Category: reviews

by Sadia Abbas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the answer lies in two incidents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If to the human mind’s imaginings 

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

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

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

Rome burns

and our slavery begins

in the alps

oven of europe

glacier of god…” (31)

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Michaela Brangan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again:

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

Again:

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

And again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

This review is the third in a three-part series on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. The first part was written by Jesse Oak-Taylor. The second part was written by Ursula K. Heise.

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Kate Marshall

One of the most commonly bemoaned features of the contemporary climate crisis is its resistance to narrativity. The source of this resistance might vary, from scalar incompatibility, to the nature of data representation, to the insidiousness of discourses that subordinate the needs of collectives to those of individuals. Who better to bridge the gap between subject and object, or narrator and that which shrinks from narration, than a novelist versed in the logics of scale, one whose range includes not only the future of science (The Calcutta Chromosome) but also the grandeur of intertwined family, political, spatial and environmental networks of historical fiction (The Ibis Trilogy)?

Amitav Ghosh’s quietly startling account of the novel in the era of climate change, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, gathers a set of stories about both the subjects of fiction that takes place on a warming planet and about their authors. And while the failings of the latter set, as well as their cultural arbiters, constitute much of the deranging to which the title refers, the most fascinating author to emerge in the book is a nonhuman one. This nonhuman author, Ghosh notes early in the text, is one he had recognized much earlier without fully apprehending the consequences of such recognition, and quotes himself in 2002 describing “land that is demonstrably alive,” a vision of the earth as, as he put it then, “protagonist” (6).

Of great fascination to Ghosh is the manner and richness with which the protagonicity of the planet and nonhuman matter have emerged in critical discourse and as agents of ecological awareness. The Great Derangement opens with the question, “Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?” He then immediately posits a speculative subject, “the readers of the future,” a collective that understands, through the material experience of its effects, the unfolding ecological catastrophe of today (3). The readers of the future, for Ghosh, know more than is contained in the subject matter of the literary fiction of our present, which is a “manor house” controlled by publishing interests and critical discourses more interested in the intimate dilemmas of bourgeois life and the valuing of “freedom” writ large to be attuned either to geological scales or the agency of nonhuman objects, systems, and lifeforms. This present-day literary world, in addition, is held back from such topics by its refusal of the scalar dramas, cosmic viewpoints, and nonhuman assemblages more at home in genres that precede the contemporary novel (like epic and romance) or run parallel lives to it (like science fiction and fantasy). In light of the failures of our novels and our readers, Ghosh points to the Anthropocene itself as the one knowing critic of our time, registering the issues persistently at hand yet stubbornly evading the gaze of the literary.

The periodizing derangement named by the title refers to such failure – the inability to produce within the cultural frame of contemporary literary fiction accurate accounts of both the totality of the unfolding catastrophe as well as the unevenness with which it is experienced. These, however, are just some of the narratives that Ghosh’s text provides and analyzes. Much of the volume, while unfolding from the original claim about the novel today, deals instead with providing a timely and well-told tale about the mixed legacies of imperialism when climate change takes precedence in historical narrative.

Ghosh contextualizes his account of the novel in the time of climate change within this larger tale of how colonial policies and points of view play a surprising role in the development of ecological behavior in colonial and postcolonial Asia. While sympathetic to the important developments in humanist studies of the Anthropocene that focus on its deep entwinement with capitalist development, he finds that these narratives often leave empire and imperialism in an awkward blind spot. “The imperatives of capital and empire,” he says, “have often pushed in different directions sometimes producing counterintuitive results” (87). These imperatives, importantly here, become more visible when brought into contact with skilled narration. Early in the volume Ghosh provides a lesson in point of view, suggesting that a colonial perspective always aligns “power and security, mastery and conquest,” with proximity to water, resulting in the great nineteenth-century cities like Singapore and Hong Kong as products of that vision whose futures are tied to its ultimate ends – manifested in their proximate and rising seas (37). The colonial point of view, which for Ghosh is an agent with material force, also produces habits of mind that are reflected in the most readily available narrative technologies for registering larger-scale shifts in how we understand capricious categories like collective ways of seeing.

The most succinct and surprising section of The Great Derangement, “History,” unpacks the consequences of narrating climate change from the point of view of empire. It includes the kinds of hyperbole that are endemic to studies invoking the vocabulary of the Anthropocene, such as his argument that “certain crucial aspects of modernity would not have become apparent if they had not been put to an empirical test, in the only continent where the magnitudes of population are such that they can literally move the planet” (92). While true, this participates in a grandiosity of collective human agency at the geological level about which Ghosh himself seems otherwise suspicious. More illuminating by far is his point about how the present-day carbon economies of countries like India were shaped by colonial commitments that proved paradoxically beneficial. Telling the story of carbon fuel in these regions with an attention to the point of view of empire, he suggests, results in an alternate story.

Ghosh’s ultimate argument about how the colonial worldview shaped the destiny of carbon consumption worldwide is that “the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own, by compulsion if necessary” (107). This, then, is for Ghosh a formal alignment of the carbon economy with the human, at least in terms of genealogy, where “many different lines of descent are commingled in its present form” (108). The unexpected case he makes is nonetheless an outstanding demonstration of his point about point of view, for he shows that the vantage point it produces lets in a powerful thought, which is that colonial power delayed the current climate crisis. It did so by restricting the access of the most demographically powerful region of the planet to fossil fuels. From this position, the present crisis is a reprieve brought on by colonial rapaciousness (he mentions, for example, that the first steps toward contemporary petroculture were taken in Burma, which could have led to an accelerated per capita global carbon expenditure if the forces of empire had not intervened when they did). Ghosh’s inclusion of this narrative within the broader critique he makes of the absence of Asian-specific conditions from broader discussions of climate politics and policy is illustrative of the richness of his narrative acumen and critical nous. If the earth is narrator and the Anthropocene a “sly critic” (80), Ghosh is the kind of interlocutor they urgently demand.

The introduction of historical paradox into the interlocking yet divergent narratives of capital and empire in The Great Derangement lead to a larger realization about how these historical narratives ultimately overlap, which is at the point where individual and national lives become structured in historical patterns that, no matter how divergent, nevertheless orient their subjects toward self-annihilation. But adept as these counternarratives prove toward illuminating how historical and fictional narratives together conspire to produce derangments of ever-increasing greatness, there is an important gap between them. What seems profoundly clear in The Great Derangement is that the complexity Ghosh affords to climate crises, historical narratives, and political motivations is the one thing he refuses to allow contemporary literary fiction.

Two key presumptions underlie Ghosh’s account of contemporary fiction’s response to climate change: first, that realism must rely on direct representation if it is to engage with a major socio-political or geological issue; and second, that only a certain kind of realist fiction is read by those interested in the “literary” novel today. Both of these presumptions lead him to argue that those future readers he mentions will look back at the literature of the early 21^st century and will be stunned through hindsight to discover how little equipped our literature was to grasp the most important, and synthetic, issue of our time.

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of these claims, precisely because of their attachment to the status of the realist novel and contemporary fiction more broadly. For Ghosh the central periodizing claim to make about the novel in the 21^st century is that its central topics and concerns were the farthest from what mattered. Moreover, he sees an attunement to nonhuman interests, agents, and assemblages as absolutely central to the mattering and recognition of anthropogenic climate change. This now-uncontroversial point is extrapolated beautifully in this text, and Ghosh does a great service in rendering the urgency of a broader nonhuman reorientation of thought and art in genuinely accessible terms. But when he asks, “what is the place of the nonhuman in the modern novel?” and provides the answer, as seen by future readers, that answer is surprisingly rigid: “To attempt an answer is to confront another of the uncanny effects of the Anthropocene: it was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human. Inasmuch as the nonhuman was written about at all, it was not within the mansion of serious fiction but rather in the outhouses to which science fiction and fantasy had been banished” (66). The banishment to which he refers is the product of the twentieth century achieving its apotheosis in contemporary literature, and, in his view, its criticism. So when he asks, “now that the stirrings of the earth have forced us to recognize that we have never been free of nonhuman constraints how are we to rethink those conceptions of history and agency?” it’s logical that he should argue that the same question must now be posed to literature and art, but he then also insists that in the latter case the twentieth century reveals simply a “radical turn away from the nonhuman to the human, from the figurative to the abstract” (119). This is a move that he makes frequently throughout the book, but one that receives very little pressure, and the embedded assumptions about both genre and the status of representation within the argument are absolutely crucial to the future the Ghosh both imagines and wants to prevent.

The first assumption, about the relegation of genre fiction to the “outhouse” of the literary establishment, seems to me a strange one to make after not only the rise to prominence of several late twentieth and early twenty-first century science fiction and fantasy authors in the literary main stream, but also ignores the marked engagement with genre that has become a commonplace feature of the contemporary Anglophone novel. To consider the role of genre hybridity in mainstream literary fiction in 2017, for example, one can look immediately to the fabulism central to the American winner of the Booker prize, George Saunders, or to the most recent novel of the 2017 Nobel prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro’s experiment with the fantastic The Buried Giant. These casual examples are hardly exceptional – an element of fabulism and genre hybridity is central to the 2016 National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead – and yet Ghosh insists on the seemingly anachronistic observation that the moves of fabulism, or the generic intermingling of science fiction, fantasy, romance and realism, are all alien to what will ossify as the canon of literary production in the decades most aligned with climate catastrophe. In Ghosh’s words, “The expulsion of hybrids from the manor house has long troubled many who were thus relegated to the status of genre writers, and rightly so, for nothing could be more puzzling than the strange conceit that science fiction deals with material that is somehow contaminated; nothing could better express the completeness of the literary mainstream’s capitulation to partitioning” (71).

