intellectual. I’ll go so far as to say that if you are interested in the connection between the development of twentieth-century humanist thought and middle-class ideas, Sartre might be a good specimen. But this brings us to the situation of the intellectual in capitalism over recent centuries and the transformation of this figure, which already goes well beyond our current topic.

    BCR: The intellectual pedigree you’ve described offers a clear view of what you call the middle-class tendency’s considerable presence in the Euro-American left, clear in both their critical work and their militating against earlier capitalist contradictions. Could you explain more generally the development of this intellectual tendency on the European left?

    TL: This entails a whole series of difficult questions: where is the middle class in contemporary capitalism? How do we define it? How do we determine its social position? Particularly vexing is the question of how to subject it to class analysis. There are too many texts and theories broaching these issues in the fields of sociology, history, literary theory, cultural studies, Marxism, etcetera. Some of them are popular and have provoked a range of responses. Even if I tried to “explain more generally,” it would be extremely difficult to clarify the matter.

    All I can speak to is my own decision: I not only acknowledge the historical existence of the middle class, but recognize to a high degree the description and critique of the new middle class in Charles Wright Mills’s 1951 book White Collar: The American Middle Class (although it’s about America, the argument is generalizable). I think that the new middle class which first appeared in developed countries following World War II ushered in a new reality: on the one hand, it delivered a massive blow to what formerly was the basic framework for understanding the opposition between capitalist and proletariat classes as well as to received ideas about the constitution of classes in capitalist society; on the other hand, as an actually existing class, this new class intervenes in many aspects of the real world, especially cultural politics and ideology. It is difficult to measure the major impact this new class has had on society, be it constructive or destructive. The relationship between this impact and the evolution and revitalization of contemporary capitalism is a major topic which warrants its own program of study. Your question would fall within such a program.

    To avoid abstract talk, I prefer to draw on concrete examples. A few days ago, I reread Sartre’s Words. His autobiography is taken to be Sartre’s application of psychoanalytic method to his own intellectual development. Since it’s an autobiography, much of the book is filled with realistic details and I was struck by many of these details. What did his childhood hardships amount to? Nothing more than other children refusing to include him in their games at the Luxembourg Gardens. Sartre was removed from the many sufferings and feelings wrought by the anxieties of poverty. As a child, he only had two concerns: reading—too many books at his grandfather’s, too many old books and journals to choose from amongst the bouquinistes along the Seine; and writing—he already believed he was an author at ten years of age, and what concerned him was whether his grandfather and mother would appreciate his writing. Did he have other worries? Of course, but they’re a bunch of little melancholic sentiments bound deep inside his ego. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but isn’t it natural that a thinker who enjoyed the tranquility and safety of a happy childhood would choose to dedicate his life’s intellectual energies to the beautiful and attractive concept of “freedom?” Isn’t it reasonable? Or could we at least say that it’s necessary (on this point, his plays like Dead without Burial are an even clearer expression than his philosophy)?

    You might object that Sartre is just an example. When we look the École Normale Supérieure, that cradle of French thinkers, it’s apparent that many thinkers who emerged from there, on both the right and left, have all more or less the same background as Sartre. They are all children of the middle class or upper class and excepting those who lived through the Second World War, they all shared the experience of crossing the same three thresholds: entering school, exiting school, and lastly entering academia to become members of the intellectual elite who went on to dominate the world of thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. I often wonder if these things deserve closer scrutiny and if they might yield many potential research topics worth exploring.

    Another interesting specimen would be the intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group, of whom Virginia Woolf was a representative (maybe some would think that members of this group are a bit too distant from our present, but such “classics” never go out of date). Although the members of this group are all well-known, they hail from every manner of profession. Within the set was author E. M. Forster, art critics and aesthetic theorists Clive Bell and Roger Fry, and economist John Maynard Keynes. In addition, there were those extremely close but outside the group proper like the philosopher Bertrand Russel, T.S. Elliot, and James Joyce—all of them crème de la crème. What is it that brought these people together, and in such an intimate fashion, that their association has all but become an enchanting myth? If we pursue this question, of course there are many factors. But one thing is important, which is their shared middle-class cultural interest.

    I have come across research on the middle class that considers cultural interest to be the primary element in constructing the middle class (John Smail’s The Origins of Middle-Class Culture is a representative example, posing cultural interest as a special mechanism constituting the middle class). I don’t agree, but I think we can make “cultural interest” into a point of entry for class analysis. From this perspective, what brought the Bloomsbury Group together is precisely their shared cultural interest. It is not only embodied in their origins at Cambridge, the Cambridge culture shared amongst “Cantabrigians” is world famous; what’s more, it’s incarnated in daily life through the refined quality of their aspirations, in their transformation of passion into literary and aesthetic practices. In addition, the sum total of Bloomsbury intellectuals’ practices has made an indelible contribution to twentieth-century modernist cultural development.

    In my view, modernist literature and art are cultural constructions through which the middle class (it would be a bit more apt to say the new middle class) articulate their political aspirations and social ideals. It is a novel culture distinguishing this new class from the bourgeoisie, the old middle class, and from the urban petty bourgeois class. It instigated a complex, longstanding intellectual clash in the ideological realm over the course of the twentieth century which extended to philosophy, aesthetics, and literature. It continues to exert its influence even today. Although there has been a considerable amount of research on this topic, there is actually a dearth of dedicated class analysis. In sum, if the Bloomsbury group is a mere example, it would follow to ask: is it an exception? If you consider the other groups resembling this cultural set, you’ll see that it is a universal phenomenon found throughout modern intellectual circles. It is what life is generally like for contemporary intellectuals. How similar are the circumstances in other fields? And are they as widespread?

    This calls to mind a few relevant circumstances in the leftist thought in the West.

    No matter how theorists differ in standpoint or orientation, many innovations were profoundly influenced by the theoretical breakthroughs of the late nineteenth century and fin de siècle. With regards to the major transformations in Euro-American theories, Nietzsche and Freud were of particular importance, as well as structuralism a bit later. If we claim that the theoretical tradition of the previous generation always exerts an “anxiety of influence” on the subsequent generation, this “anxiety” is not at all apparent amongst many scholars and theorists of the twentieth century. On the contrary, you get the sense that they take great pleasure in citing Nietzsche and Freud as they develop their own ideas. What warrants more attention is that this phenomenon is quite clear in the field of Marxist thought. If you examine a bit the last hundred years of “Western Marxism” or “Neo-Marxism,” many revisions and developments of Marxism are closely connected to Nietzsche, Freud, or structuralism (as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis). Amongst them, Erich Fromm had exerted a considerable influence through the direct application of Freud to supplementing and remolding Marxism.

    As a major member of the Frankfurt School, Fromm forces us to pose the following question: if this is a development of Marxism, does it exhibit divergences from the general direction of Capital? Of course you may ask: but didn’t Freud discover a new continent within the human spirit and social life? Didn’t classical Marxism neglect the relationship between elements of human psychology and social life, inadequately theorizing these aspects? So what new issues did Fromm add to this?

    I have two responses. First, Fromm didn’t “add” to Marxism. He began by defining Marxism as a sort of humanism and, on that basis, took great pains to reform it. Secondly, my concern isn’t how to evaluate his reform, as there are far too many discussions and debates over this within theoretical and academic circles. This isn’t what I’m interrogating, what interests me is this: if Fromm is not merely another example but part of a widespread phenomenon in leftist theoretical development over these years, everyone would recognize it as being of “scholarly interest”  (which inevitably calls to mind the Bloomsbury Group’s shared “cultural interest”). Are there any divergences from the general direction of Capital? If so, what is the cause? Does this relate to the rise of the twentieth-century new middle class which we’ve discussed at such length here? Since the vast majority of intellectuals are producing knowledge in the academic system as researchers and professors and many of them are members of the middle class, can we say that a kind of middle-class left wing has emerged from it? Or a middle-class Marxism?

    I’ve mulled over this for quite a long time, but that question is too big. Every time I raise it, I feel incapable of offering up any judgement. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Capital came back into perspective, with appeals to reevaluate the intellectual terrain from the perspective of Capital becoming more frequent. Given these new circumstances, I think these concerns of mine have some relevance and are worth discussing. This brings me to Žižek who likes giving talks all over the place, proclaiming himself on the one hand to be a resolute communist while, on the other, insisting that he is a pessimist. Although his thinking is full of razzle-dazzle (it seems that he cannot but think or speak under the shadow of Lacan), his pessimism may be genuine. As early as 1949, when Sartre was responding to questions from the “Global Citizens Movement,” he said something to this effect: if we avoid intervening in concrete, actual politics, the movement can only solicit “those strata of the petty bourgeois class and the middle class who always fear disorder, whose positions are forever shifting, and who haven’t a shred of political experience.”[v] This would fit my description of Žižek. Where is the root of his pessimism? Doesn’t it come from the kind of “strata” Sartre described?

    BCR:  In the final analysis, how should we regard China’s experience of socialism in practice from both the perspective of evolutions in international socialist theory and from critical theory on contemporary global capitalism? How has China continuously developed Marxism through its far-reaching process of socialist practice by engaging its own long historical experience and ways of thinking? What kind of value and significance does this practice have for the theory and practice of the international socialist movement?

    TL: Don’t you think it would be better to narrow this down a little, so that we can reflect on your question within a manageable scope? China’s revolution, China’s socialism, and the ensuing reform that shook the world and is regarded as a historical miracle are but part of an extremely complex historical process with its achievements and setbacks. And the direct expression of this kind of complexity can be identified when the intensification of the social contradictions that have been difficult to reconcile in any given time become all of a sudden very acute. These converge and transform into the determinant knots of social contradictions that always present a thorny issue for historical analysis. Rarely do these issues get clarified as such, so our tendency is to either ignore them or try to get around them. This is true of past history as well as of our present moment.

    China has gone through decades of reform. Its GDP reached 14.343 trillion US dollars (according to the World Bank) in 2019, in second place to the United States. This is an incredible achievement. At the same time, the 2019 Gini coefficient of gross income inequality in China hit 0.465 whereas the United States was at 0.485. These two figures are shocking. How could it be that a developing country like China has more or less the same Gini coefficient as the USA, the wealthiest country on the planet? This needs to be explained, though doing so is no easy task. It’s first among the thorny problems I just indicated. When confronted by such issues, it’s not convincing to simply affirm China’s reform and justify it. Upon reflection, the situation is tremendously complex. All this has occurred in the process of China’s “reintegration” into the world economy. Can anyone explain the contradiction away by suggesting that one must pay the price for China’s economy to get assimilated to global capital? Or is it, as Amin pointed out, that in the process of becoming the “world’s factory,” China’s vast working class and migrant labor cannot but be placed at the lowest rung of a globalized system of exploitation? If this is true, how is the global system related to the Chinese system? How do we analyze the many contradictions that overlap, interrupt or entangle each other constantly? All this deserves careful studies.

    Those who don’t want to spend time working through these issues believe that matters are quite simple, and that there are no puzzles to speak of. One of the popular positions states that China’s reforms have turned it into state capitalism and the country has slipped into global capitalism. Therefore, wealth disparity is not only impossible to avoid but also inevitable. China can only continue down this road, and there’s no turning back. This view meets with substantial counterevidence: the country has invested tremendous resources in a nationwide campaign to lift millions of peasants out of poverty. The goal for 2020 is that all of China’s core and peripheral regions must eliminate absolute poverty, a hard target devoid of any market value. China has elected to take major losses in economic development, including the closing down or transformation of businesses, in order to implement green environmental protections, working strenuously to maintain equilibrium between a population of one billion four hundred million and the ecology; the country persists in installing an “Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal” high-speed rail network covering all of China in full knowledge that short-term revenue will not suffice to cover debts, and with the sizeable risk of a “gray rhino” threatening the overall economy.[vi] Even though there are numerous problems with state-owned enterprises, producing massive contradictions with the market economy, carrying various economic risks, becoming an object of denunciation within China and abroad, instigating an endless stream of criticism, the reform as a whole maintains support for the public economy as its guiding policy.

    The economic behaviors that violate market norms are quite numerous throughout the recent decades of reform and have been taken as a matter of course, as if this is how things should be. If not, why would you call it reform? To consider matters further, none of these behaviors can be adequately explained by capitalism alone, including the argument of state capitalism. What kind of capitalism in the world would have undertaken such crazy activities that are not only ill-suited to market rationality but run contrary to “economic norms”? Once we put this question out there, we can then deal with the level of difficulty I have raised: how do these matters relate to the Chinese system? Is this what Deng Xiaoping famously described as “crossing the river by feeling the stones”? If so, what are the “stones”? And what is the “river”? How do we analyze the contradictions formed out of the many overlapped, interrupted, and entangled elements within it? Can we explore and develop a new analytic framework? Can we cast off the dualist logic of affirmation and negation?

    As we turn our attention to other, ideologically related fields similarly fraught with complications, the questions with no easy answers become more daunting. There was a nationwide debate online last year over the “996” work system in China which deserves mention here. The “996” routine (9AM to 9PM working hours, 6 days per week) has been practiced nationwide for some years and most people have begun to take it as a norm by force of habit. On the other hand, the new norm has caused major social conflicts because it has inflicted severe fatigue on hundreds upon thousands of white-collar workers. The rise in the number of young and middle-aged workers who suffered sudden death syndrome made this increasingly evident. Imagine Alibaba co-founder Ma Yun [Jack Ma] coming out with a speech at this particular juncture to defend the 996 system. He went so far as to say: “I consider it a tremendous stroke of good fortune to be able to work 996.” Ma Yun did not anticipate any trouble when he made this statement but his speech unexpectedly set off a firestorm on social media. His view of “good fortune” or happiness immediately started a “flame war” online, which was followed by widespread discussions and debates.

    Big or small, this tempest in a teapot warrants some reflection. First, while supporters or detractors all believe that the 996 work system violates labor laws, the debate soon shifted its focus to the subject of whether or not young people should have a “spirit of dedication” or whether this practice belongs to normal “company culture.” As for the essential question of whether the 996 work system is legitimate at all and several other important issues relating to the logic of that question, they are left completely untouched. For example, how did this system manage to escape people’s attention for so long, assented to over the course of China’s reforms? How did it achieve the legitimacy to quietly circumvent labor laws? How did it get tacit approval from the state, society, and individuals? What are the direct and indirect relations between this system and economic reforms? Is the 996 work system related to what Amin saw as the transnational system of exploitation formed over the process of globalization? And furthermore, why is it that when the 996 work system finally ignited the rage of young people who rose up to criticize it and question it, a fair number of people trivialized the issue or reduced and atomized it into a discussion of individual choice for personal development, (underlying all this is their atomistic logic which takes the “individual” as the point of departure to explain the world, or the ontological foundation upon which liberalism invariably depends)? What seemed to be a tempest in a teapot contained a whole load of questions on practice as well as on theory, and none of them simple.

    We cannot expect the young people who joined in the discussions and debates to pursue rigorous theoretical analyses of the above. That would be unrealistic expectation. Rather, my concern is with the intellectuals and scholars who remained absent from the entire debate. Is it not their job to develop theoretical analyses? Why not a peep from any of them? You could explain by saying that there are so many news every day to keep people busy, and most of them will not have paid attention to the event. Well, any flutter of a butterfly wing can stir up a tempest online, how come this particular butterfly went unnoticed? There’s another side to this: what if the intellectual world had been attentive and intervened? Would they have been able to abstract the concrete problems of this debate at a theoretical level? Would they have been able to generalize them in relation to globalized capitalism, relating the concrete issue of the 996 work system to labor history, connecting it to the rise of twentieth-century service sectors and the subsequent formation of a new social structure? Would they have been able to link all this to the critique of political economy, thereby exploring the depth of some of those ideas? I have my doubts.