What’s interesting here is that his argument about the potential of genre to think with the nonhuman is incisive and illuminating, even as he withdraws it from the horizon of possibility for writers with mainstream aspirations in the past half century. What novels need, he says, are “the unheard-of and the unlikely,” “fractures in time,” and a confrontation with “the centrality of the improbable,” all of which are characteristics of the kind of global systems, events and outcomes he thinks the fiction of this time requires for its non-humiliating posterity. I think he’s absolutely right about this, but it remains startling that Ghosh imagines his readers of the future looking back at the literature of the present, and our critical accounts of it, and seeing none of the generic complexity and narrative experimentation that seems so central not only to some of his recent work but also so much of the contemporary, and even realist, literary world. Why would this be?

The answer, I think, lies in the kind of critical eye these imagined readers possess. To look back on the literature of the age of accelerated carbon usage and anthropogenic climate change, as these imagined readers do, and not see deep, complex engagement with both the nonhuman and with the strange scales of ecological symptoms, is to fall prey to a demand that is often placed on scholars of the contemporary as well as scholars broadly concerned with the relationship of the environment to literature. We could call this most simply a demand for content: an idea that the work of the critic is simply to show where climate change is represented directly, centrally to the plot or setting, and easily identifiable. Critics then become collators of texts that are “about” forms of climate change or experience, or that contain aspects of such fact or experience within their most overt characteristics. And while it’s certainly useful to develop a library of “cli-fi” and understand and describe its generic and representational tendencies, to argue that it’s only this kind of direct fictional representation that can provide the kind of engagement with the material complexity of our current era is both dangerous and not a little depressing. Ghosh does not go this far, but does lament the relegation of “fiction that deals with climate change” to a science fiction excluded from the literary mainstream (7, italics mine), and nevertheless will describe a contemporary literary world that, in contrast to the epic, cannot contain multitudes in a manner that would require it to do so in its content: “Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but absurd within the delimited horizon of a novel – when they intrude, the temptation to lapse into satire, as in Ian McEwan’s Solar, becomes almost irresistible” (61).

Happily, at least the possibility of resisting reading McEwan’s Solar remains alive in this account, and Ghosh does acknowledge writers like J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy as novelists whose works address aspects of climate crisis with something more like a formal complexity. These are the writers whose ability to escape what Ghosh sees as the trap of the “individual moral crisis” as the primary subject matter of the modern novel makes them exceptional cases rather than the story of our contemporary literary scene and its inheritances from the course of fiction in the twentieth century. What they make clear, moreover, is that the crisis of “the great derangement” may not be what he calls it – a crisis in the production of fiction or in its market reception – but rather a crisis in criticism, or in our ability to value good criticism over bad.

For Ghosh is absolutely right, and urgently so, when he remarks that “to reproduce the world as it exists need not be the project of fiction,” and part of what our criticism can do is remain committed to unpacking the project of fictionality as such, especially as it transforms in changing material conditions. “What fiction,” he says, “…makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode, to conceive of it as if it were other than it is: in short, the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis” (128). An alternative beginning of the project Ghosh envisions would be to make a stronger case for the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose response to systematic change may not be overt but rather subtly and insistently present, and to look not only for the primary genres of climate fiction but rather their hybrid traces in novels not otherwise considered within that frame. It would also require keeping a critical attitude alive that can think the conjunction of form and materiality, in all of its abstraction and conceptual rigor, without relegating such thought to the realm of inaccessible or esoteric discourse. We need, in other words, to prepare the readers of the future to be good readers just as much as we need good aesthetic responses to the world as it is.

Kate Marshall is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Ilan Stavans, I Love My Selfie (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017)

reviewed by Nicole Erin Morse

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

The figure of Narcissus haunts both popular and academic discussions of selfies. Usually, his absorption with his own image is taken to stand in for the experience of creating selfies, while his death beside his reflection is read as a warning about the perceived negative consequences of this image-making practice. Framed in this way, selfies are described merely as a symptom of a narcissistic era and as the cause of further cultural narcissism. And while narcissism may indeed be a central feature of selfie practices, accounts of selfies that focus on their narcissism tend to be so disturbed by the cultural practice that they neglect any consideration of the formal and aesthetic properties of specific images. Furthermore, the myth of Narcissus is not so simple, and in linking selfies to the Narcissus myth, the other principle character is always excised from the telling: Echo. Yet in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Echo’s role is significant, and although her character is often read primarily as a parable of the conflict between sound and image, the figure of Echo also has critical implications for our understanding of selfies. Echo, the nymph who cannot speak for herself, falls in love with a man who cannot recognize himself, their twin inadequacies fueling her passion for him at the same time that they ensure that reciprocal love between the two is impossible. Ultimately, Echo is the witness to Narcissus’ passion for his reflection and her voice transforms the glade in which Narcissus discovers his own image into a space that responds to and repeats his dying words to himself. Echo’s voice turns Narcissus’s endless invocations of his love and desire for his mirror image into something that has an element of reciprocation: a call and response. Within discussions of selfies, the figure of Echo should remind us that selfies are addressed to others, with the role of reception challenging any account of digital self-representation that presents it only as a closed or solipsistic loop—a relationship between self and reflection that involves no others.

Commentary on selfies is divided between two general trends, one that condemns selfies for their narcissism and one that attempts to redeem selfies from the charge of narcissism by arguing that selfies invite or produce interpersonal relationships (Goldberg 2017, 1), but in both cases, the actual formal specificity of individual images is elided. Curiously uniting these two trends, critic Ilan Stavans’ and artist Adál Maldonado’s I Love My Selfie (2017) reads selfies through Narcissus and condemns their narcissism without ever mentioning the role of Echo. Indeed, Maldonado, otherwise known as ADÁL, describes his participation in the project thus: “I wanted to create an exhibition in which I compare the self-portrait as an artistic expression versus the selfie as a narcissistic expression” (ARC Magazine 2014). Yet as a collaborative volume, created by an artist and by a critic who deeply admires that artist, the book’s very structure stresses relationality. As Stavans narrativizes his encounter with ADÁL, his enthusiasm for ADÁL’s work and his admiration for the artist shape the entire text, as he strives to turn ADÁL’s stylized, black-and-white self-portraits from the 1980s and 1990s into a commentary on contemporary selfies. Both Stavans and Adal have produced immense bodies of work independently of their collaboration, and it is not my intention here to contextualize this particular project within their larger oeuvres. Instead, I contend that, although I Love My Selfie points the way toward many of the most compelling questions about selfies, nonetheless, Stavans’ and ADÁL’s collaboration does not answer these questions. Instead, it offers, by way of illustration, a demonstration of some of the issues that currently hinder selfie scholarship more broadly. Ultimately, although it is titled I Love My Selfie, this book is far less concerned with selfies than it is interested in self-portraits. And as the volume details the relationship between the artist and the critic, both selfies and self-portraits serve as a vehicle through which Stavans meditates on the nature of the self. In so doing, I Love My Selfie demonstrates how difficult it is for critics to talk about selfies without turning immediately to other representational practices and to seemingly more important topics—in other words, it seems to be extremely difficult to take selfies seriously on their own terms as aesthetic, political, and theoretical texts.

Repeatedly, when new media have emerged, there is a tendency to argue for their value by analogizing them to more established art practices. For selfies, this tendency is often encapsulated in the seemingly ever-present urge to compare them to the work of photographer Cindy Sherman—always to the detriment of selfies—so that even when Sherman herself began taking selfies and sharing them on Instagram, The New York Times asserted that this only revealed “the gap between Ms. Sherman’s vital, unsettling practice of sideways self-portraiture and the narcissistic practice of selfie snapping” (Farago 2017). In I Love My Selfie, this pattern surfaces within Stavans’ persistent privileging of ADÁL’s self-portraits over more vernacular selfie practices. It also emerges in their joint assessment of ADÁL’s black-and-white style as a kind of “Nazi Tropic Noir” (118), which Stavans then attempts to further legitimize by describing how it invokes the work of Leni Riefenstahl, “the German director of films like Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), whose critique of fascism was done from inside the Third Reich” (118-119). This sentence alone should give us pause. The fact that Stavans so easily accepts Riefenstahl’s post facto justification of her work as a critique—rather than an embodiment—of fascist aesthetics is troubling in its eschewal of established critical consensus. Even so, what is especially striking about this in context is the extent to which Stavans goes in his persistent attempts to validate ADÁL’s self-portraiture by aligning it with fine art practices and against vernacular snapshot photography.

Despite the surprise of its politics, this is an unsurprising move by Stavans. As artists have begun exploring selfies as a realm for art practice, a variety of efforts have been made to delineate what distinguishes artistic uses of selfies from vernacular selfies. For example, the #artselfie project seeks to position selfies in relation to art by curating selfies taken in proximity to classical art works (#artselfie 2014; Droitcour 2012), while a recent exhibition of selfies in London was organized around the principle that artistic intention differentiates vernacular selfies from selfies that are worthy of being considered art (Jones 2013). Tulsa Kinney describes her first encounter with Zackary Drucker’s and Rhys Ernst’s Relationship thus: “At first glance, thumbing through, they look like a lot of selfies—if they weren’t photographs.” Distinguishing between selfies and “photographs,” Kinney asserts that she subsequently realized that “These were far from selfies. These are of the fine craft of art photography with an edge, with hints of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and maybe a little Cindy Sherman” (2014). Courting controversy at the boundary between vernacular selfies and art works, artist Richard Prince transformed appropriated selfies from Instagram into works that sold for up to six figures by blowing up the original photos and adding emoji captions (Parkinson 2015). Finally, artists like Audrey Wollen and Melanie Bonajo undo the very logic of selfies, exploring negative affect through self-portraits and what Bonajo calls “anti-selfies,” or images that reject those qualities of selfies strongly associated with their vernacular use, such as their polished self-presentation and positivity (Barron 2014; Capricious 2014). Amid such boundary negotiations, what disappears in commentary on selfies, including Stavans and ADÁL’s work, is the question of what individual selfies—whether artistic or vernacular—actually do.

Instead, the heart of this book is Stavans’ recognition of a kindred spirit in ADÁL, his admiration for the artist, and, finally, Stavans’ own narration of his personal experience. Given this, a more appropriate title for the book might be “I ♥ ADÁL,” or even ADÁL’s original, antagonistic title for his photography series: “Go F_ck Your Selfie.” Here, selfies and self-representational art are not a sustained object of art historical inquiry but instead the catalyst for the narrative of a relationship between artist and critic. As a result, personal narrative or loosely-structured memoir is the form of self-representation that permeates a volume that actually features few selfies. After encountering ADÁL’s self-portraits, Stavans is inspired to reach out to him, and eventually makes contact. As Stavans tells it, in approximately 2013, ADÁL asked if Stavans “would be interested in exploring together the nature—make that the ‘condition’—of the selfie as a newly arrived art form”; Stavans adds, “the sheer question sent my mind into a roller-coaster ride” (38). Stavans describes the questions that he and ADÁL wanted to answer through their collaboration, but he seems to be unaware that these questions had already been asked and answered (largely by cisgender women and transgender artists) in exhibitions and collections that emerged well-before this volume went to press. Critically, these interventions speak more to the formal and aesthetic possibilities of selfies than to their availability for representational politics. For example, the question of whether selfies should be exhibited at MoMA was certainly at issue in 2014 when Relationship, a photographic series that opens with several selfies, was included in the Whitney Biennial (Drucker and Ernst 2016). Additionally, as Stavans and ADÁL were beginning their collaboration, the question of whether “anti-selfies” exist was being actively explored by feminist artists (Barron 2014; Capricious 2014). However, inspired by ADÁL’s questions, Stavans travels to visit the artist, proposing that they should “take out-of-focus selfies” together (38), building on ADÁL’s long history of taking self-portraits with soft focus.

Because Stavans understands selfies through self-portraiture, there is a constant tension between the move to historicize selfies as an evolution of self-portraiture and the unrealized attempt to distinguish selfies from self-portraiture. As a result, it is difficult to determine whether Stavans’ conclusions about self-representational art—developed through reflections on painted self-portraits and ADÁL’s photography—even apply to selfies. Though Stavans indicates that there are a variety of distinctions between selfies and self-portraiture (114, 120), it seems that, for Stavans, the primary differences are related to technology, with selfies characterized by the fact that they are taken with consumer-grade digital electronics and recognizable because of the typical compositions that follow from this fact. In this vein, ADÁL asserts, “for a photograph to be a selfie, it needs to be taken with a cell phone or on a laptop. The entire aesthetic is that of a photographic image created digitally, by the cyberculture with cybertools, with the cybernet in mind” (119). Even though ADÁL allows that some selfies could be taken with a laptop, which introduces a degree of compositional flexibility, Stavans suggests that selfies are identifiable as such because of the typical composition that results from holding a front-facing smartphone camera at arm’s length (32), stating that the problem with selfie-sticks is that they make “selfies look unselfie-like” (38). Although these distinctions between selfies and self-portraits are not as clearly developed as they could be, one thing seems certain: based on these categorical definitions, almost none of ADÁL’s photographs in this volume, around which Stavans’ discussion of selfies develops, are actually selfies.

Indeed, there are few selfies in the volume at all—six or seven out of the seventy-four total images—and as a result most of the specific analysis of individual images concerns self-portraits. Furthermore, because Stavans and ADÁL assert that there are rigid distinctions between selfies and self-portraits, it is unclear to what extent Stavans’ meditations on the self and on self-representation even apply to selfies; in any case, these musings do not appear to arise from the selfies reproduced in the volume. Chapter Six is primarily concerned with self-portraiture, and in it Stavans uses self-portraiture as a springboard for pondering narcissism, gesturing obliquely to selfies when he writes, “we aren’t more narcissistic than our predecessors; we simply have more tools to parade that narcissism. They might not be better, but they surely are more efficient” (99). Caught between a technological determinism in which photography thoroughly changes the nature of art (103) and a confident claim that the only difference between a Rembrandt self-portrait and a selfie is that “the tools are different” (102), Stavans attempts to historicize selfies through self-portraiture. Yet the history of self-representation that Stavans offers is not only inconsistent but unpredictable. On the one hand, he emphasizes the technological shift that distinguishes selfies from painting and photography (103). On the other, he elides this distinction when detailing the history of ADÁL’s work; in discussing ADÁL’s “series on the selfie,” Stavans writes, “Adál started it while living in San Juan in 1987 and continued it in New York, where he returned in 1988” (118). The problem here is that, as Stavans notes, the “invention” of the word “selfie” is generally dated to 2002 (4), and in any case the consumer-grade digital technologies that ADÁL and Stavans regard as essential to selfie production were certainly not widely available in 1987; moreover, ADÁL’s series, reproduced in this volume, was initiated in the 1980s through analog photography (118). Unable to resolve the contradiction between a technologically deterministic position and an account of selfies that locates their “selfieness” elsewhere, Stavans’ attempt to offer a genealogy of selfies remains inconclusive.

Despite the limitations of his argument, Stavans’ key intuition that selfies might be understood in dialogue with self-portraiture is significant, as putting pressure on the definitions of selfies and self-portraiture—whether in the present moment or across the history of photography—can yield rich insights. For example, in her analysis of the early-twentieth century photographs usually attributed to Claude Cahun, Tirza True Latimer argues that these photographs of Cahun—almost all of which have been posthumously titled “Self-Portrait”—should not be understood as self-portraits so much as collaborative performances, given that they were created with Cahun’s partner and lover, Marcel Moore. According to Latimer, the discourse of self-portraiture that has followed Cahun elides the collaborative, queer relationship that was inextricable from her—actually their—work. Through close analysis of these photographs, Latimer identifies what she describes as “statements of or about Moore’s participation in the creative process within the work itself” (2006, 56), statements that emerge through formal techniques including reversals, doubling, and in particular the intrusion of the photographer’s shadow into the frame of the photograph. Beyond Latimer, other scholars also argue for a reconsideration of the status of Cahun’s “self-portraits,” with Abigail Solomon-Godeau emphasizing the relationality of the body of work. She argues that, since Moore was not only the photographer but also the audience to whom the photographic poses are addressed, the photographs should not be understood as female representation, which places undue stress on the individual subject of the photograph, but rather as lesbian representation, to capture the relationship between the subject and the photographer (1999, 117). In one example of the complex relationality captured in these photographs, an image from 1927 shows Cahun, in vampire-style makeup, gazing into the camera while holding a reflecting ball. In the depths of the reflective orb, shadows suggest the presence of a photographer, and yet the obscurity of the image doesn’t offer the viewer a clear understanding of the photograph’s production situation. Instead, we are drawn into the image’s depths, seeking out a glimpse of the person to whom Cahun’s direct look is addressed. Although such efforts to reassert Moore’s role in Cahun’s “self-portraits” are compelling and necessary, at the same time, the fact that these collaborative queer images are described as “self-portraits” opens up the possibility of asking to what extent the self is always collaborative and relational.

While Cahun and Moore’s Surrealist collaborations from the 1920s and 1930s might seem quite distanced from contemporary selfie practices, artistic practices like their “self-portraits” can illuminate how contemporary selfie practices offer an exploration of “the self” that is always-already relational, formed through multiplicity, reflection, and doubling. Such possibilities appear in Drucker’s and Ernst’s Relationship series, which begins with several selfies shot with an inexpensive digital point-and-shoot camera, and employs the visual rhetoric of doubling to capture fleeting moments from the artists’ six-year relationship. Although Relationship also contributes to trans visibility, demonstrating selfies’ role in representational politics, it is the formal particularities of Relationship’s images that make the series such a rich exploration of the possibilities of selfies. Across the series, Drucker and Ernst double each other through pose, gesture, and other formal strategies, ultimately challenging the idealism of the singular, unified self (in part by explicitly complicating the use of the Lacanian mirror stage to understand self-representational art). Rather than valorize the discrete, bounded, and separate individuated self, Drucker and Ernst employ shadows and silhouettes to repeatedly represent themselves as a unified, doubled body, in images that evoke Aristophanes’ account of love from Plato’s Symposium. In one such image, titled “Flawless Through the Mirror,” the two figures stand near each other, not quite touching, the distance between them emphasized by the wide-angle lens while shadows create a distinction between Drucker’s arm and Ernst’s body. [FIG 1] However, thrown—or projected—onto Ernst’s body, Drucker is doubled in two shadows that overlap and intertwine, producing a single compound figure with four arms, and the hint of two faces, with this vision of the double-bodied being appearing within the larger photograph. As an image-within-the-image, this silhouette’s flatness contrasts with their material bodies, and its dissolution of boundaries highlights, by contrast, the very real distance between them. Staging the desire for this idealized union, along with its real impossibility, the melancholy, blue-tinged photograph shows Drucker’s and Ernst’s bodies serving as the literal support for an image of love and wholeness that—the photograph tells us—can only be produced through representational trickery.