    After the Cultural Revolution, the dominant intellectual discourse in China has never completely cast off the superstition of “civilization” symbolized in the documentary TV series River Elegy.[vii] This superstition has been a fog bank rolling over the rough seas of China’s reform years, constantly hanging over the progress of countless intellectuals. As they survey through the fog, their gaze is in thrall to an ever-present expanse of blue ocean over yonder. At the conceptual root of this enthrallment are the liberalism and neoliberalism that have prevailed over decades through various permutations in the fields of politics and ideology. Now that they have experienced the collapse of Eurocentrism and borne witness to a world-scale crisis in the democratic system, will they emerge from that dense fog? Hard to say. It is highly unusual if not a miracle in modern history for a country’s intellectuals to swing collectively toward right-wing thought as Chinese intellectuals have done over the past several decades, with many embracing capitalism rather than critiquing it. We might look upon this behavior as a weighty “miracle.” Somehow, this particular miracle got muddled together with the awe-inspiring miracle of economic reform itself whereas the space between the two miracles has been left a massive intellectual blank. The arduous work of thinking about twentieth-century socialism and capitalism gets swallowed up in this blank space. It is not surprising that the intellectuals paid scant attention to the 996 fracas, or perhaps they did take notice but willfully ignored it.

    To conclude, I’d like to touch upon a different but related subject. Over the past few years, especially since the global pandemic broke out this year, some scholars and theorists in the West have begun to realize that the world is undergoing fundamental transformations. It seems that these changes are inextricably bound to China and one cannot leave China out of the picture when one wants to explain the global changes, or adjust the current order to accommodate them, or look to the trajectory of future development. Many people are ill-suited to such conditions, and those in the Euro-American world in particular (in spheres of politics, commerce, military, academia– as well as the masses of people in general) seem unable to adapt. As a writer, I can almost feel their dual torment—an indescribable feeling–that the situation is causing them at emotional and psychological levels. For a people who have long been scorned by them as the “Chinese” over the last two or three hundred years to suddenly leap forward (by the measure of history, it’s the blink of an eye) and move to the center of the world stage where no piece could be played without China, or any forceful act of exclusion could descend easily into farce–this is indeed an intolerable and awkward state of affairs, isn’t it?

    Not only can I imagine their spiritual torment but I can empathize a bit. With a dedicated analysis, I might even use these complicated feelings to write a book of psychoanalysis. I’d call it Turn of the Century Torment. For the purpose of such a book, I might find it easier to understand how the right wing in the West feel threatened by the global transformations to discover that the great wealth (spiritual, material, political, economic, and cultural) amassed by them over the past five hundred years are vanishing right into thin air before their eyes. Looking on helplessly as these riches suddenly start to decay, even possibly scattering once and for all into the ether, who wouldn’t burn with anxiety? Why were the happy days following the collapse of the Berlin Wall so short? Why did history suddenly declare that it hadn’t ended? Why is humanity being stung once again by a draught of Cold-War air, sending a chill across every corner of the globe? There’s nothing unusual in this.

    As a point of comparison, however, circumstances of the Euro-American left are quite different. I would not use torment or anxiety to describe their response to these new conditions, especially regarding any issues relating to China; rather, it comes with a lot of murkiness and ambivalence. Starting from the twentieth century, the left’s attitude towards China’s revolution and reform has always been ambivalent, with a few notable exceptions (like Sartre, Althusser, Amin). Read their works and you’ll see that the parts which should have mentioned or discussed China are carefully suppressed or receive a bland description. They pretend not to see the relevance and might as well say nothing.

    To tell the truth, this arrogance never ceases to astonish me. Do you really believe the October revolution and China’s revolution did not change the course of human history in the twentieth century? Did Lenin and Mao not seek to carry out socialist experiments at the institutional level for the first time after centuries of brewing and development? It is true that the actual practices of these two revolutions led to many problems. To insist that these practices (the two revolutions’ experimental forms of practice warrant specialized research) are the most valuable feature of this history is not to deny that many of their experiments were not successful; some failed, and these failures led to disastrous consequences to the extent that certain outcomes ran completely counter to the socialist movement’s aims and intentions. This is precisely the kind of reflection and research we need for developing socialist theory. In the long history of socialist movements, there is no dearth of positive and negative experience and some works of Marx and Lenin have dealt with these experiences at great length. If these studies and reflections are already part of the wealth of Marxism, why can’t we do the same when it comes to China? What is the point of avoiding the subject? Why trying to skirt around it?

    Whatever it is, it seems to me that the latest developments no longer allow for any room to continue hiding or ducking about. So why not offer a candid explanation for all of that avoidance? Why can’t one work up the courage for self-examination and self-criticism? Eurocentrism, for example, remains a topic for deep reflection. I have noticed how leftist intellectuals have pushed the criticism of Eurocentrism in recent decades. Their efforts extend to disciplines like history, anthropology, and literature around the whole world, creating a wave of criticism without precedent. Will these intellectuals ask themselves and examine whether Eurocentrism has affected themselves or not?

    Another difficulty for contemporary leftists everywhere in understanding China and China’s revolution is its full complexity. The complexity of this revolution lies at the heart or foundation for all of modern China’s various problems. Of course, all revolutions are complex, but the complexity of each is different. Our task is to distinguish each layer of complexity, identify its particularity, and provide an explanation that raises that particularity to a theoretical level, such that it’s suited to the theoretical language of today’s world. Who should undertake this difficult task? Who would be the suitable candidate? I thought that Chinese intellectuals would be the first to attempt it. But there seems to be very little research devoted to the complexity of China’s revolution and its reforms. My sense of this could be inaccurate, perhaps there is some research but I’ve had limited exposure. I should point out, however, that research on the revolution and China’s reforms in recent years hailing from the left and right either to defend them or to attack them has produced books and articles so numerous that they’d surely amount to an astronomical figure.

    Still, I’d like to single out two recent books here. One is Wang Hui’s The Birth of the Century and the other Han Shaogong’s Epilogue to a Revolution.[viii] I think these two books are focused on the question of complexity to a certain extent. The two works’ arguments and discussions are organized around the same core issues; and even though each book has its own merits, with considerable difference in argumentative method and writing style, the arguments of their books consistently take up three complexities–China’s revolution, China’s socialism, and China’s reforms–as their objects of analysis. Their composition is distinguished by a fresh argumentative logic quite unlike those found in other revolutionary histories, intellectual histories, studies of ideology, etcetera. They demonstrate that it is possible to have a Chinese approach to these questions. As the contemporary pandemic exerts intense transformative impact on the world, Wang Hui and Han Shaogong’s thinking assumes new importance, making it particularly urgent to understand the China question’s complexity. Perhaps one will not approve of certain of their views (for my own part, I can’t totally agree with certain positions and have discussed and debated with them); however, I do hope that the complexity explored in these two books could be a source of enlightenment for all those concerned with issues relating to China. They can help free us from the crude method of affirmation or negation, aid us in casting off the logic of dualistic thinking, investigate and explore new analytic frameworks suitable for seeking truth from facts. I also think that if these two books could be translated into English or other foreign languages, if would give the left in other countries and regions the opportunity to learn how Chinese thinkers approach  history and problems of practice and how critical reflections can be conducted at a theoretical level. This would certainly be quite helpful, especially for Marxists in the Euro-American left.

    In a footnote to For Marx discussing differences between Marx and Hegel, Althusser agrees with the following position: “Hegel and Marx did not drink at the same source.”[ix] Here we can extend this a bit further: if we leave aside the principles of socialist thought and sources of revolutionary theory and depart instead from a revolution’s circumstances and conditions, China’s revolutionaries–no matter whether it be Mao Zedong or his predecessors, or his students–did not “drink at the same source” as European revolutionaries. I am referring to the theoretical advances and battle strategies produced from concrete circumstances and conditions, including the kind of language employed to achieve such theoretical and strategic thinking. Perhaps the complexity of China-related questions can be traced here, and this is particularly difficult for western leftists intellectuals to grasp, which is why they’ve been ducking and skirting around. I wonder if they would be able to comprehend Wang Hui’s and Han Shaogong’s works even if they take them seriously. Would they turn around right away? Would they start tasting water at a Chinese source? Not so easy, it seems. Ultimately, we must be concerned with our own conditions. History has presented a rare and unique opportunity– the whole world is turning to China with these questions: where did you come from? Who are you? Where are you going?

    Do we have the option of not answering? Can we at least strive for answers that will satisfy ourselves?

     

    Tuo Li (author) is a writer, literary critic, and former senior editor of Beijing Literature. He has written film screenplays and authored numerous essays on Chinese literature, cinema and art. His most recent books include a novel Wuming zhi (Beijing Blues) and an essay collection called Xue beng hechu? (Where was the Avalanche?). He currently lives in New York and is Adjunct Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University.

    Harlan Chambers (translator) is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Chinese literature and culture at Columbia University. His dissertation in-progress explores possibilities for socialist cultural politics in the wake of China’s revolution. He has co-translated several essays by Wang Hui and published his own research in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.

     

    [i] [Translator’s note] “New type of globalization” and “community of common destiny” are formulations which figure prominently in the recent Xi Jinping administration’s political discourse.

    [ii] Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, 413.

    [iii] Cheng, Zhongchan jieji de haizi men: 60 niandai yu wenhua lingdao quan [The Children of the Middle Class: the Sixties and Cultural Hegemony], 2006.

    [iv] Sao, Sixiang de luyou: xibanya sanji [Fertile Hardships: Notes on Latin America], 2002.

    [v] See the appendix to the Chinese translation of Sartre, Ci yu [Words], 1988, 248.

    [vi] [Translator’s note] Akin to but distinct from the unexpected “black swan” event, a “gray rhino” is a threat which is at once highly probable and generally neglected. This idea was proposed by Michele Wucker in her 2016 book The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore. The 2017 Chinese translation by Wang Liyun was a major bestseller.

    [vii] He shang [River Elegy], 1988. Directed by Xin Jun.

    [viii] Wang, Shiji de dansheng [Birth of the Century], 2020; Han, Geming houji [Epilogue to a revolution], 2014.

    [ix] Althusser, “On the Young Marx”, For Marx, 77 fn39.

  • Emma Lezberg and Christian Thorne — “Always a Picture Too Big to See”: The Missing Maps of Immigrant Fiction

    Emma Lezberg and Christian Thorne — “Always a Picture Too Big to See”: The Missing Maps of Immigrant Fiction

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

    by Emma Lezberg & Christian Thorne

    Literary theorist Ursula Heise and novelist Amitav Ghosh share a vision for contemporary fiction: they both consider it crucial that narrative, in an age of intensified interconnection, address global concerns.[1] Heise asks how art can “foster an understanding of how a wide variety of both natural and cultural places and processes are connected and shape each other around the world, and how human impact affects and changes this connectedness” (Sense of Place 21). Ghosh specifies Heise’s request: where will we find the tools to write about climate change on the scale the problem demands?

    Both Heise and Ghosh, as Heise herself notes, are picking up the inquiry Fredric Jameson raised decades ago: both are, we might say, searching for a way out of postmodernism. Jameson identifies a certain problem generated by late capitalism: “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global, multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 16). Our lives are increasingly shaped by global processes inaccessible to our senses. Yet Jameson argues that our artistic moment is characterized precisely by its inability to make sense of the world-system as a whole:

    [T]he phenomenological experience of the individual subject—traditionally, the supreme raw materials of the work of art—becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed-camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong[.…] Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience[…]” (“Cognitive Mapping” 349)

    This contradiction, Jameson concludes, “poses tremendous and crippling problems for a work of art” (“Cognitive Mapping” 349). In order to deal meaningfully with London, India, Jamaica, and Hong Kong in a single work and reveal the links between them, aesthetic representations would need to achieve some innovative reconciliation of subjective experience with structural reality.

    Heise and Ghosh are among the only theorists of the novel to rise to Jameson’s challenge, ingenuously and at face value. They diverge, however, around the innovations they would recommend. Ghosh, indeed, isn’t sure whether there is anything to recommend. He pegs the alarming absence of climate-change fiction on the mechanics of fiction writing itself. Settings in literature, Ghosh writes, are “constructed out of discontinuities” in such a way that “connections to the world beyond are inevitably made to recede” (59). Yet “the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast” (62). Our literary techniques thus seem ill-suited to address our contemporary world.

    A specification is in order. It is the realist novel that Ghosh is holding up for inspection and that he finds wanting, for he agrees with Margaret Atwood that “the Anthropocene resists science fiction: it is precisely not the imagined ‘other’ world apart from ours” that demands our attention, nor are problems like climate change “located in another ‘time’ or another ‘dimension’” (72-73). At this last statement, Heise balks, for it is precisely the “speculative approaches” that she believes will make possible a global storytelling. She thinks Atwood and Ghosh “fundamentally misunderstand the ‘elsewheres’ of science fiction,” which Jameson himself has argued are simply our own world presented as “the past of a future yet to come,” something readers “have no trouble” recognizing (Heise, “Climate Stories”). If this is true, then Heise sees no reason to look elsewhere. If science fiction “satisfactorily addresses the challenges of narrating the Anthropocene,” with “[n]one of the constraints” of conventional novels, “why should we care whether the mainstream novel does” the same (Heise, “Climate Stories”)?

    In this essay, we will not take a stance on the accomplishment of science fiction. We do believe, however, that the realist novel deserves a second chance, if only because cognitive mapping is what social realism has always promised to deliver: novels of totality and interconnection, novels that map extensive sociohistorical networks and reveal the animating connections between points. Admittedly, the totalities that the Lukácsian novel maps—the “worlds” of a Balzac, Tolstoy, Scott, or Cooper—are not properly worlds at all. Indeed, one need only become minimally acquainted with Lukács to notice that he deploys the words “totality” and “nation” all but interchangeably (The Historical Novel). Yet when Heise writes that allegory is “hard to avoid in representations of the whole planet,” does she really mean that it is impossible—that allegory is obligatory (Sense of Place 21)? If one seeks a contemporary literature that engages with the world, it does seem worth examining whether it can do so in a fashion continuous with ordinary experience, and not just in disguise.

    One way forward is to examine the merits of a particular genre within realist fiction, one that appears well-suited for expanding the geographical scope of the novel beyond the cities and nation-states of the novel tradition: immigrant fiction, that signature genre of the last half-century claiming transnational migration, and thereby the linkages between states, as its very subject.[2] Instead of shrinking the world to fit into the London neighborhood already in the camera’s frame, why not move the camera or indeed buy a wider lens? Instead of forcing the Thames to stand in for oceans, why not cross actual oceans? Just as the Lukácsian protagonist mediates between parties in a historical conflict, revealing the forces that underlie a moment in national history, so the migrant could perhaps mediate between nations, as neo-Waverley, disclosing at least part of the structure underpinning multinational capitalism (The Historical Novel).[3] We should not, admittedly, expect immigrant fiction to deal with the entire world-system: the immigrant journey is generally only two-term, and the world-system clearly has more nodes than that. But even a two-term journey would deal not only transnationally but also relationally; unlike travel fiction, to name a close cousin, which tends to represent nations additively, as a mere list, immigrant fiction would likely be interested in transnational connections. In addition, the immigrant is often departing a lower-income or peripheral country for a wealthier country in the old imperial core, and this should enable the immigrant novel to represent not just any transnational relationship but a tellingly uneven one, revealing conditions of global dominance that characterize our world-system. A question poses itself: might this genre remedy the crisis of contemporary narrative that Heise and Ghosh have articulated, and might it do so without relying on full-blown allegory?

    In 1981, William Boelhower offered an early account of the genre’s narrative structure, proposing the following as its “macroproposition” (4): “An immigrant protagonist(s), representing an ethnic world view, comes to America with great expectations, and through a series of trials is led to reconsider them in terms of his final status” (5). The novels, he contends, revolve around three structural moments: Expectation, Contact, and Resolution, each taking America as its focus. The Expectation is of the New World, the Contact is with the New World, and the Resolution—the protagonist’s “final status”—is a settlement with New World society, usually in the form of assimilation (5).[4] To this extent at least, the setting of Boelhower’s immigrant novel is America, with the Old World featuring mainly through the protagonist’s “ethnic world view”—by which he seems to mean a set of non-American attitudes and dispositions.

    But Boelhower’s theory is in many respects outdated, as contemporary authors have sought to question and complicate a mass readership’s likely assumptions about the immigrant experience. Boelhower notes that it is “essential[…]that the protagonists be foreign-born” (6), while many of the most lauded immigrant novels written since[5] take as their protagonists children of immigrants, not immigrants themselves. He insists that “[t]he reasons for immigrating[…]are expressed in all immigrant novels and are an essential part of the narrative model” (Boelhower 6), even though in contemporary narratives—as we will see later—the protagonist’s ignorance of his family’s, and sometimes even his own, immigration history is often an crucial point. In many recent immigrant novels, the stage of “Expectation” is heavily downplayed or denied completely; characters begin the novel already disillusioned with America, not expecting all that much.[6] And it is also not the case that all contemporary immigrant novels allow America to monopolize their settings. There is a considerable amount of variety on this front, among which we can draw one core distinction: those set (almost) exclusively in one country, and those that opt for multiple settings in more than one nation.

    One important type of immigrant novel, therefore, takes place in the destination country: Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu, and Call it Sleep by Henry Roth, to name a few.[7] Many of these novels excel at uncovering the workings and contradictions of metropolitan (American or British) society. Native Speaker, whose Korean-American protagonist—the child of an immigrant—assists on a politician’s campaign, expertly exposes the underlying racial tensions in New York City. Tortilla Curtain—following a destitute undocumented couple and a middle-class native-born couple living in the same suburb of Los Angeles—puts immigration-related tensions into stark focus, revealing the xenophobia and racism lying just under the surface of most “liberal” American towns. The protagonist in The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears says himself how important it is to consider his city, D.C., “not in fragments or pieces, but as a unified whole” (Mengestu 173). That is a novel proclaiming its Lukácsian intentions in maximally quotable form.

    Yet these novels exclude the country of origin from the narrative in myriad ways. Boelhower had pointed out that “[a]lthough there is usually a clear journey sequence in the immigrant novel[…]it may be present as a flashback or a digression” (6). Contemporary immigrant novels are less likely to include such a sequence, in flashback or not, and they tend to open after the immigration has already taken place. This brings us to a strange and altogether counterintuitive realization: immigrant novels tend to erase, or at least bury, the very migration—the very interstitial, transnational connection—that nominally defines the genre. In this way, the immigrant narrative is reduced to the assimilation narrative (which is sometimes a failed assimilation narrative); the immigrant’s story begins when he disembarks from the plane or when she crosses the border. This aligns, of course, with America’s idealized conception of the immigrant-with-no-past, who sheds her history and is reborn in a new land.[8]

    Because these novels commence after the journey, narrative time spent in the country of origin tends to be minimal, and details sparsely shared. Some do not feature the country of origin at all, as in Native Speaker, whose protagonist, Henry, has never left the United States and has heard little about Korea from his parents. We never read his parents’ backstory—Henry himself “never learned the exact reason [his father] chose to come to America,” and only heard his father mention “something about the ‘big network’ in Korean business, how someone from the rural regions of the country could only get so far in Seoul” (Lee 57)—nor are we let into the pre-history of his family’s immigrant housekeeper or his father’s old friends who come to visit.[9] Tortilla Curtain, which features two migrant protagonists, is nevertheless similar in this respect: the novel opens several weeks after the undocumented couple has reached America from their native Mexico, and all we hear about the latter is one mention of the country’s forty percent unemployment rate (Boyle 199), a few remarks on men going north for migrant work (see 50, for example), and a couple of tightly drawn vignettes: the wife’s father killing an opossum (20), for example, or villagers firing pistols at the sky during a bad storm (129-130). We see this same pattern in Call it Sleep, which begins with the immigrant protagonists disembarking in America. Europe, their point of origin, is “the other side” (Roth 10), a “world somewhere, somewhere else” (23), and although the child narrator, David, thinks “[a]nything about the old land was always worth listening to” (33), we nevertheless rarely overhear these conversations with him. There are moments when “[c]onversation touched on many subjects[…]from this land to the old land and back again to this,” but the reader is sent away from the table (Roth 31). When David’s father tells him that he ate cornmeal as a child, David remarks that “that was one of the few facts that David had ever learnt of his father’s boyhood” (Roth 209). And when David’s mother finally tells an extended story of her young adulthood prior to her immigration, most of it is in Polish and therefore incomprehensible to David, and not transcribed for us (Roth 194-204).

    This reluctance to cross oceans and borders extends even to a number of immigrant novels whose characters travel back to their home countries. Here we can look to White Teeth and The Namesake as two striking examples. White Teeth might give us hope for a binational mapping, as one of the novel’s fathers sends his son, Magid, to live for years with his extended family in his native Bangladesh; the omniscient narrator head-hops between characters and ranges widely in time and space; and the book has the trapping of a family saga, tracking three generations of characters. The narrator briefly follows Magid across the ocean to make the point that Magid in Bangladesh and his twin brother in England are cosmically connected (“tied together like a cat’s cradle,” to be precise: both boys narrowly escape very different kinds of disasters at exactly the same time, halfway across the world (Smith 220)), which gives us only more reason to expect that the novel might follow both boys. And yet, even with all indications pointing to Bangladeshi interludes in White Teeth, Magid, after that one paragraph, disappears from the narrative for his eight years abroad, our only knowledge of him coming from the letters he sends to his parents—until he finally returns to London, at which point the narrator promptly regains interest in his story and begins inhabiting his mind fairly extensively. The only time the narrator travels beyond England is in brief flashbacks of Samad, Magid’s father, and his friend Archie during World War II, serving in Greece and Bulgaria (for the longest series of flashbacks, see Smith 83-122). At the end of the novel, we are told that Irie, her husband Joshua, and her grandmother Hortense will visit Jamaica, Hortense’s birthplace, yet all we get are the words, “a snapshot seven years hence of Irie, Joshua, and Hortense sitting by a Caribbean sea” (Smith 541); the novel declines to so much as describe the snapshot to which it alludes.

    The Namesake, like White Teeth, also enjoys an omniscient narrator that inhabits the minds of both immigrants and their children. It, too, concerns itself with tracing effects back to their causes. The novel opens eighteen months after a Bengali couple has immigrated from Calcutta, India to Cambridge, Massachusetts, but, when the wife’s mother dies, the couple boards a plane with their infant son, about to fly “for the first time in his life across the world” for the funeral (Lahiri 47). Yet when we flip the page to the next chapter, we do not find ourselves across the world. Instead, the narrative has jumped forward two years, skipping their visit to Calcutta entirely. We are told that the family henceforth visits Calcutta every few years, “six or eight weeks passing like a dream” each time—but for the reader, passing in this one sentence (Lahiri 64). By the time the son, Gogol, is ten years old, “he has been to Calcutta three more times,” yet all we are told is his astonishment at seeing so many Gangulis—his last name—in the telephone book (Lahiri 67). Later in the novel, the narrative does follow the family to Calcutta on the husband’s sabbatical. Yet the eight months pass in less than eight pages. Gogol finds it impossible to keep up with cross-country training on the congested streets, so he “surrender[s] to confinement,” which means that we learn much more about the relatives’ households than we do about the postcolonial city of four million around him (Lahiri 83). Later, when his girlfriend’s mother asks Gogol, “What’s Calcutta like? Is it beautiful?”, the question takes him by surprise: “He is accustomed to people asking about the poverty, about the beggars” (Lahiri 134). Yet we readers were never shown the beggars or introduced to the poverty; we learned little more than that the weather is warm and that people sleep under mosquito nets. Tellingly, although the word “world” comes up frequently in the novel, it consistently refers to some much smaller totality: a nation, an ethnic group, or even just a campus.[10]

    At the very least, then, we can conclude that a good many immigrant novels do not provide the multinational mapping for which Heise is looking. Myriad strategies combine to render the Old World beyond narration. The novels commence after the characters have left it behind. Protagonists, especially those who are children of immigrants or were young when their families emigrated, may be genuinely ignorant of it. References to it, even if numerous, are vague, cloaked in nostalgia or distant generalities. If the characters travel, whether in flashback or in the main narrative, time is condensed into brief recaps, and we manage to learn disproportionately little about it. We can attribute this at least partially to the psychologizing impulse of many of these novels: even when the narrative brings us to Calcutta, say, it focuses on the characters’ minds rather than the city that surrounds them. For all these reasons, these narratives neglect to bring the other country into analytic view, running dry when they might otherwise turn transnational. They may take from the realist tradition a certain appetite for sociohistorical explanation, but this appetite does not extend overseas. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears astutely sums up the position in which these novels find themselves: the protagonist used to be able to keep both the Ethiopian and the American calendars in his mind, but “as the years accumulated, it became harder and harder to remember that there were two halves to the narrative” (Mengestu 153).

    One might protest that a novel need not have an expanded setting to deal with expansive forces. Why can global dynamics not be adequately addressed “from the scale of a single neighborhood” (Kirsch 25)?[11] Yet the pattern these novels reveal should caution us against such an approach. These immigrant novels—with circumscribed settings that are, as Ghosh suggests, “constructed out of discontinuities” (59)—tend to make intelligible only the effects of global forces and movements, leaving their causes mysterious. Forces originating outside that spatial scope, such as the forces that led these characters to immigrate, become mere events, mere “things that happen,” without explanation—which then turns every Old Country into the same narrative abstraction that requires no specification, the black box for which lonely immigrants pine and to which an occasional twin brother can indefinitely disappear.[12]

    This is a point worth pausing on, for we must make clear that these immigrant novels do not erase the country of origin, however much they bury it. Quite the contrary: the Old World tends to loom quite large, determining much more in the narratives than merely Boelhower’s “ethnic world view.” In White Teeth, it is on Bangladesh that Magid’s father pins all his hopes for his son, and it is Jamaica that persistently occupies the imagination of Irie, the daughter of a West Indian immigrant, in the second half of the novel. In The Namesake, Bengal comes up constantly even when the story hunkers down in the United States: we hear mention of the snacks sold on Calcutta sidewalks (Lahiri 1), the tea sold on Bengali trains (112), the funerals performed for Bengal’s dead (70). In The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, the protagonist and his two friends, all immigrants from Africa, play the “coup game” to the point of obsession—I name the leader of an African coup, you guess with which country he is associated (see Mengestu 7, for example); the protagonist “searche[s] for familiarity” and catches “glimpses of home” everywhere in D.C. (Mengestu 175-76), and his friend is similarly wont to see “flashes of the continent wherever he went” (100). But insofar as the country of origin occupies a prominent place in the narrative, it does so as a suspended question mark, a skeptical gap, an absent cause, inserted only to prevent causal regress. A familiar smell here, the name of a politician there—but no sense of the larger society and how these isolated details fit together. The eight-month trip to Calcutta is “quickly shed, quickly forgotten[…]irrelevant to their lives” (Lahiri 88).[13] Jamaica is a “blank page”—“somewhere quite fictional” (Smith 400, 402). Ethiopia, though it is the country that nursed him, seems “conjured, the fictitious dreams of a hyperactive and lonely imagination” (Mengestu 96). We know the country of origin is important, that it is where the story really began, but it is not accessible to us—because even if the characters grew up there, even if they return occasionally to visit, it is no longer truly accessible to them.

    These narratives, therefore, tend perhaps unexpectedly to announce and problematize their own self-imposed limits. We might, in this sense, venture to call these immigrant novels postmodern, in that they self-consciously draw attention to—and then fail to resolve—the epistemological crisis Jameson has identified. Tortilla Curtain says explicitly that “it was crazy to think you could detach yourself from the rest of the world” (Boyle 32)—yet the rest of the world is nevertheless unreachable. In Native Speaker: “no one is smart enough to see the whole world. There’s always a picture too big to see” (Lee 46). In White Teeth: characters feel “tiny and rootless,” with miniscule “significance in the Greater Scheme of Things” (Smith 11)[14] and yet with the dream to “make sense of the world” (366). And without getting too far ahead of ourselves, we can say that slogans such as these will appear even in immigrant novels that feature the home country more substantially, though we cannot yet say whether those do more to resolve the dilemma than these do. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: “The world! It was what she desired with her entire heart, but how could she achieve it?” (Díaz 113) In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook: he “considered yet again his own relative loss of place in this world” (Shteyngart 408). In Americanah: “She felt like a small ball, adrift and alone. The world was a big, big place and she was so tiny, so insignificant” (Adichie 190).

    This crisis of mapping is not only articulated on the geographic front, as an inability to locate the subject in space, but also on the historical front as an inability to locate the subject in time. We see this most prominently in the genre’s metaconcern for storytelling: of the twelve immigrant novels referenced in this essay, chosen because high-profile, eight include major characters (and five feature protagonists) who are writers or professors.[15] Characters are maddened by their inability to tell a story in its totality, a story of totality: “if you’re looking for a full story, I don’t have it” (Díaz 243); “my point is that this is not the full story.[… F]ull stories are as rare as honesty, precious as diamonds” (Smith 252); “There’s more to the story. There always is to a true story” (Alvarez 102); “You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what’s left in the hollow of my story?” (Alvarez 289); his “problem” is that “he wanted to tell the entire history of the Congo,” believing that “[n]othing can be left out” and that “[t]he poem must be able to contain it all” (Mengestu 170-71). Beginnings and endings of the tales these characters tell are self-consciously artificial and vexed: “the question is how far back do you want? How far will do?” (Smith 83); “this is no movie and there is no fucking end to it, just as there is no fucking beginning” (Smith 464); “maybe I should start there[…o]r is this where the story begins[?]” (Mengestu 127); “the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story” (Smith 540-41). In certain cases, this inability to find The Beginning is explicitly glossed as the inability to access the home country: for example, “the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings” (Smith 402), only to be followed up a few pages later with, “if you could take them back to the source of the river, to the start of the story, to the homeland… But she didn’t say that, because[…]it was as useless as chasing your own shadow” (Smith 407). And narrators meditate on the force that “sphinxes[…]all attempts at narrative reconstruction” (Díaz 243), most memorably with The Russian Debutante’s Handbook’s assertion that “You’ll need three omniscient narrators to cobble together half a narrative” (Shteyngart 364). In all these ways, the novels routinely reflect on their own fabrication and their own restraints. And as an additional layer of self-awareness, several of the novels that may prove best at transnational mapping—Oscar Wao, Americanah, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook—mention postmodernism explicitly and, in the last instance, treat it as a major narrative concern.[16]

    Which brings us, then, to the second type of immigrant novel: those that do engage forthrightly with multiple regions on the globe. These are novels like Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Garcia Girls by Julia Alvarez, No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart. Nearly all allow us inside multiple characters’ heads and refuse neatly linear narratives.[17] All are told looking back on events at a delay and are self-conscious about the mediated nature of their tales. And all show their protagonists crossing oceans—in fact, all do so more than once—and spend significant narrative time in one or more countries in addition to the U.S. That first set of immigrant novels proved consonant with classical social realism: a realism of one nation, in which the rest of the world registers only as narrative uncertainty. This second set, by contrast, successfully brings at least two remote locations into view, and thus has the potential, at least, to make intelligible the lopsided relationships that characterize our global order. Yet at least three problems persist—and we will want to examine them carefully.