Although admittedly, many selfies might offer more limited opportunities for artistic expression and critical analysis, the possibilities of selfies are indicated by such intricate accounts of the self in relation. Moreover, the way in which work like Drucker’s and Ernst’s evokes the messiness of self-constitution reveals the inadequacies in Stavans’ emphasis on the way that ADÁL’s work represents an autonomous, agential, and singular self. This model of the self is expressed through the gendered language Stavans uses to discuss selfies, as well as through the duo’s disavowal of and disdain for most vernacular selfie practices, practices which are associated with young women. Thus, a description of “an adolescent photographing herself half-naked in a compromising position” (37-38)—an off-handed, dismissive, yet highly gendered description of selfie practices—immediately follows Stavans’ praise of a self-portrait by ADÁL that also includes “a woman, her curves emphasized”—emphasized, obviously, by the artist, rather than by the woman’s own agency. Furthermore, right after Stavans’ description of the half-naked teenage girl “in a compromising position” Stavans returns to his valorization of ADÁL’s masculinity, writing that in his self-portraits, ADÁL’s “pose is invariably stolid. He looks stern, even defying” (38). Here, Stavans emphasizes the stern, dominant masculinity of ADÁL’s pose, implicitly claiming that, even though ADÁL is engaged with his own image, it is as art rather than narcissism. And since narcissism as pathology has long been linked to both femininity and homosexuality (Goldberg 5-7), Stavans’ attempts to deny ADÁL’s narcissism while stigmatizing vernacular selfies for their narcissism are in the service of asserting that ADÁL’s work is straight rather than queer. It seems that the kind of self-representation in which Stavans is interested is emphatically not that of the adolescent exploring her sexuality—nor is it what Stavans describes as Kim Kardashian’s “anodyne, sexually explicit selfies” (16) nor even Frida Kahlo’s “exhibitionistic” self-portraits (106)—but instead, self-representation in which female sexuality functions as a prop to be utilized by a “stolid, stern,” and hence firmly masculine, male artist.

Here, Stavans is aligned with much of the discourse about selfies, for agentive female self-representation is often heavily critiqued in discussions of selfies, particularly when that self-representation includes overt sexuality (Burns 1723), and when criticisms of sexualized selfies deride such images as “attention-seeking” they discipline women’s independent sexual expression (1724). Of course, the fact that selfies might facilitate female self-representation is not enough to justify critical analysis that attends to their formal properties; rather, the fact that selfies are so routinely dismissed because of their overdetermination as feminine should give us pause. Across Stavans’ essay, anxieties about women engaging in independent self-representation are expressed through gendered and sexualized language that suggest an attempt to discipline unregulated female agency through continuously putting women in relation to men. For example, in reflecting on Frida Kahlo’s work, Stavans asserts that “she usurps the spotlight reserved to her husband Diego Rivera, always perceived as the better artist” (28)—a concern about a woman usurping a man’s rightful place that uggests more about Stavans than it illuminates about the reception history of Kahlo’s and Rivera’s work. After dismissing Kahlo, Stavans turns to a two-page-long history of the photograph of Sharbat Gula—a young, female Afghan refugee famously featured on National Geographic Magazine’s June 1985 cover. As he speculates about how the image would have been different if it had been a selfie, asking whether self-representational photography by a woman might be “less assured, more confusing” than a portrait by a male photographer, Stavans also notes that the thirty-five-year-old National Geographic photographer could have been the twelve-year-old Gula’s “father,” adding nonchalantly, “he could also have been her lover” (32). Stavans’ meditation on the famous photograph of the “Third World Mona Lisa” (29) concludes with a brief reflection on the original Mona Lisa (1503). Here, Stavans notes that a subsequent photograph of Gula in middle age “makes us feel grateful to Leonardo da Vinci for not having returned to La Giaconda…years after he made her portrait” (32).

Through their discussion of the place of women in images of self-representation, these pages illustrate that the central organizing principle of the book is not selfies themselves but rather Stavans’ own subjective encounter with them. And of course, Stavans is hardly the first critic to seek out the ontology of the image through offering deeply personal responses to particular images. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida reflects on the nature of photography through intimate descriptions of Barthes’ experiences of select photographs, including a childhood photograph of his mother (1984). But in Stavans’ essay, photography has a different function from that which it serves in Barthes’ text, and rather than moving from diverse individual photographs toward wider claims about the medium, Stavans moves to a variety of other, loosely connected ruminations. As a result, the most incisive commentary in the section about Kahlo emerges only in Stavans’ description of the way Kahlo has been turned into a pop icon and a symbol of Mexican femininity. “Kahlo is no longer Mexican,” Stavans writes, “she is what the gringos have turned Mexico into.” What emerges in such passages is a literary self-portrait of a middle-aged Mexican man, one who can critique the global north’s subjugation of the global south, but one who seems to be far less aware of what his attitude toward images of women says about his ability to understand subjugation intersectionally.

This subjective lens also lands Stavans in other interpretive difficulties. Since he believes that selfies “promise smiles, happiness, and engagement” (4), he asserts that “certain topics become taboo,” noting immediately, as an illustration of this claim, “I have seen a selfie taken next to a corpse and found it nauseating” (5). It is likely that many people have similar experiences of selfies, and would respond similarly to selfies taken beside dead bodies. However, Stavans’ anecdote does not actually prove such an image is excluded from the category of selfies through a taboo—instead, what it shows is that such images do indeed exist, making selfies as a category more capacious than Stavans imagines. Instead of opposing the “smiles, happiness, and engagement” of selfies with the taboo of morbidity, a different approach might ask what happens when selfies unite the performance of happiness with the morbid or disturbing, such as in the Holocaust memorial selfies that Shahak Shapira criticizes on his website Yolocaust.de (Gunter 2017). Yet this is not a question that Stavans essay raises, as he notes instead that when he was in a Havana cemetery, “it never crossed my mind…to take a selfie” (5).

But what might a richer account of selfies offer us? Selfie scholarship itself frequently relies on the definition offered by Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym, who describe selfies as both objects and practices, writing:

A selfie is a photographic object that initiates the transmission of human feeling in the form of a relationship (between photographer and photographed, between image and filtering software, between viewer and viewed, between individuals circulating images, between users and social software architectures, etc.). A selfie is also a practice—a gesture that can send (and is often intended to send) different messages to different individuals, communities, and audiences. (2015, 1589, emphasis in original)

This nuanced definition of selfies as gestural as well as imagistic is echoed in other scholarship, with Matthew Bellinger and Paul Frosh asserting that selfies can be identified through pose and gesture rather than through the technical details of their production and circulation (Bellinger 2015; Frosh 2015).

Stavans can be positioned within this debate, although ultimately his work requires an attention to the restrictions within these seemingly expansive definitions of selfies. On the one hand, he is aligned with this trend in selfie scholarship, for at times his definition of selfies is exceedingly broad, extending far beyond the limited definition that selfies are “self-generated digital photographic portraiture, spread primarily via social media” (Senft and Baym 2015, 1588). On the other, because Stavans’ thought experiments about the boundaries of the category of “the selfie” put pressure on the flexible, reception-oriented descriptions of selfies offered by Bellinger and Frosh, they ultimately reveal the value in the kind of precision offered by Senft’s and Baym’s attention to the kinds of relationships selfies produce. For example, when Stavans uses the phrase “selfie taker” to describe the videographer behind the “amateur (i.e., domestic) video taken of the Rodney King beating in 1991” (112), his decision to engage with that video (as well as with other instances of video of police brutality) as a form of self-representation cannot be understood as simply one available spectatorial position among many others. Stavans’ interest in the “selfie taker [who] will step out of the frame” in order to capture a “selfie as incriminating evidence” (112) emphasizes the gesture that produces these videos rather than the violent acts captured therein. As a result, the relationships that selfies produce—in the spectatorial situation Stavans proposes—become relationships that turn on imagining the action of a witness to police violence (“stepping out of the frame”), rather than responding in outrage, disgust, or distress to this violence. As Stavans describes it, “the selfie as incriminating evidence” offers a way to escape from our interpolation into the position of witness to state-sponsored racist violence. Deliberately choosing to read such images as “selfies” functions as a distancing technique in which the murders of Amadou Diallo and Michael Brown become mere material for detached reflection on the nature of “the self.” Yet if these videos reveal anything about our selves, they reveal how identity is marked and far from universal, and hence hardly adequately captured by a singular noun.

Throughout scholarship on selfies, the relationship between selfies and the self is a persistent question. It seems natural to think that the encounter with the face of the other might prompt reflection upon the “self” thus encountered. However, in our contemporary moment, selfies are in fact an incredibly impoverished way to access information about the self—either our own selves or the selves of others. After all, as we navigate our networked world we produce “data doubles” that preserve traces of all of our online and much of our offline activity (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 614), with these records of our purchases, searches, and movements arguably containing far more information about “the self” than a static image could convey. In fact, what we encounter in selfies is not a window into “the self” but the radical alterity of the face of an other. It in this context that Stavans’s fixation on using selfies to interrogate the nature of the self, and specifically, to propose that the self is a performance, falls short. Repeatedly, Stavans speculates about whether this means that the self is, therefore, inauthentic, highlighting this question immediately through the epigraph, a line from Polonius’s speech to Laertes in Hamlet in which the father tells his son: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Paired with a comical self-portrait in which ADÁL poses with a banana superimposed over his face, the fruit standing in for a smile on the lips that it conceals, this epigraph leads Stavans to propose that the self is a performance that combines truth and falsehood. Noting that Polonius is hardly a model of transparency and truth, Stavans writes that the lines from Polonius’s speech express a paradox: “being true to one’s self means being fundamentally adaptable, contingent, provisional, all of which are attributes of falseness” (7).