    First, in expanding geographic scope to include multiple locations, some end up slackening the demands of realism in each. We can see this in particular with Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, which follows its protagonist, Sophie, from Haiti to America and back again for an extended visit. Haiti is viscerally present—beggars, prostitutes, soldiers, bribes (for example, Danticat 228)—in a way that Mexico or Bengal or Jamaica in the novels described above are not. Yet consistently, the narrative brings up some highly-charged political event that is clearly the symptom of a larger process, but, rather than broadening its scope to bring the structure into view, immediately narrows its focus instead to the psychological or the familial. For example, right before Sophie will join her mother in America, the narrative describes in gory detail what seems to be a government crackdown on a student protest. We are provided no context or explanation—and when her aunt yanks her to safety and asks, “Do you see what you are leaving?”, Sophie merely replies, “I know I am leaving you” (Danticat 34). Danticat may want us to feel the confusion of the child narrator in this moment, but when Sophie returns to Haiti as an adult and a friend comes running to tell her that the macoutes, the dictator’s militia, killed a villager, we are once again not given any context for this state violence. Instead, the sobbing friend declares, “That’s why I need to go [i.e. emigrate],” and Sophie’s grandmother voices the exact pattern we are noticing: “A poor man is dead and all you can think about is your journey” (Danticat 138).[18]

    We see this pivot to the micro scale even more strikingly when we are allowed to listen to a group of Haitian-American men “talking politics” (Danticat 54). Their argument mentions such topics as the Haitian konbit system, Vietnamese refugees resettled in the United States, and America’s military intervention in Haiti in the early twentieth century. Yet the exposition that follows does not explain what the konbit system is, who the “boat people” are, and what the military occupation entailed and why it was undertaken—the last of which, especially, has mighty relevance for the dynamics the characters face. Instead, the narrator interjects, “For some of us, arguing is a sport,” before going on to describe the “colorful language” used in the marketplace in Haiti and the dynamics between Sophie’s mother and her mother’s boyfriend (Danticat 54). The novel collides with loaded and wholly pertinent transnational phenomena only to bounce elsewhere.

    Danticat has written what has deservedly become known as one of the most ambitious and powerful narratives on the Haitian-American immigrant experience, and her deprioritization of extended narration and structural exegesis—which, no less than sociological analysis, would require embedding “individual biography in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy” (Farmer 41)[19]—may be precisely what enables her relatively short novel to so masterfully trace the impacts of trauma across oceans and generations. But this does leave her treatment of both Haiti and America only lightly ethnographic, and the countries are distinguished almost exclusively by which important people in Sophie’s life happen to live in each.[20] A reviewer credits Danticat with “evoking the pace and character of Creole life, the feel of both village and farm communities” (“Breath, Eyes, Memory”). Precisely: a pace, a feel, but not a network. She gives us a sense of how life in both places is lived but chooses not to probe the underlying mechanisms of the societies, even when the plot invites or even, in certain instances of state violence, begs for explanation—for significantly, Danticat does not avoid bumping up against such topics and thus indicates their relevance to the story she is telling, making the reader aware of the limits the novel is hitting. We need not follow Heise in her search for novels that map transnationally, but if we do, we should recognize that while the first group of immigrant novels we examined mapped but were not transnational, this novel, though transnational, is not particularly interested in mapping.

    A second impulse in these novels that resists transnational mapping is what we can call “split-screen” realism. Garcia Girls exemplifies this tendency. Alvarez’s novel backtracks chapter by chapter in narrative time from the Garcia sisters’ adult lives in the United States to their childhood in the Dominican Republic—and in between, their hasty emigration from the D.R. when their father’s plot against the government is suspected. The novel examines America only scenically (as in Breath, Eyes, Memory), but when the setting moves to the Dominican Republic, we not only get a sense of the fear Trujillo and his SIM elicit but also how the dictatorship goes about its business: its method of interrogating children and servants first, for example, and the way SIM agents can be intimidated by “big men” with American connections. The novel applies a realist impulse to multiple nations—is this not what we have been looking for?

    Not quite, in fact. Our hope was to find a novel that transcended the horizon of the nation: that zoomed out to view each country as a node in a larger global network. What it seems that Garcia Girls has given us instead is multiple distinct networks, each still delineated by national boundaries and tied together only by the sisters’ journey. We are missing the connections between nations. It is surprising for a novel concerned equally with the United States and the Dominican Republic to not once mention the D.R.’s occupation by U.S. forces, Trujillo’s training with the U.S. Marines, or any of the numerous incidents involving both countries that occur within the novel’s narrative time (1989-1956): Trujillo’s abduction of Jesús Galíndez in New York City, rumors of CIA involvement in Trujillo’s assassination, or (especially) the second U.S. invasion of the island in 1965. The sole connection, alluded to only once, is the uncle’s job as a CIA agent organizing against Trujillo (“his consulship is only a front—Vic is, in fact, a CIA agent whose orders changed midstream from organize the underground and get that SOB out to hold your horses, let’s take a second look around to see what’s best for us” (Alvarez 217)), which raises all sorts of questions the novel chooses not to answer: How did Vic gain that position? Who changed his orders? Why is the CIA involved in the first place? Instead of examining the relationship between the U.S. and the D.R.—one characterized by a vast power imbalance, and one in which the global struggle between capitalism and communism dictated many terms—the novel considers the sisters’ journey as a migration between one network and another, not between nodes in one total network. Alvarez has provided us not with a mobile camera, but with two fixed cameras, each with national scope.

    Finally, a third problem: while “split-screen” novels like Garcia Girls seem uninterested in mediation, other novels, like Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, are perhaps overly stuck on mediation. A prerequisite for mapping a society—and Lukács is especially keen on this point—is that the protagonist must bring different parts of society into human contact (The Historical Novel). The character must leave abuela’s kitchen and become acquainted with individuals from different backgrounds, classes, and affiliations—which might help explain why so many classically realist immigrant novels focused on America bring a wealthy, native-born WASP family into close proximity with the immigrant protagonist,[21] and one reason why a novel like Breath, Eyes, Memory does not map: the protagonist spends almost the entire book in one of three houses, and both Haiti and America become defined more by the people who happen to live there than by sociopolitical characteristics of the nations at large.[22] In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, we do get an initial description of Prava when the protagonist Vladimir tours: we see the quarters of the city, the smokestacks, the Austrian bank and German car dealership, and The Foot, the remains of an enormous statue to Stalin. Yet because of Vladimir’s assignment to cheat Prava’s expats in a Ponzi scheme, most of the characters we meet in the city are American expats. In fact, the only exception might be the babushkas, the old women protesting around The Foot. Vladimir, newly arrived in Russia, remarks to an acquaintance, “I’m still a little out of it as far as the locals go.” The friend’s reply? “Forget about them.[…] This is an American town” (Shteyngart 204).

    Thus, although Vladimir spends 300 pages narrating how this miniature society functions, what we miss entirely is the rest of Russian society; we finish the novel with the impression that Prava is populated solely by thugs, expats, and a few old ladies still quoting Marx. The impulse to map is there, but the subject proves elusive: Shteyngart is so preoccupied with the bridge that he neglects the land on one side of that bridge, and so his efforts to represent this transnational connection actually detract from his engagement with Russia. The Russia we find is also quite stereotyped: to be “russified” in Shteyngart’s telling is to add gunfire, car alarms, and a red carpet (Shteyngart 178). Along the lines of the immigrant novel’s postmodern character, we might even say that The Russian Debutante’s Handbook provides not a map of Russian society but a pastiche of a map, endowing the Russian present “with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage” (Jameson, “The Cultural Logic” 21). In both these ways, Russia is pushed to the margins. This results in an unexpected universalizing of the novel’s Russia: the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society in New York City is once referred to as “that nonprofit gulag” (Shteyngart 107), and an immigrant early on in the novel insists to Vladimir, “Everywhere is Russia.[…] Everywhere you go…Russia” (10). But more generally, as the above remark about the “American” town suggests, we can track an equating of the First, Second, and Third Worlds in all directions: the immigration office is likened on the first page of the novel to a “sad Third World government office” (Shteyngart 3); later, a barkeep in a Soviet town speaks “in near-perfect English, as if the waves of the Pacific were stroking the sands of Malibu outside” (417-18).

    We can see, then, that most immigrant novels do not provide anything like the global representation for which Heise, Ghosh, and Jameson are searching. Yet a few immigrant novels do avoid all of these tendencies, revealing how the narrative theme of immigration can—even if it does not always—enable realism to map at scales larger than the nation. Adichie’s Americanah offers a multiplot that follows one character from Nigeria to America and back and a second from Nigeria to England and back, while also delving deeply into issues of race, gender, and class in each nation; including detailed conversations about transnational connections (such as visa applications, rich Americans giving charity to African countries, and asylum seekers crossing into Europe); and, despite the title of the novel, never allowing the expat community to crowd out Nigeria.[23] Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, in which Clare travels from Jamaica to America to Europe and back to Jamaica, draws up a network of various characters connected to one another across the world; examines postcolonialism in Jamaica, Jim Crow in America, and the National Front in London; and is interested from the start in how, say, the guns used by Jamaican militants were made in America and the ganja they are growing will be exported to America. And Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which follows Oscar and his family back and forth between the Dominican Republic and the United States, begins with the fukú curse that connects generations and continents; has Oscar meet Dominican individuals across social strata (most memorably, the prostitute with whom he falls in love); and includes not just exposition that functions as internal footnotes, but actual footnotes—snarky and engaging—on Dominican, and Dominican-American, politics.

    We can track several patterns in these exemplars at the level of content. First, as we have discussed earlier, they all narrate a substantial period prior to immigration, which helps avoid an erasure of the home country. Second, they all follow multiple characters—each partner in a couple in Americanah, several generations in a family in Oscar Wao, or a whole network of family members and acquaintances in No Telephone to Heaven—which grants the novel easier access to multiple locations and multiple journeys.[24] Finally, all feature returnees: protagonists who immigrate and end up, by the novel’s conclusion, back in their countries of origin.[25] These protagonists reject the assimilation that, in other immigrant novels, threatens to crowd out the journey, and they can arrive at each shore with the fresh and pseudo-objective perspective of a stranger, which may encourage reflection on the inner workings of the societies. These novels are, paradoxically, in their own way anti-immigrant, steeped in misgivings about the purported terminus of the immigrant journey and ultimately rejecting it. Yet if they are not immigrant literature proper, we can call them migrant literature, which “focus[es] on characters for whom America is a stage of life rather than a final destination” (Kirsch 62). This makes clear the distinctive potential they hold: with America limited to one stage among several, the rest of the world has room to come into view.

    These, then, seem to be the novels we have been looking for. Yet one major complication remains, one more deep-rooted and structural than the others—revealing perhaps less about the internal limits of these novels than about the onerous, perhaps even excessive, demands of the cognitive mapping project itself. We can approach this final hurdle by way of a puzzle in Oscar Wao.

     

    Near the end of Díaz’s novel—after the narrator has provided us footnote after footnote, after the characters have traveled back and forth between the Dominican Republic and the United States, after we have followed three generations and come to see the continuities—we find Oscar on a visit to Santo Domingo. Under the heading “Oscar Goes Native” comes one sentence that takes up almost three pages. It is too long to cite in full, but we would not do it justice if we did not quote a substantial length. Here, then, are some excerpts:

    After his initial homecoming week, after he’d been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he’d gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters[…]after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong[…]after he’d given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he’d watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he’d left on his plate at an outdoor café[…]after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that’s bad, you should see the bateys[…]after he’d gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital—the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty[…]—[…]after he stopped marveling at the amount of political propaganda plastered up on every spare wall — ladrones, his mother announced, one and all — after the touched-in-the-head tio who’d been tortured during Balaguer’s reign came over and got into a heated political argument with Carlos Moya[…]after he’d seen his first Haitians kicked off a guagua because niggers claimed they “smelled,”[…]he decided suddenly and without warning to stay on the Island for the rest of the summer with his mother and his tío. (Díaz 276-78)

    Oscar seems to be doing for Santo Domingo what a reader with a taste for realism might wish the children in The Namesake had done for Calcutta: leave the family home and uncover the economic, political, and cultural dynamics of the city for us. Yet this is not, in fact, explanatory narration, and may not be narration at all, but rather its opposite: the chaos of unmediated subjective experience whirling around Oscar without offering the tools to make sense of it all. The sentence drags on, with enough repetition, that the reader might start to think, I get it already! Yet Díaz is insisting that we do not get it. The poverty of La Capital remains “mind-boggling” even after seeing it many times. Oscar, and we, cannot wrap our minds around it—cannot, we might say, cognitively map it. The repetition unto excess is a symptom of maplessness.

    But Díaz has provided us with enough context—on the Trujillo regime, on corruption, on U.S. intervention—to be able to account for the poverty in Santo Domingo. The narrative, judged on its own terms, should have little trouble incorporating this sight into the network it has succeeded in drawing up. Oscar, too, knows much of the information we now do: the opening footnote of the novel begins, “For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history,” implying that the Dominican-American characters know much more than the reader on topics such as this (Díaz 2). So why should the poverty be mind-boggling, either to us or to him? Is it not precisely what we would expect to see, understanding the history and politics Díaz himself has taught us? Either the novel, after achieving an unusually ambitious feat, is professing not to have done so, thus perplexingly selling itself short and denying its own accomplishment; or, alternatively, it is professing that the very feat—the elucidation of global connections—is itself an insufficient one. The task itself, as challenging as it may be, is somehow not ambitious enough.

    And it is here, with this mind-boggling repetition of “mind-boggling,” that Díaz helps us to notice something unsettled even in Jameson’s prose, and perhaps to clarify Jameson’s project. Jameson begins his essay on cognitive mapping by advocating a return to the “pedagogical function of a work of art” (Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 347). Yet elsewhere in his writing, he makes clear that he is not looking for didacticism. Drawing on Althusser’s distinction between science and ideology, Jameson states:

    The existential—the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic “point of view” on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted—is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge.[…] What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or “scientific” way[…]but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experiencewa and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. (Jameson, “The Cultural Logic” 53)

    Cognitive mapping is meant to inhabit the same gap as Althusser’s ideology. The mapping Jameson desires, then, is not an abstract account of the world. It is instead a “representation,” or what he elsewhere calls a “figuration”: some aesthetic that can reveal the world-system in its structural reality through the subjective point of view. Jameson, in other words, is not asking for the novel to lecture us about globalization. He is asking for the novel to represent characters’ experiences of global forces in such a way as to make those forces understandable.

    Previously, we searched the immigrant novels closest to this ideal for strategies at the level of content. We found that they all begin prior to immigration, follow multiple characters, and center their narratives around returnees. But we have not yet inquired at the level of form: What formal techniques enable these novels to engage with, and reveal the links between, multiple nations? How, precisely, are they bringing the world into view? On these questions hangs the crucial one. These novels are transnational, and they draw up networks—but what innovations do they offer at the level of representation?