For Stavans, this play between the true self and the false performance is at the heart of self-representation. Unlike the extensive scholarship that follows Erving Goffman’s and Judith Butler’s work on performance and performatives, however, Stavans appears to remain invested in the idea that a true self does in fact exist, and that it can even be identified and recognized. For example, in a statement that is as much a platitude as anything Polonius tells Laertes, Stavans writes of self-portraits: “the face is the portal through which the self finds expression” (106). The claim here is that the self can be recognized as authentic precisely when it is not a self-conscious performance, and Stavans contrasts Frida Kahlo’s paintings, which he dismisses as “exhibitionistic,” with more “authentic” images of female suffering by artist Ana Mendieta (106). For Stavans, Mendieta’s work is comparatively unique, as he presents self-representation, especially through selfies, as tarred by inauthenticity. This categorial distinction runs throughout. Writing about “felfies,” a hashtag that on Instagram that includes everything from “feline selfies” to “food selfies” to “filtered selfies” to “farmer selfies,” Stavans more narrowly defines them as false selfies that “look real” (122). He asserts that “felfies…misrepresent the past in a way that is egregious, not because they play on impossibilities but because the gesture depicted in them isn’t authentic to selfies, which in themselves are inauthentic items” (123). Although he does not elaborate on what gesture might be authentic to selfies, the inauthenticity of selfies seems to lie not only in their performative nature, but also in what Stavans sees as their inability to be self-aware and self-critical. While he embraces the Polonius speech for its irony (3), and celebrates Montaigne’s account of the self because of the ironic tone of “Of Cannibals” (23), Stavans seems unable to see selfies as capable of similarly ironic expression. Instead, Stavans can only locate such self-aware commentary on the relationship between self-representation and the self in ADÁL’s self-consciously artistic self-portraits. For Stavans, these portraits capture the paradoxical play of truth and falsehood that he identifies as the essential nature of the self. The collection of ADÁL self-portraits, he writes, “feels to me absolutely true, even authentic, yet it argues that the self is a mask, that our identity is in a constant state of flux” (38). From this position, selfies are simply a foil to self-portraiture, a debased form unable to produce such insight into the nature of identity.

Across popular and academic writing, selfies are repeatedly referred to in the singular—the selfie—rather than as selfies, plural, although the latter use more clearly indicates that selfies involve a multiplicity of practices. A similar trend also appears throughout scholarship on self-portraiture, which often interrogates “the self-portrait” to produce generalized and unified statements about self-portraiture. On the surface, such assessments of “the selfie” or “the self-portrait” appeal to common sense, and they indeed capture something that is true about many images. When Stavans writes that “the selfie is a portal through which we share the handsomest, least frightening side of our self” (5), this description appears to be applicable to the majority of selfies. Nonetheless, this account of selfies is immediately inadequate, something that Stavans effectively admits as he states, “I don’t often come across selfies taken in a state of depression” (5). What is neglected by any such homogenizing account of “the selfie” are the possibilities that can be glimpsed at the margins of conventional practice. And although such possibilities may indeed be marginal, they are possibilities that open up provocative alternative discourses through challenging the very conventions that descriptions of “the selfie”—singular—merely reiterate.

For example, a selfie that performatively stages apathy or depression can carry a significant political charge precisely because this affect is less common in selfie practice, and as a result, like any art work that puts pressure on the conventions of the medium or of a genre, such a selfie can offer rich rewards to the critic. In a selfie posted on Tumblr in 2014 for Trans Day of Visibility, trans activist Zinnia Jones appears listless and uninterested, leaning on her hand with an unfocused gaze, looking off into the distance, past the camera. [FIG 2] The color palette is muted, and instead of her typical, posed facial expression—with tightly pursed lips—the pressure of her hand against her face pulls her mouth sideways. The pose carries resonances of a reluctant child, one who is enduring the photograph rather than posing for it. Captioned “happy trans visibility day or whatever / be visible,” the photo presents Trans Day of Visibility as a demand to which Jones, and those whom she in turn half-heartedly exhorts to “be visible,” must comply, reluctantly and even unwillingly. Visibility becomes a type of compulsory labor, and Jones’ pose combines with the caption, which eschews capitalization or punctuation, to performatively convey her lack of enthusiasm for Trans Day of Visibility and her ambivalence toward its demands. In this way, attending to the possibilities of selfie practices—of “selfies” in the plural—reveals political and theoretical potential that exceeds what any account of “the selfie” might allow. Furthermore, Stavans’ confident descriptions of the ontology of “the selfie” open up possibilities for contestation, not only from the reader, who might mentally supply counter-examples in response to Stavans’ declarations, but potentially from artists, who might find the boundaries Stavans describes to be productive grounds for artistic interventions.

Of course, producing such spaces for contestation is one of the key functions of genre, and great art is often recognizable because it puts pressure on genre conventions. Simultaneously, selfies are indeed characterized by recognizable conventions, and given the extent to which these conventions are overdetermined by race and gender (with young, white, cisgender women as the prototypical selfie-takers), naming these conventions may allow us to recognize how they simultaneously produce and police self-expression. Yet even though defining the boundaries of a genre creates opportunities for creative contestation, Stavans is not describing the boundaries of a form that might later be contested, nor is he outlining a general direction in order to productively discuss alternative possibilities, but he is instead attempting to delimit a category that is always already exploded by works that have antecedently transgressed the definitions that Stavans now articulates. As such, Stavans’ essay is slightly reminiscent of Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976). As Krauss attempts to define the possibilities of the relatively new medium of video, she is ultimately misdirected by her own limited understanding of the technology and her concern about its potential narcissism, with the result that the boundaries of the medium as she describes it are in fact already broken by some of the works she discusses. Nonetheless, even in its inadequacies Krauss’ essay offers a compelling analysis of the temporality of video work, as well as a productive discussion of what it means for a video work to be not only medium specific, but also critical or analytical with regard to its medium. Unfortunately, Stavans does not consider how selfies might critically engage with issues of medium specificity, since the work he examines is largely self-portraiture. Given this, Stavans misses an opportunity to engage with selfies on their own terms, once again relegating selfies to the role of foil to an artistic self-portrait practice.

Though his account of selfies is not necessarily medium-specific, Stavans does attend to technology through a curious term that he introduces but does not develop: cellfie. Provocatively defined as “a cellphone picture but not a shot of myself” (2), the term “cellfie” raises critical questions about the intimate relationship between contemporary people and cellphones, prompting the reader to ask whether—and how—cellphone pictures that are not selfies might nonetheless be a form of self-representation. Given that only 3-5% of the photos posted on Instagram are selfies (Manovich 2014), and given that SnapChat is frequently used to share the sender’s perspective on something rather than an image of their face, “cellfie” could be a productive term for considering self-representation through social media more expansively. After all, celebrity Instagram accounts increasingly privilege images that are not selfies in order to create a fuller “sense of self” than selfies alone might provide (Kafer 2018). However promising, the idea of a “cellfie” is never fully developed in Stavans’ essay, only appearing in a few off-hand references in the opening and concluding chapters. Toward the end, for example, “cellfie” appears amid Stavans’ justification for his method, as he writes that ADÁL’s self-portraits “are not selfies (or cellfies) in the traditional sense, yet they are an immensely imaginative way of looking at the self” (120). Thus, despite the potential richness of “cellfie,” selfies remain relegated to the sidelines of Stavans’ essay on self-portraiture.

This focus on artistic self-portraiture is unfortunate, as Stavans’ interest in ADÁL’s “Go F_ck Your Selfie” could also illuminate one of the more critical features of selfie aesthetics: seriality. By basing his discussion of selfies on a photographic series, Stavans could have interrogated the fact that selfies are rarely if ever singular works, existing instead in relation to multiple potential series—from the series of all selfies, to the series of all selfies by a particular creator, to the many subseries that viewers identify by noticing visual rhymes, compositional patterns, and other similarities, including repetition in the captions and hashtags that accompany these selfies. Furthermore, the boundaries of all of these selfie series are expanded by network technologies, with creators relinquishing complete control over their self-representation when they post selfies online. Online, selfies can easily be repurposed and re-imagined by others, which has consequences for our understanding of the boundaries of “the self,” and which also produces additional, proliferating series. Finally, social media platforms both produce and incentivize serial production and reception of selfies through platform specific network structures, like tags and hashtags.