    The key features we discover, when we look to formal strategies, turn out to introduce high levels of mediation, freeing the novel in those moments from the bounds of experiential subjectivity—and leaning away from representation and toward didacticism. Americanah introduces the transnational politics mentioned earlier—visas, international charities, refugee crises—by recording long dinner conversations, and comments on how race and class operate transnationally through one character’s pages-long blog posts. No Telephone to Heaven introduces the effects of past colonization on the Jamaican landscape by beginning with a dictionary definition of “ruinate” (Cliff 1); at another point, it quotes a New York Times description of Jamaica (Cliff 200). The “national” immigrant novels discussed earlier use these same techniques to a lesser degree when they do gesture beyond America. For example, White Teeth quotes the Reader’s Digest Encyclopedia’s entry on “Bengali” (Smith 236), the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “Pandy” (Smith 251)[26] and television news anchors discussing the Berlin Wall (Smith 240), providing what little transnationalism is present. In Native Speaker, a politician’s speech includes commentary on American race relations as well as some history of the Japanese colonization of Korea—one of the only mentions of Korean history in the entire novel (Lee 153). In a number of these novels, like in Americanah, discussions between intellectuals are transcribed as if from a microphone. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao simply takes this trend one step further, providing sociopolitical context not just in distinct quotations but through actual footnotes—not even attempting to incorporate them into the body of the narrative. Three striking corollaries follow.

    First, list the techniques we have just identified—lectures, dictionary definitions, speeches, blog posts, footnotes—and we come to an arresting realization: these novels only seem to map when they are themselves least novelistic. We can ask, then: if what we desire is information on Trujillo’s regime, why not open up a history textbook? If we want to learn about race relations, why not find an actual blog on the subject, rather than a fake blog-within-a-novel? Of course literature can generate associations around mere information in ways that most footnotes and blog posts and dinner conversations do not. At the very least, they are written in character. But can we really claim the pedagogical function as a novelistic achievement if the novel must shrug off its own form to accomplish this?

    Second, the achievement of these exemplars is precisely pedagogical, not in fact representational in the sense Jameson was after. These features hardly form the link he recommended between subjective experience and abstract information; they simply insert passages of abstract information into plots otherwise governed by subjective experience, putting the narratives on pause as they do so. In Americanah, for example, some of Adichie’s blog posts are quoted in order to be treated in the narrative, as when a post about a friend—a young woman with “Unknown Sources of Wealth”—angers her, leading the protagonist to take down the post and drive over to her friend’s house to apologize (Adichie 521). But others come at the end of chapters, distinct from the storyline around them.[27]

    Third and lastly, this separation not only arises within the stories, but actually manifests on the very pages of these novels. Indentations and white space set apart dictionary definitions and blog posts from the rest of the prose. And if these features put the narratives on pause, then Díaz’s footnotes, as well as Cliff’s glossary (an item much less common in immigrant novels than one might expect; of the twelve novels discussed, only this one can boast a glossary), do so to a different degree entirely, making the disjunction truly disturbing to the reader. In Oscar Wao, there will be a footnote next to a name in a character’s dialogue, and we will have to choose whether to finish the paragraph (in which case we are reading without knowing the referent of that unfamiliar name) or jump immediately to the bottom of the page, in which case we have vaulted out of the conversation (out of the realm of the subjective) and into the realm of the abstract. Similarly, while most immigrant novels ensure that the rough meaning of non-English phrases is discernable from context—and if not, find a way to translate them for us, like having a character ask what a word means so that others will “represent” it[28]No Telephone to Heaven includes untranslated slang without clear context clues, forcing the reader to suspend the story to flip to the back of the book instead of gleaning the meaning organically.[29]

    This is, of course, what our everyday experience is really like. We are inescapably restricted to the “monadic ‘point of view’” (Jameson, “The Cultural Logic” 53). Jameson characterizes postmodernism as “a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience” (“Cognitive Mapping” 349). There is, again, a contradiction between experience and reality. And these immigrant novelists are underscoring the fissure rather than attempting to bridge it, separating the two on the page and forcing us to prioritize one over the other. The very form of their novels articulates the crisis of mapping.

    And it is in this context that we can make sense of that long montage towards the end of Oscar Wao. Díaz may have given us enough information about American and Dominican societies that the poverty of a Third World country oppressed by a dictator and exploited by the international hegemon should not confound us. Yet when Oscar, and we readers, are confronted with the actual beggars on the streets—with children struggling over our table scraps, with an old woman pleading for a single penny—we find ourselves unable to assimilate these experiential data into our mental schema. In Díaz, the causes of this poverty come as it were pre-explained, and yet the reality remains fragmented and inexplicable, unintegrated into a larger, explanatory whole.

    We are now in a position to specify more precisely the project of cognitive mapping: a synthesis of the experience of and explanation for global forces. This, we should note, imposes three criteria for judging a novel in this particular regard (which Jameson himself emphasizes is not intended to displace other aesthetics; after all, art has always had “a great many distinct and incommensurable functions” (“Cognitive Mapping” 347)). First, the content of the novel needs to be transnational; second, the novel must routinely reach for explanation; and third, the novel must incorporate that explanation into the narrative itself, rather than setting it apart as learned discourse. It turns out that immigrant novels, a genre we might expect to be inclined toward such a project, almost never hit these marks. Some, like Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, do not contain a strong explanatory impulse; they focus almost exclusively on the experience side of the binary, even when that experience seems incomprehensible without context, and even when—like with the men talking politics in the restaurant—such explanation is relegated just offstage. And a great many other immigrant novels are not particularly interested in the globe at all: the majority because they are confined to a single nation; others because, though multinational, they still take the nation as the unit of analysis and do not examine the connections between nations, as in Alvarez’s Garcia Girls; and still others because they reduce one or more nations to their connections with other nations, as in Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. The few that do manage to transcend the nation and include both experience and explanation—Americanah, Oscar Wao, No Telephone to Heaven—nevertheless keep the two largely distinct, even to the extent of separating them formally. And the problem with that, as one character in White Teeth insists, is that if you are looking for full stories, “epic” stories,[30] “[y]ou don’t find them in the dictionary” (Smith 252)—not even, we can add, in dictionaries within novels. The result is that characters like Oscar cannot apply their knowledge to their first-order experience, with the suggestion that we readers, too, may not be able to. A work of explanatory realism frets that explanatory realism is not enough.

    We find ourselves, then, with three possibilities, three potential verdicts on the project of cognitive mapping. We will take each in turn.

    We might conclude, first, that all three stipulations of the cognitive mapping project are desirable and at least potentially feasible. The immigrant novels we have analyzed have, admittedly, not reached this standard. Perhaps we simply need to read more of them, or look back to science fiction, or find another genre entirely—but Heise, Ghosh, and Jameson have articulated a program worth undertaking.

    This hinges on whether there is something about representation as such that we should value, something missing when experience and explanation are simply placed side-by-side and not synthesized. Whether the narrator imparts context directly to readers in what we can call “soundtrack information” (such as Balzac’s self-footnoting or Díaz’s footnotes), or alternatively, like a stage play, the novel limits itself to “diegetic information” (such as dinner conversations or TV news, in which the source of the information is present to the characters), the novel has still not achieved representation proper: both techniques simply provide us with passages of abstract, scientific information, sandwiched between involving episodes of story. Yet if Jameson is right that between experience and explanation there is, at best, a gap or a rift, and at worst, a contradiction, then simply providing us with both does not allow us to apply one to the other.

    And why should this task of reconciling the two seem pressing? The “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” is ultimately seeking to “endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system” (Jameson, “The Cultural Logic” 54). This is what multinational capitalism has robbed us of, with the “hyperspace” of advanced modernity having “transcend[ed] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and to map cognitively its position in a mappable external world” (Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 15-16). Locating oneself, of course, necessarily involves a relation between the monadic point of view and the abstract grid—and didacticism in any form can only give us the grid, not the relation between the two.[31] Mere description, in this view, may be able to teach us about our world but cannot help us locate ourselves within it.

    This is Oscar’s dilemma: he has access to his own experience as well as a working model of the external world, and yet he is still no closer to locating his position within it—and so he is unable to organize his immediate surroundings, resulting in that barrage of sensations. Without an understanding of his own positioning, he is also unable to catalyze change: he “give[s] out all his taxi money to beggars” and yet cannot make a dent. We see this too in No Telephone to Heaven, the novel that of them all probably comes closest to a synthesis. After insisting (echoing Mengestu’s protagonist who cannot hold onto both halves of the narrative), that “we will have to make the choice. Cast our lot. Cyaan [Can’t] live split. Not in this world,” Clare’s friend tells her in a long didactic passage about the canefields around them and the history of slavery in the region. “I am sorry to preach,” the friend says. Then comes Clare’s impatient mental response: “And what am I supposed to do about it?” (Cliff 131-33). Clare cannot access both Jamaica and the West at once—she will, as her friend says, be forced to choose—and being told about the impact of the global slave trade on her local surroundings does not help her understand her place in the world.

    Of course Oscar and Clare are powerless, goes this argument: a textbook explanation of the world, uninformed by our own experience, is irrelevant to us. The alternative is also true: a detailed account of our experience, uninformed by our place in the world, is not reliably connected to the world around us. What representing the world-system would grant us is a way “to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (Jameson, “The Cultural Logic” 54). This is what novels can do that textbooks and encyclopedia entries cannot: help us grasp our positioning in a system so we can recognize the system as the product of our collective agency. And this is what none of these immigrant novels, for all their achievement, fully attain, committed as they are to didacticism.

    So what would an immigrant novel that truly represents a multinational slice of our world-system look like? If the crisis under late capitalism is that we cannot experience the truth of our world, then this is what we should ask the novel to do. Characters must not be told the big picture, as diegetic techniques allow, but rather must come to glean the big picture in their everyday lives. We see a glimmer of this in No Telephone to Heaven, with Clare at the end of the novel fixated on understanding her place in the world, and being moved to action because of her rootedness in place. Her friend had told her earlier, “Cyaan [Cannot] live on this island and not understand how it work, how the world work” (Cliff 123). Although she cannot, ultimately, understand how the world works simply from seeing the effects of multinational capitalism in one location, Clare is from then on working to glean an understanding of the world as she moves through it, which is precisely the impulse such a novel would need.

    We could choose to hold out for a novel such as this. But that is not the only possibility. We might decide, second, to embrace the first two stipulations of cognitive mapping—global content and setting, and explanatory impulse—but reject the third, concluding that we are mistaken to demand a synthesis of explanation with subjective narration. We can come at this view from two angles. Either (the optimistic view) the synthesis of experience and explanation is unnecessary, even undesirable, which means that some of the immigrant novels we have identified do, more or less, achieve something worth defending; or, alternatively (the pessimistic view), the synthesis is in fact impossible, however desirable we find it. Either way, we will end up rejecting a synthesis as the goal.

    Perhaps, in support of the optimistic view, the division of explanation from narrative that we see in these last immigrant novels should not bother us at all. If this is what it takes to transcend the national scale, why not be satisfied? Immigrant novels might be especially drawn to explanation, as they cannot rely on their readers to recall their mandatory two seconds of Dominican (Haitian, Bengali, etc.) history. “To teach, to move, to delight” (Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 347)—the novel does all three—why ask it to do all three at once? There are at least three reasons why one might condone, even embrace, this didactic impulse without desiring any synthesis at all.

    First, one of our worries had been that if transnationalism only enters at moments when novels adopt other literary modes, this could be a sign that the novel as a genre really is incapable of engaging with global issues. If a novel, so this argument went, has to quote an encyclopedia to bring up Dominican-American political relations, don’t call what it is doing novelistic innovation; it has simply given up its novelness and let an entirely different medium intrude. Yet the tendency of these immigrant novels to provide explanation via embedded media is not contrary, in fact, to traditional novelistic technique. Rather, the form’s willingness to incorporate other genres into its prose is itself a key feature of the novel, and immigrant novels only “heighten the qualities of mixture that theorists of the novel have long described as fundamental to the genre” (Miller 201).[32] Canonical novels routinely feature snippets of poetry, epistolary correspondences, radio broadcasts. Why not blog posts or encyclopedia entries or, finally, footnotes? The inclusion of other genre impulses is, itself, novelistic, and finding new ways to embed media may be enough of an innovation.

    Second, reaching for didacticism too has been a common novelistic impulse. Nominally, Lukácsian mapping is supposed to take place via narration, carried by characters. And as it is, the didactic passages in these immigrant novels are more aligned with Lukács’s denigrated “description” than his venerated “narration” (“Narrate or Describe?”). Yet many of his own exemplars do not live up to his standard, comfortable as they are with explanatory passages that fall out of narration. Indeed, canonical social realist novels routinely snub the “show, don’t tell” rule. We might consider James Fenimore Cooper and Lukács’s own beloved Walter Scott, who typically open their books with pages of scene-setting and background before introducing a single character. Or the no-less-Lukácsian Balzac, whose narrator has been known to write that it is “necessary to pause here” to detail the geography of an old city, “without which account it will not be possible to understand” one of the characters (32). This is basically an in-line footnote; Díaz’s actual footnotes simply take what proves to be a wholly common novelistic impulse to its page-formatting conclusion.[33] If we are simply looking for a social realism capable of bringing into view extended social networks, then we are not necessarily looking for Jameson’s integrated representation. We, like Lukács, may simply be looking for authors who make art out of social explanation—a task at which these last immigrant novels excel.

    Finally, we may not merely wish to tolerate description, because it has happened to be successful in other novels; we might in fact argue that the novel’s ability to tell rather than show is one of its greatest assets. Fledgling novelists are often told to “think of your book as a movie or a stage play” (Morrill). If an audience couldn’t see it or hear it, it is telling—don’t put it in. But novels are not movies or plays; why limit them as if they were? Why should prose fiction give up the huge advantage it has over visual narrative: namely, that it can deliver context non-scenically?

    If we are convinced by these arguments—if readers are perfectly capable of applying the knowledge they glean from “internal footnotes” to the rest of the narrative, so long as they are provided with both—then we need not look any further: these last immigrant novels we have identified have, in fact, with the help of a thinking reader, achieved the desired reconciliation of experience with structural reality. We have been making too much of Oscar’s confusion.

    There is, of course, the pessimistic alternative: that the synthesis is desirable, that there is something important these novels are lacking, and yet the task is simply hopeless. In this view, the best these novels can do is provide experience and explanation side-by-side; they are incapable, even with interpretive help, of synthesizing the two. If we take seriously Jameson’s insistence that there is a gap, even a contradiction, between experience and reality, then we might reasonably conclude that readers cannot be expected to apply the didactic information a novel provides to make sense of the narrative. And when it comes to global matters, it may simply be too much to expect novelists to reconcile that contradiction either. The crisis of contemporary narrative in this case remains, and the immigrant novels we have analyzed only showcase this. But they have gotten as close as they can to fostering the global understandings Heise desires.

    Whichever of these we choose—that the synthesis is undesirable, or that it is desirable but impossible—we end up with the same verdict: that we should stop creating a novelistic imperative out of cognitive mapping. Whether literature cannot manage it, or literature has already managed it with the readers’ help, or we do not even want it in the first place, there is no reason we should insist on Jameson’s stronger claim that the task of literature is to bridge subjective experience and structural reality. All we might ask is that literature find ways to incorporate both.

    So far, our two possible verdicts on cognitive mapping assume that at least the first two stipulations are worthwhile: that we ought to desire spatially expansive content, and that we ought to look for literature that is inclined to teach us about that content. But there is also a third potential verdict that rejects these assumptions.