From their serial nature, to their ties to self-portraiture, to our relationships to our cellphones, I Love My Selfie opens up critical questions about selfies, but in the attempt to address these questions, the volume falls into traps that currently weaken both popular and academic discourse about selfies. Like many others, Stavans is so troubled by the narcissism of selfies that he never talks about specific images, even though close analysis of individual selfies might actually support his characterization of selfies as a symptom of cultural narcissism. Additionally, Stavans’ account of the Narcissus myth is incomplete, given that reproduces the typical absence of Echo. Through highlighting relationality, the figure of Echo can remind us that selfies are also addressed to others, shared and circulated to be seen and engaged, producing face-to-face relationships between people separated by space and time. In underscoring the ways that selfies are relational, Echo’s relation to Narcissus does not merely absolve selfies from the charge of narcissism by revealing that they are about interpersonal relationships, and hence, in some way, redeemed from narcissism’s stigma. Rather, the figure of Echo unveils the self-other interactions at the heart of selfie practices without characterizing these relations as positive—after all, Echo struggled to be heard and understood, ultimately watched her beloved die, and the only thing she was able to do after this experience was to persuade the gods to turn his body into a flower. Read through the full Narcissus myth, selfies are in fact about much more than the solipsistic engagement with one’s own image. Instead, their multiple uses and forms—vernacular as well as artistic—stage complicated networks of recognition, misrecognition, mimicry, mirroring, invitation and response. We can begin to better understand this full complexity if we turn a little to the side, and seek out not only the youth enamored of his reflection in the pool but also the nymph whose active participation turns this static moment of self-absorption into a narrative of encounter.

Bibliography

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This review is the second in a three-part series on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. The first part was written by Jesse Oak-Taylor. boundary 2 also published a conversation between J. Daniel Elam and Amitav Ghosh in March 2017.   

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Ursula K. Heise

“Let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination,” Amitav Ghosh writes toward the beginning of his book of three essays, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (9). With this still startling if no longer new claim, he places his essays into the growing body of analyses that approach climate change from a cultural, historical, philosophical, and narrative angle rather than the still more common perspective of science, technology, and policy. Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree about Climate Change (2009), Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History” (2009) and its follow-up essays, Kari Marie Norgaard’s Living in Denial (2011), John L. Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global History (2014), Dale Jamieson’s Reason in a Dark Time (2014), Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions (2015), and E. Ann Kaplan’s Climate Trauma (2015), among others, have established a way of thinking about climate change that foregrounds historical memory and amnesia, socio-economic inequalities and cultural differences, and the story templates and metaphors that have shaped public debates about the issue.

Like many writers in this field, Ghosh uses the concept of the Anthropocene as essentially synonymous with climate change, even though it encompassed far more numerous and quite different global transformations in the original formulations by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the atmospherical chemist Paul Crutzen (Stoermer and Crutzen 2000; Crutzen 2003). And like other cultural theorists of global warming, he sees it as a fundamental test for established ways of reasoning, telling stories, and acting politically: “The Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our commonsense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general” (9). He analyzes this challenge as it affects the writing of mainstream novels (“Stories”), the standard historical narrative of technological innovation and fossil fuel use (“History”), and social movements for climate justice (“Politics”).

The most innovative and persuasive of these essays is no doubt the one concerning history, which resolutely shifts the focus of the climate change narrative from Europe and North America to Asia, and from capitalism to empire and imperialism. Ghosh has no fundamental disagreement with leftist critics such as Naomi Klein, Jason Moore, or Slavoj Žižek, who define climate change primarily as a consequence of capitalism and its global spread. But he foregrounds how from an Asian perspective, the critique of capitalism does not smoothly align with the critique of colonialism. In Burma and China, the exploitation of oil as fuel preceded or was contemporaneous with its development in Europe and North America. Steam engines were so quickly adopted and improved in India that a carbon economy might have developed rapidly in the region. What impeded these developments from unfolding into fully fledged carbon economies was not lack of ingenuity or entrepreneurism, Ghosh argues, but the exercise of colonial power which diverted resources to the metropolis and held back technological development in the colonies. Indigenous resistance movements contributed their own to oppose the early development of industrial capitalism. Because of these factors, the carbon footprint of most Asian nations began to expand only after decolonization.

Seen from this angle, Ghosh suggests, imperialism may actually prevented climate change from setting in earlier. “Could it be the case that imperialism actually delayed the onset of the climate crisis by retarding the expansion of Asian and African economies? Is it possible that if the major twentieth-century empires had been dismantled earlier, then the landmark figure of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been crossed long before it actually was? It seems to me the answer is almost certainly yes” (109-110). This insight, Ghosh highlights, strengthens arguments in favor of global distributive justice (formerly colonial nations indeed have a right to claim that they have to make up for time lost), but attaining such justice entails putting all human societies at even greater risk. In a gesture reminiscent of Chakrabarty’s call for a “negative universal history” in the face of climate change (2009: 221-222), Ghosh emphasizes that this paradox undermines the utility of an “us-versus-them” approach to the climate crisis – including, presumably, the approach of critics who see the abolition of capitalism as a prerequisite for solving the climate crisis. “While there can be no doubt that the climate crisis was brought on by the way in which the carbon economy evolved in the West, it is also true that the matter might have taken many different turns. The climate crisis cannot therefore be thought of as a problem created by an utterly distant ‘Other’” (114).

Ghosh’s argument in the “History” essay remains brilliant and thought-provoking even if one takes his suggestion that the matter of the carbon economy might have taken different turns in other directions. Certainly it is sobering to think that without imperialism (or with an earlier end to empire), carbon emissions might have reached crisis thresholds a century or more earlier. But in the same scenario, it is also possible that alternative energy economies would have developed sooner, and that they might have done so at a time when the world population was far smaller than it is today. Emissions reached 400 parts per million (50ppm above what most climate scientists deem safe) for the first time in 2014, when the world population numbered 7.1 billion. The world population was about 1.2 billion in 1850, 1.6 billion in 1900, and 2.55 billion in 1950. Even given earlier decolonization and more rapid development of carbon-intensive economies in Africa and Asia, it is not clear whether these population numbers would have been sufficient to trigger a climate crisis of the magnitude we are currently facing. Earlier decolonization and industrial development, if it went along with an empowerment of women as it has in some regions, might also have helped in themselves to alter population growth rates. Even granting Ghosh’s historical thought experiment, therefore, his own emphasis on the importance of numbers – population numbers included – make it uncertain whether an earlier end to colonialism would have accelerated carbon emissions in the way he hypothesizes. Under a variety of other scenarios, the critique of capitalism and the critique of colonialism would remain more firmly aligned than his argument allows.

In his “Politics” essay, Ghosh shifts from climate change as an issue of economic inequality to one of inequality in power. Even in the anglophone countries where climate denialism has found its most fertile territory (such as Australia, Canada, and the United States), he notes, the military and intelligence establishments have been conspicuously exempt from such skepticism, and have instead zeroed in on climate change as a major threat to national security. This is because “the nature of the carbon economy is such that power, no less than wealth, is largely dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels” (142), and climate justice would therefore imply a redistribution of power that is ultimately unacceptable to those nations who currently possess it. “From this perspective, global inaction on climate change is by no means the result of confusion of denialism or a lack of planning: to the contrary, the maintenance of the status quo is the plan. Climate change may itself facilitate the realization of this plan by providing an alibi for ever-greater military intrusion into every kind of geographic and military space,” Ghosh argues (145). In this context, he articulates his difference with critics of capitalism even more sharply by arguing that these “imperatives of political and military dominance” (146) – imperial aspirations, in other words – would persist even if capitalism were replaced by a different economic system.

Given the continuing power of empire, Ghosh sharply criticizes the rhetoric of climate change as a moral issue, which substitutes individual changes for the large-scale political transformations that are really needed. In the same vein, he holds out little hope for the success of emergent social movements for climate justice, which in his view will take longer to consolidate power than the urgency of global warming leaves room for. Instead, via a brilliant tour-de-force textual comparison of the Paris Climate Agreement and the papal encyclica Laudato Si’, both published in 2015, Ghosh proposes that the transnational mobilization abilities of major religions and a broad idea of the sacred, which he loosely associates with an “acceptance of limits and limitations” (161), may offer more promising prospects for the politics of the future. This is an odd turn of argument not only because quite a few major religions rely on the centrality of individual conversion as the key to changing the world – the individual perspective Ghosh had earlier rejected. Many institutionalized religions have also historically distinguished themselves by their expertise in pitting populations against each other at least as much as by the ability to “join hands with popular movements” and with each other that Ghosh stakes his hope on (161).

If the conclusion of the argument in “Politics” persuades less than its sharply insightful analysis, this disjunction is even more palpable in Ghosh’s first essay, “Stories.” The mainstream novel such as it arose in Europe in the eighteenth century and has dominated the literary scene worldwide since, Ghosh argues in this more literature-oriented essay, is incapable of dealing with climate change. Unlike premodern epic, the modern novel is concerned with everyday people and ordinary affairs, not the improbable and extraordinary events that climate change has already begun to visit on humans and their environments: increasingly frequent hurricanes and typhoons, floods, droughts, sea level rise. It is typically keyed to the scale of the individual, the family, and the nation – not the planetary framework climate change requires. And it is structured so as to separate human culture out from nonhuman processes and forms of agency that are instead relegated to the realm of the natural sciences. All of these tendencies entail that “the Anthropocene [resists] the techniques that are most closely identified with the novel: its essence consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel – forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space” (63). Premodern forms of narrative, of course, were not constrained in similar ways: myths, epics, and fairy tales often ranged over large spaces and time intervals, and included a wide variety of human as well as nonhuman agents. But it is precisely in the Anthropocene, Ghosh highlights, “that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human” (66).