    We might decide, lastly, to reject more than one, even all three, of the stipulations of the cognitive mapping project, and conclude that we are mistaken to even desire global explanation from literature. If even immigrant novels, which we might expect to excel at such a project, turn out not to meet the three stipulations named above, then perhaps the stipulations themselves are misguided and ultimately not useful. This is a conclusion open to us to draw. It would seem to depend on our valuation of the social realist tradition, which has historically placed an emphasis on the pedagogical function of art, but which has also tended to uncritically celebrate unifying projects. Whether social realism can be harnessed to other ends, and whether it can be expanded to a global scale without destroying particularities—as we saw occur in many of these immigrant novels, with every Old Country despecified to serve the same narrative purpose, or with Haiti or Russia becoming just another America—is an essential consideration. Full stories, according to a protagonist in White Teeth, “are like the stories God tells: full of impossibly particular information” (Smith 252). If he is right, then this project might tend uncomfortably toward the imperial gaze. There is the feasibility concern: perhaps novelists cannot possibly play God, in which case supposedly full stories will consistently, upon inspection, turn out to be quite narrow. And there is the normative concern: should novelists be aiming to play God at all?

    We end, then, with a recognition that the conclusion we draw from this analysis of immigrant literature depends almost entirely on our theoretical commitments: on what we believe literature is for, and what we want the novel in particular to accomplish. If we believe that novels are best suited for revealing the particularity of experience, or if we prize different sorts of explanations from the kind mapping solicits, then we will derive from this essay a questioning of the standard itself, and will consider Oscar’s mind-bogglement not a puzzle at all, but a reflection of our condition in a globalized world—a condition literature can usefully articulate, but is not meant to solve. If we believe that novels are best suited for description—if their ability to tell, not just show, is their prized feature—then we will be pleased with the last few immigrant novels we explored, and hopeful about the potential of social realism. And if we believe that novels are best suited for integrated representation—and for representing, in particular, a reality that includes a great many global phenomena—then we may be able to take clues from a few of these immigrant novels, but the search, in a variety of genres, will be far from over.

     

    Emma Lezberg is a senior undergraduate majoring in critical theory at Williams College. Her current research examines how figures of scale (local/global, small/big) are deployed in debates around agriculture and food production.

    Christian Thorne is a professor of English at Williams College.

     

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    [1] This essay was co-written by Emma Lezberg and Christian Thorne, with Emma Lezberg as lead author. Christian Thorne generated the initial questions. Emma Lezberg did all of the research, generating the essay’s literary judgments and arguments in conversation with Christian Thorne. She also produced two major drafts of the essay, each of which Christian Thorne revised.

    [2] We have chosen to focus in this essay on immigrant fiction to the exclusion of refugee fiction, variously considered an alternate genre or a sub-genre, because we suspect that refugee fiction contains its own dynamics which may contribute more, or at least differently, to the cognitive mapping project. Refugee novels may be more likely to follow characters during their migrations, and rather than being limited primarily to two nations (sending and receiving), refugees may travel through a number of nations or be formally resettled through Third Country Resettlement (“Solutions”). On the other hand, the impact of trauma—certainly not absent in these immigrant novels, but perhaps more ubiquitous in refugee novels—may complicate the narratives in ways that puncture any potential map. At the very least, refugee fiction deserves its own essay to investigate these various considerations. As refugee novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen says in a 2017 interview, explaining his conscious effort to write refugee literature that is not immigrant literature, “I don’t think they’re the same.[…] Immigrants who voluntarily come to a country have already made a decision to assimilate to one degree or another.[…] But refugees, especially in their early years, are still caught up in the experience that made them refugees.[…] They’re much more oriented towards the past and towards the country of origin” (Bethune).

    [3] For a brief analysis of how migrant literature has been characterized as a “new world literature,” see Glesener. Glesener concludes, “World literature studies will find in migration literature the necessary material to further research on cosmopolitanism[….]”

    [4] Joshua Miller, in his sweeping analysis of nineteenth and early twentieth-century immigrant novels, writes that “the ‘immigrant novel’ has been understood as a tale of arrival to a New World,” a tale of “optimism and obstacles” (200).

    [5] To name a few that will be discussed in this article: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee, and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

    [6] For example, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker denies that immigrants arrive in America with idealistic expectations, and chides us for assuming so: “Not one of them thinks these streets are paved with gold. This remains our own fancy.[…] They know they will come here and live eight or nine to a room and earn ten dollars a day, maybe save five” (335).

    [7] Call it Sleep is, in fact, one of the novels Boelhower mentions in his analysis, but we also bring it up here—both because of its enduring prominence and because it beautifully illustrates, as we hope to show, how the homeland can be rendered inaccessible in narratives such as these.

    [8] The American oath of allegiance makes aspiring citizens vow to “renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen” (“Naturalization Oath”). Journalists in left-wing newspapers write op-eds titled “Immigrants are Americans Who are Born in the Wrong Place” (Goldberg). Refugee resettlement agencies, community-based nonprofits, and government agencies offer immigration services under their “New Americans” programs: to name just a few, Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, Queens Library, Center for New Americans in the Pioneer Valley, One America in Washington, Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, and the Citizenship for New Americans Program (CNAP) in Massachusetts.

    [9] The only time anyone describes living in Korea is when Henry reviews what he has learned about a Korean-American politician’s immigration history: one paragraph involving family members killed in the Korean War and immigration to America as a houseboy (Lee 210-11). Yet we later find out that this politician has been keeping enormous secrets, leading us to question even the little information about Korea we might have been able to glean from this short passage.

    [10] When someone on a train asks Gogol’s father, Ashoke, “Seen much of this world?” and Ashoke begins naming places in India, the man responds, “Not this world[…] England. America[…] Have you considered going there?” (15). The word is again used regionally when, at the end of the novel, we are told that Gogol’s mother will “dwell, as his father does, in a separate world,” which means she will be moving back to Calcutta (289). Even more often, “world” refers to even smaller entities. For example, the narrator names four addresses, two in India and two in America, and remarks about Gogol’s mother, “That had been her world” (160). Gogol’s wife feels sick over the death of a departmental administrative assistant at the university, who was “so marginal and yet so central to her world” (255). The university campus is called “the confined, picturesque universe that had been his father’s world for most of the past twenty-five years” (183). And of Gogol and his first wife, the narrator admits, “They had both sought comfort in each other, and in their shared world, perhaps for the sake of novelty, or out of the fear that that world was slowly dying” (284).

    [11] Kirsch writes, “A global novel can be one that sees humanity on the level of the species, so that its problems and prospects can only be dealt with on the scale of the whole planet; or it can start from the scale of a single neighborhood, showing how even the most constrained of lives are affected by worldwide movements” (25).

    [12] For more on Things That Just Happen, see Thorne, “Providence in the Early Novel,” and “The Sea is Not a Place.”

    [13] This quote describes the children of the family upon returning to America, but the novel gives the immigrant parents similar sentiments. Home from another one of their trips to Calcutta, “there is nothing to remind them” of where they’ve been; “in spite of the hundred or so relatives they’ve just seen, they feel as if they are the only Gangulis in the world” (Lahiri 64). In these few sentences, the other side of the world is made extraneous and is pushed to the margins.

    [14] That significance “could be figured along familiar ratios”: “Pebble: Beach. Raindrop: Ocean. Needle: Haystack” (Smith 11).

    [15] Protagonists: Oscar in Oscar Wao, Vladimir in Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Ifemelu in Americanah, Delaney in Tortilla Curtain, and Yolanda in Garcia Girls. Others: Ashoke in The Namesake, Marcus in White Teeth, Judith in The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. Oscar Wao and possibly Garcia Girls are supposed to have been written by characters in their narratives. And this is not including Henry in Native Speaker, who as part of his job as an operative writes up detailed stories of subjects’ lives, also enabling the novel to reflect upon storytelling.

    [16] In Díaz, see 144 and 294. In Adichie, see 154. In Shteyngart, see 82, 180, 244, and 357 for “postmodernism”; see also 270 for “semiotics” and 316 for “poststructuralists.” Marxism, in the end, ends up saving the protagonist’s life in Shteyngart.

    [17] The exception is Breath, Eyes, Memory.

    [18] The next section does provide one paragraph describing how the macoutes routinely enter a house and demand food and women, but it still does not probe the state dynamics that encourage this, and the explanation only lasts a few sentences.

    [19] Paul Farmer insists that “it is one thing to make sense of extreme suffering—a universal activity, really—and quite another to explain it” (41). Drawing from Wallerstein, he argues that individual life experiences in Haiti require explanation, and that these “local understandings must be embedded, in turn, in the historical system of which Haiti is a part” (Farmer 41): precisely the preoccupation of this essay. Why one would turn to literature rather than anthropology for this purpose is another question, one we will take up at the end of this essay.

    [20] In Native Speaker, when Henry’s wife suggests to his father that the Korean neighborhood in New York City must be like the old country, his father corrects her, explaining “how if she looked carefully at the people she’d see the extra spring in their steps” just from the knowledge that “[t]his is an American street” (Lee 282-83). Breath, Eyes, Memory refuses to grant America such power, and likens the origin and destination countries: Haiti is simply where her aunt lives, while America is where her mother, and later her husband, live. Sophie’s first reaction upon seeing her mother in America, noting her scarred and sunburned fingers, is “It was as though she had never stopped working in the cane fields after all” (Danticat 42). Later, when Sophie returns with her daughter to visit Haiti, her aunt asks her, “Is it really as grand as they say, New York?” When Sophie replies, “It’s a place where you can lose yourself easily,” her aunt admits, “Grand or not grand, I am losing myself here too” (Danticat 103-04).

    [21] Usually this comes in the form of a partner, whose family “adopts” the protagonist and teaches him or her about America. For Americanah, it’s Curt and Kimberly. For The Namesake, it’s Maxine. For White Teeth, it’s the Chalfen family: “She wanted to “merge with them. She wanted their Englishness.[…] She was crossing borders, sneaking into England[…]wearing somebody else’s uniform or somebody else’s skin” (Smith 328). For Russian Debutante’s Handbook, it’s Fran: “what he really wanted to do[…]was to become Manhattanite Francesca Ruocco” (Shteyngart 83). For The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, it’s Judith. And Tortilla Curtain simply gives the white, native-born Mossbacher couple their own points of view.

    [22] See footnote 20.

    [23] Admittedly, Americanah does not pursue Nigerian politics even the few times it gestures at governmental affairs. For example, Ifemelu’s Aunty Uju dates a man termed The General, and although we know he is high up in the Nigerian government, we do not learn anything about what he does. And the one time a coup is mentioned, the novel does not recount for us anything about the current government, the attempted coup, or what led up to it; all we get is, “on the same day as the failed coup, while the traders who lived downstairs were crying because the coup would have saved Nigeria and market women would have been given cabinet positions[…]” (Adichie 52). One might also note that “[w]hile Americanah stands as a self-consciously global novel, as metonymically encapsulated by Ifemelu’s transnational blogging, questions of global economic history appear marginal to the novel’s central love story” (Hallemeier 236). For example, there is no mention of the economic recession, even as Ifemelu is quitting jobs and pursuing freelance writing. Yet while this may certainly be read as “deliberately undermining expectations that the African novel is always already politically-oriented” (Hallemeier 236), we would point out that these are exceptions to what is on the whole a very politically-oriented novel; to suggest that there is an “absence of overt politics in Americanah” (Kirsch 67) is to skip over the many conversations between characters on overtly political topics.

    [24] As Rita Barnard points out, the point of view of the literature which concerned Benedict Anderson “must transcend that of a single individual” to create even a national imaginary, let alone a global one (207). See Barnard for a consideration of how Anderson’s account might be adapted for the purpose of imagining global novels.

    [25] See Daily-Bruckner for the argument that there is “a discernable, emerging pattern of waning allegiance to America within twenty-first century American immigrant narratives” (219). She also notes, “The immigrant novel has been transformed in order to tell a story that is otherwise too large for traditional narrative conventions” (233).

    [26] Mangal Pandy was the sepoy who began the Indian Mutiny of 1857-59.

    [27] See Adichie 227-28, 253-54, 264-66, 273-75 for examples.

    [28] For example, when a tía in Garcia Girls uses the word “antojo,” Alvarez has the protagonist ask her what the word means, and the novel spends a full page having characters impart its meaning, blowing out their cheeks to indicate that it is food-related and giving examples of when one might use the word (8).

    [29] Díaz does, similar to Cliff, include many full sentences of untranslated Spanish, but does not even offer a glossary, requiring us to turn to a dictionary or the internet. And Google Translate is often unhelpful, necessitating a more laborious search; readers have in fact created an online annotated Oscar Wao that includes translations and references. It is interesting that Díaz includes footnotes for historical and political explanation but not for translations or his many sci-fi references. It is as if, in these cases, Díaz is saying: the world doesn’t give you a dictionary (or, subjective experience does not provide its own map)—why should I?

    [30] On the epic’s potential for global storytelling, see Thorne, “Grassy-Green Sea.”

    [31] Along these lines, Heise regrets that a particular novelist’s “narrative technique, for the most part, reverts to the ‘outside’ view of the globe that was symbolized in the 1960s by the image of the Blue Planet, rather than suggesting how this perspective might formally be integrated with the multiple different viewpoints and approaches that, as theories of cosmopolitanism would insist, go into the making of images of the global” (Sense of Place 177).

    [32] Miller notes that immigrant novels have long tended to “innovate through overt translation and recombination of features from diverse sources” (201).

    [33] See Jameson, The Political Unconscious 34 on the self-footnoting novel.

  • Eric Wertheimer – The Telegraphed Republic: Semaphores and the New Executive

    Eric Wertheimer – The Telegraphed Republic: Semaphores and the New Executive

    by Eric Wertheimer

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

    Paris is quiet and the good citizens are content.

    —Napoleon Bonaparte’s first message delivered by optical telegraph after seizing power in 1799

    Maybe it should not surprise us that among the first messages of consequence sent by telegraph is an exacting statement about the silent satisfaction of the “people.”[1] Contrasted with Samuel Morse’s portentously open-ended “What hath God wrought?”, the cool administrative authority of Napoleon Bonaparte’s dispatch is rendered all the more acute. A republican concern for “contentment” —the Enlightenment affection for happiness even—is condensed into a secure, omniscient, and unambiguous transmission meant for deferred public consumption. It is a mode we might call “executive”—political information traveling the secure means of public power, assuming public consent as confirmation of its administrative reach; fitting that Napoleon inherited this state technology from the republic’s ruling Directoire Exécutif (Executive Directory). The victory message encodes and relays, rather than prints and broadcasts, the certainty of order and noiselessness, presuming authority over a defined geography.

    That certainty, in turn, can be understood as a product of the telegraphic process itself, a new, though not completely un-theorized, thing.[2] Prior to the telegraph, during the period of the republican nationalizing of print, a wave of information networks sought to align the aggregate of public discourse with the apparatus of state power. Napoleon’s telegraphy, however, represents a point of inflection away from this aggregation toward state power, inviting us to think about why the telegraph caused a change in republican governance. Consider that republican theories of oration and writing imagined an expansive and egalitarian field of persuasion and critique that, like a self-leveling body of water, would spread just behind, or ahead of, the nation itself. Coextensive with the information springs that diffuse its imagined selves, the new republic guaranteed a check on the balance of power between the public and civil authority. But, framed by republican ideology and the necessities of war, it became apparent during the transformations of Napoleonic statecraft that information would be both critical to public welfare and increasingly restricted within its compass. Networks of information would no longer be isomorphic with public self-conceptions—if they ever were. Republicanism’s sphere of mediation, an idealized reflecting surface, also started to become a linear network of self-locking channels—dark chambers and webs as opposed to mirrors and funnels. To be clear, telegraphy did not supplant these forms of mediation and political circuitry; rather, it added to the range of techniques available to the new republican state.