So far, one may agree with Ghosh: the conventional realist, high-modernist and postmodernist or postcolonial novel may not offer ready-made narrative strategies for addressing climate change. Ghosh himself, however, notes that mainstream novelists have in fact addressed climate change – one might think here of such texts as Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau (Ice Thaw, 2011) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012). But mostly, Ghosh laments, climate change in the perspective of “serious literary journals” such as the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, or the Los Angeles Review of Books appears only in connection with nonfiction. In fiction, it has appeared more often in the “outhouses” (66) of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction­ – genres too invested in the hybridization of nature and culture to be tolerated by a mainstream Zeitgeist invested in keeping these two realms apart, in his view (71).

But it remains unclear why this neglect on the part of a certain kind of literary establishment should be a matter of intrinsic aesthetic concern. If science fiction, for example, satisfactorily addresses the challenges of narrating the Anthropocene, why should we care whether the mainstream novel does or not? None of the constraints that Ghosh so lucidly analyzes in conventional novels handicap science fiction. Indeed, science fiction distinguishes itself generically from the novel not just by its dual focus on nature and culture, but by perpetuating many of the conventions of epic in the age of the novel. Science fiction enthusiastically embraces nonhuman agents, from aliens and sentient animals to robots and AIs. It often focuses on extraordinary events such as the discovery of new planets, the destruction of civilizations, encounters with aliens, and revolutionary technological change. And it has never limited itself in temporal or spatial scale in the way mainstream novels have: Olaf Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men (1930) covers two billion years and eighteen human species, for example; Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of novels (1950s-80s) hundreds of years; and Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels (1979-83) describe human history on Earth from the point of view aliens to whom the planet and its dominant species appear unusually tumultuous and short-lived, compared to their own, much vaster temporal scales. More recently, Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten (The Abolition of Species, 2008) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) have taken readers hundreds of years and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015) 5,000 years into the future to narrate technological, ecological, and biological evolutions. Constraints of probability, individualism, and scale that shape the mainstream novel, as this mere handful of examples shows, have not mattered significantly for science fiction.

This leads to the question whether “science fiction is better equipped to address the Anthropocene than mainstream literary fiction?” (72). Not so, according to Ghosh. In what is perhaps one of the most striking argumentative shortfalls in his otherwise perceptive and eloquent essay, he draws on the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s claim that “‘science fiction and speculative fiction . . . draw from . . . imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one’” (72). Therefore, he claims, “the Anthropocene resists science fiction: it is precisely not an imagined ‘other’ world apart from ours; not is it located in another ‘time’ or another ‘dimension’” (72-73). It is unfortunate that Ghosh would have chosen to rely on an author who has repeatedly incited the anger of other science fiction writers and readers by dismissing a genre in which she herself has established part of her writerly reputation. Both she and Ghosh fundamentally misunderstand the “elsewheres” of science fiction. One can argue, with the literary theorist Fredric Jameson, that science fiction’s basic narrative strategy is to present to us our present society as the past of a future yet to come (2005: 255); or one can go along with science fiction novelist William Gibson’s claim that the future is here, just not evenly distributed yet, so that the present becomes a kind of future in science fiction (Kennedy 2012). Either way, science fiction of course always addresses its audience’s here and now through the detour of imagined futures. Denying this connection to the present, as Ghosh does, implies an oddly literalist misunderstanding of the genre that is all the more surprising as he himself has pointed out in an interview with boundary2 that “much of the work that continues to be read today, that survives from the mid-twentieth century, is science fiction,” whereas the appeal and audience of mainstream fiction continue to dwindle (https://www.boundary2.org/2017/03/the-temporal-order-of-modernity-has-changed-j-daniel-elam-in-conversation-with-amitav-ghosh-on-the-anthropocene-climate-change-and-world-literature/ ). Readers, even in Ghosh’s own asssessment, seem to have no trouble in translating the imagined worlds of science fiction to their present.

Science fiction has been at the forefront of climate change narrative, and not invariably in the guise of “disaster stories set in the future” rather than the present, as Ghosh claims (72). In science fiction film, one might usefully contrast Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which does use the story template of the disaster movie, with the much quieter and more lyrical exploration of climate futures in Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo’s Nước 2030 (Water 2030; 2014), which follows a young woman in her investigation of her husband’s murder on a floating farm in the mostly flooded southern Vietnam of 2030. In fiction, the Australian novelist George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987) explores how class differences persist and change as the seas rise in Melbourne. Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), so accurate in its forecast that its galley proofs needed only minor edits when Hurricane Sandy translated its literary vision into reality in late 2012, recasts the disaster story in the framework of commodified risk analysis. Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) has readers imagine Thailand as a bastion of resistance against both biotech plagues and climate change in the future. And Kim Stanley Robinson, without denying the challenges and disasters climate change will bring, also highlights the varied kinds of ingenuity, expertise, political engagement, and aesthetic beauty climate change will generate in his Climate in the Capital trilogy (2004-2007) and in his more recent novels 2312 and New York 2140 (2017). Building on earlier futuristic portrayals of rising seas and (non-anthropogenic) climate change in such novels as Abe Kōbō’s 第四間氷期 (Dai Yon Kampyōki, translated as Inter Ice Age 4; 1959) and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), science fiction novels ranging from David Brin’s Earth (1990) to Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015) have explored the upheavals and catastrophes climate change will bring, but also and above all the altered everyday experiences and psychological structures it will generate.

That science fiction is becoming the default genre for the narrative engagement with climate change is also obvious from recent environmental nonfiction. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (Heise 2016: 215-220), journalists like Alan Weisman (The World Without Us, 2007), climate scientists like James Hansen (Storms of my Grandchildren, 2009), and activists like Bill McKibben (Eaarth, 2011) have all adopted themes and narrative strategies from science fiction to convey environmental realities. This tendency culminated, in 2014, in the science fiction novella The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, who had earlier published a well-received analysis of climate science denialism (The Merchants of Doubt, 2010). Collapse tells the story of climate change in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries from the perspective of a Chinese historian looking back from 2393. In spite of its shortfalls as a science fiction texts, Collapse beautifully exemplifies the recent convergences between environmental nonfiction and science fiction around the issue of climate change.

Why does as astute a literary critic and as accomplished a writer as Amitav Ghosh not seem to take these developments seriously? Ghosh himself has ventured into science fiction in The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) – a novel that, in spite of its intriguing mix of colonial history and futurism, remains elusive at the end. His major achievements have come in the form more conventionally realist novels, The Hungry Tide (2004) and Sea of Poppies (2008) among them, whose genius lies in the way in which they make historical facts come alive for the present through imagined characters. Ghosh’s deep investment in history and anthropology may keep him from fully appreciating the import of more speculative approaches to the present and future that are visible in current science fiction.

Considering how many writers have engaged with climate change over the last two decades, the fact that journals such as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books rarely review such fiction may bespeak a shortfall of the editorial rather than the literary imagination. Whatever the challenges of representing climate change in literature, film, and art may be, narrative tools for telling climate change stories at various scales and across different cultures are not in short supply. That these tools are now being developed and deployed in genres that do not conform to what Ghosh and his boundary2 interviewer, J. Daniel Elam, understand as the world literature canon may be regrettable by the standards of a certain kind of literary criticism. But is likely immaterial to most readers – certainly to those who are interested in environmental narrative and communication. The stories of climate change are being told, in print, in film, and on the internet. Ghosh’s lucid and innovative analyses of the historical and political quandaries that surround demands for global climate justice provide an immensely helpful framework for understanding when and how such narratives have been successful and where they have failed in the past, and how they might succeed in the future.

References

Brooke, John L. 2014. Climate Change and the Course of Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35: 197-222.

Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415: 23.

—, and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18.

Hansen, James. 2009. Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and the Last Chance to Save Humanity. New York: Bloomsbury.

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

Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.

Kaplan, E. Ann. 2015. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Fiction and Film. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Kennedy, Pagan. 2012. “William Gibson’s Future Is Now.”  New York Times, January 13. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/books/review/distrust-that-particular-flavor-by-william-gibson-book-review.html?pagewanted=all.

McKibben, Bill. 2011. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: St. Martin’s.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury.

—.  2014. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. New York: Columbia University Press.

Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.

Weisman, Alan. 2008. [2007]. The World Without Us. New York: Picador.

Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare (Punctum Books, 2017)

Reviewed by Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Anders Engberg-Pedersen’s work also appears in Issue 44(4) of boundary 2, “The Militarization of Knowledge.”

On March 11, 2005, The Washington Post reported on a newly minted secret military category: “ghost detainees.” In an agreement with the CIA, intelligence officials at the Abu Ghraib prison in Guantánamo had decided to hide a number of prisoners without registering them. It was suggested that they be fingerprinted and processed under an assumed name, but the intelligence officer in charge, Thomas M. Pappas, decided against it. Locked in isolation cells on Tier 1A in the facility without an internment number and without a paper trail, the detainees’ existence was officially denied. Not prisoners of war, nor simply a specimen of the contentious category “unlawful enemy combatants,” these prisoners, hovering between biological being and symbolic non-being, had been transformed into ghosts of war. The process was named with a novel linguistic creation in the English language: the verb “ghosting” – i.e. making someone disappear at a black site often with the intent of torturing them. In 2005, according to the Department of Defense, prisons in Iraq contained in the vicinity of 100 ghosts (White 2005).