    When we begin to consider the semaphoric landscape of national communications, we see the various ways the republic of letters was not so much a network of transparent arguments and narratives about national integration or even regional identity, or a stage upon which the powerful exercised their arguments anonymously in service to the public good. During the early Federal period of the 1790s, it was increasingly a republic of inverted publicity, with the relays, compressions, and decompressions of texts serving to disrupt the economic and informational systems of print, signal-making, and manuscript. And this is true not only of everyday signal-making within networked New England (cf. Matt Cohen), but also of the highest and most canonical of American Enlightenment thinkers and politicians. Understanding the technology as a transatlantic republican transfer, we can begin to understand the republic of letters in its full range of mediated symbolic economies.

    *

    The chambering effect of the earliest semaphore telegraphs was architecturally visible in the structure of the telegraph stations themselves, and in the patterns such structures made upon the geography of the modern national republic. Figure 1 shows a Binary Panel telegraph from 1794, which diagrammatically charges each space with discrete intelligence, at once connected to and sealed off from an integrated whole.

    Figure 1: Binary panel telegraph. From: Louis Figuier, Les Merveilles de la science, 1867–1891, Tome 2.djvu, Image 21.m

    Designed as a set of relational binaries, the networked physical space combines autonomous coding with a necessary extension of that space into repeated linkages. Each linkage requires privileged access to interpretation and to the overall design of the coding structure. Individually and taken together, these stations signaled an open-air puzzle that invaded public space with private meanings about public things. Under such conditions—these coded assemblages—readers and writers form a publically private sphere, or what we might call a crypto-public.

    That geometry of segmentation and networking repeated itself at larger scales. Indeed, such segmenting is evident in the regularized rhizome or web that becomes the French station map from 1792 until 1852 (see Figure 2). At the risk of over-metaphorizing the pattern, this webbed rhizome forms a networked humanoid (the King’s ghosted body?) in its telegraph system, revealing in the process a kind of early infographic of modern power.

    Figure 2: Chappe telegraph system

    Paul Virilio has described the post-Roman segmentarity of territory as essential to the logic of modern states, imposing linearity in its militarized necessity. Perhaps that is discernible here with the return of an updated Roman militarism, very much in keeping with an echoed Napoleonic neoclassical and royal poetics, but here with the modern executive as its austere figurative counterpart. The map reveals the telos of this transformation’s capacity to make meaning visibly transportable across the French topography and adherent to the needs of the new republican executive.[3]

    We can begin to evaluate this transformation, particularly visible in the 1790s, by asking questions not just of the broader shapes of networking and mediation, but of our dispositions as readers of both ambiguity and precision. The new telegraphic sphere transformed the methods of reading itself, taking the rage for cryptography and ciphers into a more systematic and pervasive (because more public and open) mode of coded transmission. Words, clauses, phrases, and sentences (which can helpfully be classified as “intelligence,” “information,” “data,” or “plaintext”) were condensed into graphemes, and then sequenced for reception that resists confusion; we might even think of it as among the earliest forms of pure information. And yet we should remember that the pure informatics of the telegraph does not exclude confusion from the structure of transmission—indeed, confusion (as with all cryptography) is a feature, not a bug. Confusion fills the role of the sealed envelope in open field communication like telegraphy, keeping the visible illegible, but packaged nonetheless. The conversion of plaintext into a smoother temporal package, able to splice distance, divides legibility into the indecipherable and the solvable. Depending on one’s access to the network of interpretive competence, one’s intention and position in the signifying relay, what appears opaque can be perfectly legible.

    Telegraphy’s early binary hermeneutics had its sources in a worry about the degrading of meaning across distance and about the sufficiency of human agency itself. As a result of perceptual and interpretive decay, uncertainty emerges as an unfortunate consequence of the limitations of human acuity, a crippling nearsightedness. Telegraphy thus demanded a larger perceptual apparatus that could be prosthetically attached to the human eye, and it is given form both in the structures of the transponder stations that were built during the period of Napoleonic republicanism, and in the political state that necessitates and organizes those stations. The contingencies of visibility made signification’s emblems layered and rich, and they can be read as meaningful artifacts in both their patterns of projective mechanics and their metaphors for explaining political effects.

    The quest for a secure broadcast meant rethinking the terms of internal signification, transmission and external reception—a reclassifying of the perceptual mechanics of communication. Some of that work had already been theorized as a merging of the “sudden” with the “certain.” In 1684, Robert Hooke hailed the “certainty” of a proposed telegraphic “intelligence” in a “Discourse to the Royal Society. . . shewing a Way how to communicate one’s Mind at great Distances”: “That. . . [is] a Method of discoursing at a Distance, not by Sound, but by Sight. . . . ’tis possible to convey Intelligence from any one high and eminent Place, to any other that lies in Sight of it. . . in as short a Time almost, as a Man can write what he would have sent, and as suddenly to receive an Answer” (Hooke 1964, 142). Suddenness is Hooke’s word for automatism, or perhaps “telepresence.” Data imprints itself onto a computational, agent-less consciousness, forgoing faculties of judgment and interest that delay immediate understanding and make demands on memory. Distance and recall become what I would call negative fields of exchange, and only important to the degree that they are made to recede.[4] It is the origin of text as pure data rather than argumentation or even “thought”—non-conversational, foreclosing dialogue and memory, a text that is constrained and defined by its linear velocity, particularly well-suited to the purposes of the executive state. That executive state stood to recover what its nationalized representational technology might dissolve in the circuitry.

    That executive reclamation, at the dawn of the constitutional era of republics, is driven by the semiotics of technological migrations and deployments. I assemble this story out of disparate fixtures that may seem wholly apart. That is, it may seem this essay is bifurcated nationally and conceptually—France and America, telegraphic structures and telegraphic metaphors—but I want to contend that the two are essential to understanding each function. While this essay is largely about French telegraphes and then American “telegraphs,” it is really about how the new world of executive informatics in the transatlantic republican era came to recognize itself as a political technology and, in so doing, made room for a new kind of communicative regime.

    *

    Edward Cave’s London-based Gentleman’s Magazine in 1794 ran a long item about the deployment of the semaphore telegraph in France, a piece of reportage which was reprinted in US periodicals not long after. What is particularly telling about Cave’s piece is its appending to the report a quotation from Ovid, “Fas est ab hoste doceri [It’s right to learn from one’s enemy].” Cave signals to his readers that the import of the technological breakthrough is as much in its usefulness in defining enemies as in its power as a means of communication.

    Mr. Urban                               Sept 11.

    The telegraph was originally the invention of William Amontons. . . [who] contracted such a deafness as obliged him to renounce all communications with mankind. . . . This philosopher also first pointed out a method to acquaint people at a great distance, and in a very little time, with whatever one pleased. This method was as follows: let persons be placed in several stations, at such distances from each other, that, by the help of a telescope, a man in one station may see a signal made by the next before him; he immediately repeats this signal, which is again repeated through all the intermediate stations. This, with considerable improvements, has been adopted by the French, and denominated a Telegraphe; and, from the utility of the invention, we doubt not but it will be soon introduced in this country. Fas est ab hoste doceri. (Cave 1794)

    And so indeed the French enemy speaks of telegraphy as the key to republican governmentality: in this iteration, the invention is quickly attached to the purposes of a voracious political program that is, in turn, alleged to be in the service of shadowy power-hungry persons.

    To Cave’s account is appended a much-reprinted copy of the notorious Jacobin Bertrand Barere’s report to the French Convention of August 15, 1794, which describes the telegraph’s value to the new Republic:

    By this invention the remoteness of distances almost disappear; and all the communications of correspondence are effected with the rapidity of the twinkling of an eye. The operations of Government can be…facilitated by this contrivance, and the unity of the Republick can be the more consolidated by the speedy communication with all its parts. The greatest advantage which can be derived from this correspondence is. . . its object shall only be known to certain individuals. (Cave 1794, 815–16)

    Barere’s advertisement in the English-speaking press for the new technology is decidedly political but blind to its ideological contradictions—“certain” individuals who make use of certainty, executives, seeking the unity of its dispersed publics. The telegraph is immediately conceived in such quarters in executive mode, exclusive to what Friedrich Kittler (2010) in Optical Media calls a “militant elite” (74), despite the radical democratic alignment of the partisans who are accused of deploying it.[5]

    The capacity to make information a spectacular but exclusive part of modern control, and a certain kind of public comfort, was immediately evident to all who had a stake in political power. Consider the telegraph in Figure 3, which Claude and Ignace Chappe perfected as a synchronized pendulum system between 1790 and 1791.[6] Despite its anachronism as a depiction (c. 1868) it is a useful rendering of the original system as first used on March 2, 1791, with synchronized towers in Brulon and Parce. In the distance (16 kilometers) is the synced analog clock in Brulon, distinguished by the popping face of phosphorous white set on the edge of a calm green horizon.

    Figure 3: Visual telegraph system, 1791. Sheila Terry/Science Photo Library

    A modified clock face in guillotine-like frame is the inaugural emblem of telegraphic coding—here, divided temporality looms over all aspects of its earliest methods. More precisely, the clock face is a dead metaphor, no hands inexorably rotating through a fixed template. It has become, instead, an analogic key for the alphabet (the severed head still speaking) divided into sixteen points that indicate letters through serial combinations of position and sound. The reliance upon numerals underscores the medium’s crypto-publicity, even as it bespeaks time as something to be erased or repositioned. Temporality has been transferred from the “clock” to the spaces between, with the linearity of time made literal in its acoustical and graphical run over space, the natural world modernized by technical structures; indeed, now clocks could be made to “speak” to one another, from station to station, over the mute countryside. The speech of such machines across backcountries was—even as early as 1795 in the following press report on the surrender of Conde-sur-Lescaut (see Figure 4)—referred to as “lines,” well before the more obvious metonym deriving from the cables and wiring of electronic telegraphy.

    Figure 4: Press report on the surrender of Conde-sur-Lescaut. Source: Readex (Readex.com), a division of NewsBank, inc.

    The stations were not meant for public squares, as in the somewhat fanciful context in the rendering above (see Figure 3), but more like the austere passive-voiced reportorial description here (see Figure 4). Indeed, the public should be imagined as a potential decoder in the countryside, waiting passively or aggressively beneath the flow of information, a confusion of unseen seers unable to see—“copying the words so expeditiously, and for throwing such a body of light as to make them visible. . . does not yet appear”. There is not only a deliberate confusion engendered by the encrypted signals, but also a confusion that arises from the non-human agency of transponders—bodies of light and bodies of human copiers are effectively the same.

    In fact, that initial puzzlement or wonderment about the grafting of data over demographics was soon turned to distrust of the elitist, undemocratic origins and ends of executive transponders. This disorientation—the national imaginary threatened by encrypted units of time and space, or what Patricia Crain (2003) describes as “paranoia” about the semaphore telegraph’s “seemingly self-authorized power”—is not discernible in any of the early transatlantic accounts (67). But we know that the successor to Chappe’s panel telegraph was destroyed twice by mobs who apparently feared that the telegraph was being used to aid royalist forces within France.

    Barely two years later, after the synchronized pendulum and then binary panels, the French had established the first telegraph line, an optical semaphore, that used a four-part armature, the angles of which could be regulated (see Figure 5).

    Figure 5: French semaphore telegraph.

     

    On view here is a muted sociability, with blackened windows in the tower, the crowd absent from a landscape that suggests its utilitarian purpose with diagrammatic rigor. A single man stands with a horse, back to us, presumably part of the postal system, ready to dispatch an end note. The clock face has been replaced by a purely angular semiotics, one whose capacity for coded permutations was multiplied greatly, with sixty-three possibilities. In the armature of the new semaphore, time of transmission is squeezed into smaller intervals, smoothed out and compressed, abbreviation disguised as executive technique. Another way to put it is that executive communication via telegraph was “steganographic,” a term borrowed from diplomatic ciphering’s system for managing confusion. Steganography provided for the polity to be policed and protected via codes.

    *

    Steganography, the communicative science of secrecy, is one way telegraphy relayed across the Atlantic, before the infamous nineteenth-century story of the heroic laying of the cable. For instance, Benjamin Franklin Bache’s 1797 English-French reprinting of P. R. Wouve’s fragmentary Tableau Syllabique et Steganographique/A Syllabical and Steganographical Table figures encryption as a form of telegraphy, stressing the way steganography guarantees the “safety of the secret” (Wouve 1787, repr.1797).

    Figure 6: Title page of French steganography text, published in Philadelphia.

    Part of a mini-genre of ciphering and cryptography tables in the 1790s, the manual assembled methods for encrypting information numerically so that it could travel publicly without detection as to alphabetic meaning. As Wouve’s (1787, repr. 1797) manual puts it, “Experience will soon bring to a general demonstration, that the method here employed, is not only conducive to secure the secret of any kind of written intercourse, but is even advantageously applicable to all telegraphical purposes, as well as to all sorts of reconnoitering signals, either for the sea or land service.” The word “telegraphical” here, in its adjectival charge, tropes automatism and brevity, as the republic begins to experiment with abbreviation and secrecy as civic activities.

    In 1793, about four months after George Washington delivered the shortest inaugural address in American history (a speech entirely given over to a brief of republican executive caution: depose me if I abuse power), several newspapers reported the demonstration of Chappe’s telegraph as part of a nationalized system. The reportage picked up considerably with news of its instrumentality in the French capture of Conde-sur-L’Escaut from the Austrians in 1794. But rather than the lightning of Napoleonic informatics, telegraphy actually crossed the Atlantic in the slow boat of metaphor, as a second-order signal about easily-relayed public information, rather than a viable state technology of applied steganography. As with other new technologies finding their places within uneven national development, telegraphy and steganography became devices for conceiving a new cultural and political capability, rather than a story about what the device itself does. In the United States, telegraphy became a commercial curiosity inserted into print culture in a way that was either part of an enthusiastic endorsement of, or deep suspicion about, republicanism and its aggressive mutations in Jacobin and early-Napoleonic France. What we notice most is the specter of a technology being used quite openly to ideological ends—republicans praising the possibility of the telegraphic state and Federalists decrying the militarized appropriation of its capacity for public information. Both postures were paranoid, but not entirely unwarranted.

    Telegraphy entered the burgeoning print press of the early United States as a metaphor about how dissemination of news across the republic might take place—“telegraphing,” as Barere made clear, keeps information current even at great distances, to the benefit of executive and public alike. In the process of metaphorical transposition, the military was quickly conflated with the political. It joined other technophilic tropes of distance-, time-, or mechanical-conquest in newspapers that incorporated words like “telescope,” “time piece,” “balance,” and “orrery” into their nameplates. This needful over-reach in the naming of newspapers even became the object of satire. On the millennial date of January 1, 1800, the Massachusetts Mercury made sport of the practice of media metaphors in a poem, targeting competitors like The Aurora, The Argus, and The Bee:

    That ‘RORA’s’ cloudy, ‘ARGUS’ squints;

    That the pert ‘BEE’’s a worthless drone,

    Sans sting or honey of his own.

    But dropping anger, loud you laugh,

    At signal false of ‘TELEGRAPH.’   

    Despite the manifest epidemic of journalistic over-selling, the telegraphic brand in the US preserved a naïve belief in the transparency of print messaging—it was the same, only faster, and so its use in key parts of the new republic was reassuringly not ambiguous or threatening. As long as it was subsumed within print networks, the telegraph was only indirectly threatening to those who feared republicanism and its radical political agenda derived from revolutionary militancy.

    An assortment of rural towns and cities outside the northern periphery had papers that adopted the title. Charleston, SC, was North America’s first. With only four issues of the Telegraph, published from March 16, 1795 to March 20, 1795, and a variant title of The Telegraph and Charleston Daily Advertiser: a proposed Baltimore Telegraphe was advertised in the Aurora General Advertiser in February 1795, but never published. Perhaps the most infamous and influential early “telegraph” (and in many ways an anomaly to the regional and demographic rule at work here) was Boston’s arch-Republican twice weekly, Constitutional Telegraph.[7] Aside from Boston’s Constitutional Telegraph, what one notices is that the majority of “telegraphs” were removed from the metropolitan centers, either in suburbs or frontier towns, across regions north to south, mid-Atlantic to west. Examples include: the Telegraph in Georgetown, KY[8]; the American Telegraphe in Newfield, CT, with a variant of American Telegraphe & Fairfield County Gazette[9]; and Maine’s Wiscasset Telegraph.[10]

    The use of the technologized press metaphor tended to be a signal about the party affiliations of the printer, as was the case of Brookfield, Massachusetts’s The Moral and Political Telegraphe.[11] It was produced as a successor to the venerable Isaiah Thomas’s Worcester Intelligencer by Thomas’s apprentice Elisha H. Waldo. Upon taking it over for its run as the Telegraphe, Waldo shifted the paper’s allegiance to republican France, which, as a front-page report of an anti-Jacobin conspiracy put it, had “warm American friends.” There is something fitting about the great printer’s pupil paradigmatically adopting the telegraphic metaphor to politically realign and modernize the news. Allegiance, whether changed or emphasized, moral or political, was publicized by subtle orthographic signals: Boston’s The Constitutional Telegraph changed its spelling to the French in 1802, becoming The Constitutional Telegraphe (see Figures 7 and 8). After the War of 1812, and, arguably, the onset of a Napoleonic executive posture in US political culture, the telegraph secures its place firmly in a variety of nameplates. For instance, the Hillsboro Telegraph[12]; the Columbian Telegraph[13]; the Rochester Telegraph[14]; the Telegraph[15]; and the American Telegraph published in Brownsville, PA.[16]

    Figure 7: The English Constitutional Telegraph. Source: Readex (Readex.com), a division of NewsBank, inc.

    And the Constitutional Telegraphe, three years later transformed with the French spelling and the addition of a flourish of an iconic masthead (see Figure 8):

    Figure 8: The French Constitutional Telegraphe, three years later. Source: Readex (Readex.com), a division of NewsBank, inc.

    The press motif of a telegraphed republic had a life outside the means of bringing both news and a politicized Napoleonic semiotics to the suburbs and rural outposts of the United States. Indeed its metaphorical purposes did cultural, and even literary, heavy lifting beyond the journalistic. It was both an emblem of progressive inventiveness in pro-French propaganda and a warning about dystopic ruination in Federalist satire. Of the pro-French variety, telegraphy became a glorious artifact and a feature of historical prophecy: Virginia republican St. George Tucker’s 1794 replica model/homage to Chappe’s telegraph was soon after included in Peale’s Museum. And the Aurora/Gazette of 1795 hails the telegraph bringing news at the speed of “lightning” of the “disgrace of our enemies” and the “towering flights of our glories,” positing the conflation of the technology with the triumphantly political. English historian John Gifford produced a grand hagiography called The History of France (1792), praising the telegraph and Napoleon’s military genius that was re-published by the Aurora’s republican printer and editor, William Duane.

    Of the latter, anti-Jacobin genre: John Lowell Jr.’s The Antigallican [sic]; or, The Lover of His Own Country: In a Series of Pieces Partly Heretofore Published and Partly New, Wherein French Influence, and False Patriotism, Are Fully and Fairly Displayed,(1797), retails the purported schemes in which Jacobins were wont to use technology to bypass rational debate and aim straight for the passions.

    By pompous professions of their own purity, and by an over zealous crimination of their opposers, the Jacobins always aim at exciting the passions of the people, before their understandings have opportunity to examine into the truth. They know that public clamor is like a torrent, which in its destructive course, sweeps away every vestige of human wisdom. . . . By exciting it therefore they hope to overwhelm the monument of law, order and public authority. Thus in the case of the treaty with Great Britain, no arts, no intrigues, no falsehoods were omitted, to excite the prejudice and inflame the passions of the people. . . . They distributed it with the rapidity of the telegraph, and promoted instant discussions of it in illegal assemblies…proud ambition leagued with stupid folly. (32)

    Lowell’s “telegraph” is a symbol, part of a political jeremiad meant to appropriately dispose the public to a threat. It is accurate insofar as it presages President James Madison’s rather overt preying on public passions fifteen years later, during the War of 1812. It is also a moment that arguably ushered in the new age of war-making as executive action, when the telegraph’s secretive modalities do indeed feed a politics that is really neither republican nor Federalist, but executive. And while Lowell might have been justified in worrying the Democratic–Republican tilt to France, he need not have fretted the communicative means to that end because the telegraph’s military mode was similarly disdainful of the public and its passions; passions could be political, executive telegraphy was merely strategic.

    *

    The realization of the telegraph as a militarized national project took some time, but of course it did happen just early enough for the United States to weigh in formally against British anti-Bonapartism. But the actual building of telegraph networks stayed relatively modest in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It is first mentioned as a possible means of “dart[ing] information” in hypothetical land and naval maneuvers in John Dickinson’s 1798 pro-French tract, A Caution: or, Reflections on the Present Contest between France and Great-Britain: “If intelligence from places more remote is wanted, telegraphs can dart it, with any requisite velocity.” Not long after, Jonathan Grant of Belchertown, MA, obtained a patent for an improved semaphore telegraph in 1800 and ran a line between Martha’s Vineyard and Boston (see O’Rielly 1869, 262–69).

    In 1813, in the midst of North America’s extension of Napoleonic war, civil engineer Christopher Colles reverse-engineered the telegraphic metaphor and published Description of the Numerical Telegraph for Communicating Unexpected Intelligence by Figures, Letters, Words, and Sentences (see also O’Rielly 1869, 262–69). The word “unexpected” here replays the sense of suddenness and even automatism suggested in Hooke’s plans for a medium that would allow two minds to surpass distance. The condition of war becomes a crystal in the fluid of the saturated medium of political necessity. In the midst of the War of 1812, this is the first attempt to really theorize and diagram a new kind of semaphore telegraph, which would be put to the uses of the American state (see Figure 9). Colles’s plan, first advertised in the Columbian in 1812, was realized in a forty-seven-mile line between New York City and Sandy Hook, NJ.

    Figure 9: Christopher Colles’s semaphore telegraph

    Colles’s semiotic machine was a hybrid of the semaphore, the ratcheting gear, and the clock face, suggesting for the first time a structure not wedded to the land, in the manner of a house, but a mobile, if clunky, device. Moreover, Colles’s telegraph is DIY-modular, and as with the French telegraphic station map it is comically homologous to the human form—a promising stick figure for the execution and administration of post-Enlightenment “unexpected intelligence.” The austere new agent of meaning is fit for Madisonian executive pragmatism—or bumbling, as the case may be. Unlike the French homology of state power, here the telegraphic pattern is coded at a smaller scale, individualized and repurposed for the public sphere of dispersed American political regionalism.

    We are learning in the process of historicizing “new media” that nothing is especially new under certain conditions of modernity (see Pingree and Gitelman 2003), and this is particularly true for telegraphy as a medium for political discourse and organized statecraft. The history of the telegraph is far from discretely composed by the period I have chosen to examine in this essay; understanding a range of phenomena—print culture, republicanism, early American regional allegiances—all resolve to greater clarity in the wake of the telegraph’s semiotic migrations. The hardnosed political deployment of the technology in France, the rhetorical circulation of an idea in the absence of state support in the United States, and then the effects of republican executive theory in the galvanizing moment of war—all form a proto-apparatus for militarized communication.

    And there is a deeper connection worth following and remembering that has to do with how cultural memory works and how political techniques maintain critical visibility to the public: During the 1790s, the telegraphic metaphor lodged itself within republican print culture benignly and visibly, removed from (but still encoded with) the terms of militarized informatics. That metaphor of telegraphic power emerged as a discernible self-consciousness about the technological shifts and executive ascendancy that began to fundamentally reorder the print sphere and its publics; but that self-consciousness did not extend to shifts in how executive semiotics reordered political life as a function of its form. The early technologists saw all symbol and nation, but not form or the implications of form. Telegraphy is, as such, part of the story of the undoing of the political order of print and the making of something newly invisible both to the public and to itself. Such technology, in which data is joined to politics, communicates its own “natural” ascendancy.

    I’d like to thank Sohinee Roy and Christopher Hanlon for their help in preparing this manuscript for publication.

    References

    Beauchamp, Ken. 2008. A History of Telegraphy. London: Institution of Engineering and Technology.

    Cave, Edward. 1794. Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 64, Part 2: 815-16.

    Cohen, Matt. 2009. The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press.

    Colles, Christopher. 1813. Description of the Numerical Telegraph for Communicating Unexpected Intelligence by Figures, Letters, Words, and Sentences. Brooklyn, NY: Alden Spooner.

    Crain, Patricia. 2003. “Children of Media, Children as Media: Optical Telegraphs, Indian Pupils, and Joseph Lancaster’s System for Cultural Replication.” In New Media: 1740–1915, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, 61–90. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Dickinson, John. 1798. A Caution: or, Reflections on the Present Contest between France and Great-Britain. Philadelphia, PA: Benjamin Franklin Bache.

    Giedion, Sigfried. 2014. Mechanisation Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1948.

    Gifford, John. 1792. The History of France. London:  C. Lowndes and W. Locke.

    Holzmann Gerard J. and Björn Pehrson. 2003. The Early History of Data Networks. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

    Hooke, Robert. 1967. Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke. Edited by William Derham. London: Frank Cass and Co.

    Innis, Harold A. 1951 The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Kittler, Friedrich. 2010. Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Translated by Anthony Enns. Malden, MA: Polity.

    Locke, John. 1689. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

    Lowell Jr., John. 1797. The Antigallican [sic]; or, The Lover of His Own Country: In a Series of Pieces Partly Heretofore Published and Partly New, Wherein French Influence, and False Patriotism, Are Fully and Fairly Displayed. Philadelphia, PA: William Cobbett.

    Manovich, Lev. 2001.  The Language of New Media. Cambridge:  MIT Press.

    O’Rielly, Henry. 1869. The Historical Magazine, Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, History, and Biography of America. Vol. V, Second Series. Morrisania, NY: Henry B. Dawson, 1869.

    Petre, F. Loraine. 2003. Napoleon and the Archduke Charles. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger.

    Pingree, Geoffrey B., and Lisa Gitelman. 2003. “Introduction: What’s New About New Media?” In New Media, 1740–1915, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, xi–xxii. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Wertheimer, Eric. 2012. “Pretexts: Some Thoughts on the Militarization of Print Rationality in the Early Republic.’ Canadian Review of American Studies 42, no. 1: 21–35.

    Wouves, P. R. 1787, repr. 1797. Tableau Syllabique et Steganographique/A Syllabical and Steganographical Table. Philadelphia, PA: Benjamin Franklin Bache.

    Notes

    [1] See Patricia Crain’s (2003) brief but seminal discussion of Napoleon’s message in “Children of Media, Children as Media.” Napoleon’s communiqué of 1799 was not, of course, the first message sent by nationalized telegraph. The very first message came years earlier, in 1794, when Napoleon relayed word of the capture of Quesnoy, an intriguingly precise post-revolutionary report about the surrender of “slaves”: “Austrian garrison of 300 slaves has laid down its arms and surrendered at discretion” (Petre 2003, 65 original emphasis)

    [2] Much of my thinking about this set of historically resonant design issues arises from a vein of media theory and history that originates in the work of Harold A. Innis in The Bias of Communication (1951) which begins to connect empire with media history and Sigfried Giedion, whose Mechanisation Takes Command (1948, repr. 2014) articulates a way to think about design as a signifier with deep meaning embedded in social (what he calls “anonymous”) history. I am aware my own terminology here is indebted to the new directions in media history, which take chances with analogies and homologies of form—thus the words “computational” and “binary” in my discussion of the early semaphore telegraph. I view this chance-taking as a way to theorize the semaphore as part of ideologies of representation that are playing out now, in fields like circuit design and social media analysis, but have distinct and identifiable origins in the past. Others in this lineage are of course, Friedrich Kittler (2010) and Lev Manovich, though I am wary of fully agent-less iterations of media history. That wariness is why I am interested in the political figure of the executive within this interpretive and representational network.

    [3] No accident it would seem that Napoleon spent part of 1795 in the Department of Topography. It is also worth mentioning that 1795 was also the year he produced the fragments of what would become his novella, Clisson et Eugenie, an example of a remarkably direct style of novelistic narrative.

    [4] This is a view of language largely shared by Hooke’s contemporary John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689); Locke is deeply impatient with the inefficiencies of language as a means to certainty in communication. For further elaborations on the work of Hooke as a key figure in the history of telegraphic representation, see Wertheimer (2012).

    [5] Kittler (2010) uses this phrase in referring to Anathasius Kircher’s lanterna magica, pointing out that Kircher developed the projecting device as part of military research (74).

    [6] According to Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson (2003) in The Early History of Data Networks, the earliest experiments with the concept of the modern telegraph systems occurred in the French navy. Captain Decourrejolles, in 1783, used a coastal network of semaphore stations to transmit enemy positions. In A History of Telegraphy, Ken Beauchamp (2008) has an in-depth description of the development of electrostatic telegraphy, which predated Chappe’s invention, but remained for much of the  eighteenth century a parlor spectacle rather than a viable state technology.

    [7] Published 276 issues between October 2, 1799 and May 22, 1802.

    [8] Published 5 issues between September 25, 1811 and December 22, 1813.

    [9] Published 128 issues between April 8, 1795 and December 28, 1796.

    [10] Published 41 issues between December 3, 1796 and March 9, 1799, with minor variant titles. It later had the title Lincoln Telegraph, which published 78 issues between April 27, 1820 and October 18, 1821.

    [11] Published 67 issues between May 6, 1795 and August 17, 1796.

    [12] Published 159 issues between January 1, 1820 and July 13, 1822 in New Hampshire.

    [13] Published 11 issues between August 19, 1812 and December 25, 1812 in  Norwich, NY.

    [14] Published 144 issues between July 7, 1818 and December 26, 1820 in Rochester, NY.

    [15] Published 77 issues between January 13, 1813 and July 30, 1814 in Norwich, NY (it was also known as The Telegraph and the Newton Telegraph).

    [16] Published 159 issues between November 9, 1814, and March 4, 1818.

  • Philip Mirowski: Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late

    Philip Mirowski: Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late

    Philip Mirowski’s talk, “Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late” is now online! This was the keynote lecture at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh, March 17, 2017.

    Critics and analysts of neoliberalism seem to miss one of its key tenets: that markets are better than people when it comes to thinking. This talk explores the consequences of this blind spot for modern Marxists, for ‘fake news’, and for the utopia of ‘open science.’

    Philip Mirowski is Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is also Director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. He is the author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013) and ScienceMart: Privatizing American Science (2011), along with four other books focused on the intersection of economics and science.