Ghosting is merely one example of the spectral nature of 21^st century warfare. The development of high tech weaponry, the intermingling of warfare and digital culture, and the continued interest in obscuring the actual nature and consequences of war have given rise to various forms of invisibility that pervade modern warfare. To see without being seen, to attack without being attacked, and to wage war without waging war have been guiding principles of the US military efforts summed up in the ‘war on terror.’ Drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan planned and carried out on military sites in Nevada and Florida have created such distance between enemies that traditional notions of what constitutes a soldier, an enemy, and war itself, have been put to the test. If, some two hundred years ago, military thinker Carl von Clausewitz sought to expand our understanding of war by theorizing elements such as friction, emotions, and uncertainty, his basic model of battle was an event clearly limited in time and space: During the Napoleonic wars a battle lasted a given number of days and was fought out in a confined geographical space. On these post-Westphalian warscapes, large armies would stage grand battles whose theatrical aspect did not elude Clausewitz. The theaters of war were just that, grand spectacles to be viewed as much as won.

Contemporary warfare is very different. Tracking targets from thousands of miles away for days, weeks, or months and completely removed from the zone of danger, drone operators stretch the Clausewitzian model of battle beyond its breaking point, just as they transform what it means to be a soldier and an enemy. While the enemy is rendered hypervisible, blind, and permanently vulnerable, the drone operator has become invisible, all-seeing, and beyond reach. With drone warfare the differences in the balance of military advantage have become nearly absolute.

As the practice of ghosting reveals, the invisibilities of contemporary warfare also include a recalibration of our common language. “Black sites,” “stealth torture,” “enhanced interrogration techniques” – all appelations reveal the elaborate linguistic camouflage meant to deflect the attention of civil society from the realities they obscure. If the ‘war on terror’ puts war on display in a strategic, but peculiar and self-contradictory use of the concept, a number of inventive and at times perverse circumlocutions are at work to ensure that contemporary warfare remains out of sight and out of mind.

This is where Elisabeth Weber’s new book intervenes. In an effort to jolt the public out of its carefully induced slumber, she has gathered five previously published essays and one new one that from different angles examine the subtle processes by which war is made invisible, in particular through distortions of language. Focusing on torture, detention, and drones, she proceeds from the premise that language itself constitutes a primary battleground and that language forms a central tool for the production of a series of strategic blind spots in the general public. Weber revisits a number of canonical literary authors and makes use of their reflections on torture and war to highlight the linguistic distortions that accompany 21^st century warfare. Twisting the mistreated words back into shape she tries to bring the brutalities they designate clearly into view.

Of course, such an endeavor isn’t entirely new. In 1947 Victor Klemperer documenting the language practices of the National Socialists during the Third Reich in LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii, recording the euphemisms, circumlocutions and procedures of resignification that came to shape the language of an era. In more recent times Derrida in particular wrote important essays on torture and global warfare in response to the ‘war on terror’ before his death 2004. And in a series of books W. J. T. Mitchell has complemented the examination of the language of war with illuminating analyses of the images of war and their cunning détournements by various artistic projects. Weber quotes liberally from Derrida and Mitchell throughout the book, but she also extends their insights to new material.

Two of her essays examine literary censorship at the Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp. During their incarceration, some of the prisoners have written hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of poems. In 2007 a small selection of twenty-two poems was declassified and published in translation as Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. The vast majority of the poems, however, remains under lock in a military facility in Virginia. The reason was reported in a Wall Street Journal front-page article shortly before the publication of the collection, viz. that “poetry presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language” (Dreazen 2007). Wary of secret messages hidden in the imagery, alliterations, personifications – the entire poetic dimension of language – the military refused to declassify the remaining body of literature. And because of their perceived threat to national security, the poems were translated by linguists with security clearances rather than by professional translators of poetry. Whether silenced or deformed, the Guantánamo poems make visible the degree to which fear of language and the attempt control language continue to be central elements of the war effort. As Weber rightly points out, “The silencing of legal justice goes hand in hand here with the silencing of literary justice.”

Weber’s close readings raise the larger question of method and purpose. For what is the task of the scholar and in particular the scholar with a background in literary and cultural studies living in a time of seemingly endless war? One approach would be to deploy the critical and hermeneutic apparatus of the humanities to contemporary representations of war in order to unearth the latent hypocrisies inherent to state-sponsored torture and indefinite detention. Another would be to historicize in the belief that history remains a magistra vitae and that the contemporary farce is the repetition of an instructive tragedy that can offer perspective and illumination. Weber does both, but she also combines the two approaches by way of a method of indirection. The first chapter juxtaposes the Austrian writer and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry with the recent history of US-sponsored torture, while the last chapter views drone warfare through the prism of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Many readers will probably find the connection between the scene in which Gregor Samsa is bombarded by his apple-throwing father and the victims of drone operators colloquially referred to as “bug splat” more than a tad imaginative.

The method of indirection does show its merit in the opening chapter, however.

As Weber explains, Améry’s testimony from 1966, translated as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities not only claimed that torture was the essence of National Socialism. It also prefigured the practice of “ghosting” with its account of how human beings are transformed when they are subjected to torture. For Améry, who survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, torture reduces it victims to pure flesh, rendering them into nothing but a thing writhing in pain. As he puts it, “flesh becomes a total reality in self-negation” (Weber 2017: 59). This complete transformation of the subject’s will, memories, desires, and emotions into a body in pain is, for Améry, the experience of death while still alive. Even after the torture ends, its victims inhabit an indeterminate zone between the living and the dead.

To give testimony to this experience, Améry has to reinvent the German language. Victims are “fleshifized,” and it is no longer they that scream, rather “it screams” – the grammar as distorted in German as in its English translation. To bear witness means twisting a grammar whose conventional order is incapable of depicting the experience of torture. In what is perhaps the book’s best chapter, Weber’s careful attention to the poetics of a testimony from 1966 serves as a useful counterpoint to the linguistic camouflage that pervades the official discourse on torture. As the old French term for torture “la question” reminds us, torture has long been intimately tied up with language, and it remains so today.

As so often with books compiled from individual essays, Kill Boxes suffers somewhat from both repetitions and gaps. It does, however, effectively summarize and add its own voice to recent critiques of US militarism. The guiding thread, as Weber frames it in the introduction, is the pursuit of “shocks of recognition” – be they in the images from Abu Ghraib or in the mute poetry from Guantánamo. Recognition, that is, of the torture performed by the “other” in the torture performed by oneself, as well as of common suffering and the shared vulnerability of the flesh. In her analyses of such shocks of recognition in the images and language of contemporary warfare, however, Weber’s descriptions often take the form not of a description of actual emotional responses but of an injunction: let us be shocked. As if the public has become inured to the uncomfortable truths that have flooded our news screens. In her often perceptive close readings of contemporary warfare, Weber knows that she is addressing an anaesthesized public whose sensorium has been blunted to such an extent that it no longer seems capable of experiencing the emotional state of shock. Weber must tell her readers that horrific images and testimonies are indeed horrifying. The condition that Walter Benjamin diagnosed about a hundred years ago after the First World War seems to have shifted. As he famously wrote: “Was it not evident that the people who returned from the field had fallen silent? that they were not richer in communicable experience, but poorer” (Benjamin 1977, 2:439). Today, paradoxically, it is less the soldiers who have lost the ability to narrate, than the public that has lost its ability to listen. Seventeen years into the ‘war on terror,’ the shock of war has gradually lost its force to engage let alone change the minds of a war weary nation. And with the world’s attention continuously hijacked by the histrionics of a tweeting US President, who has made shock into his preferred tactics of distraction, the public store of affect required for the experience of shock has been depleted. Weber’s exhortation to be shocked therefore reveals at once the limits of the affective strategies of persuasion she invokes, but also the importance of scholarly work like hers that make us cognizant of this state of public affairs and seeks new ways of interpretation and interpellation to make both visible and relevant the specters of war that ought to haunt society in the 21^st century.

References

Benjamin, Walter. 1977. Gesammelte Schriften II, 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Dreazen, Yochi J. 2007. “The Prison Poets of Guantanamo Find a Publisher.” Wall Street Journal, June 20. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118217520339739055

Weber, Elisabeth. 2017. Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare. Goleta, CA: Punctum Books.

White, Josh. 2005. “Army, CIA Agreed on ‘Ghost’ Prisoners.” Washington Post, March 11.

Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Reviewed by Dermot Ryan

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

“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.

“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”

“It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.

                                                —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

As a graduate student at Columbia in the early noughties, I attended Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminar on Poststructuralism. It was an often tense seminar, where once a week my classmates and I would flounder and generally fail to say anything illuminating about the assigned text for that session. One fraught morning, I attempted to answer a question of textual detail in Derrida to which Spivak responded, “Exactly wrong!” Lost in the rabbit hole of French theory and crazed for any crumb of comfort, I vacillated between hope and despair in my reading of Spivak’s “exactly.” Could an interpretation that was “exactly wrong” provide, through the looking glass as it were, a clue to the right reading? Was my answer so wrong that it was partially right? Or did my wrong answer, like a donut hole, merely identify where the good stuff would not be found. I found myself returning to these questions as I read Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017). North purports to offer a new history of literary studies, a diagnosis of its current malaise, and a prescription for where it should go from here. The book raises a number of important questions: What would a political history of literary criticism look like? What is the relationship (if any) between literary studies and politics? How is neoliberalism reshaping universities generally and literary studies in particular? North’s answers to these questions are wrong. And wrong in ways that are damaging to the discipline and give ammunition to reactionary forces within and beyond it. But my wager is that they are exactly wrong. North’s history of literary criticism—an account that is wrong from beginning to end, to quote the Caterpillar—can point us in the direction of its true history. Even, if it does so, like that donut hole, by identifying the places we need not look.

North frames his history as an overview rather than an exhaustive survey. His stated goal is to “step back from individual figures and movements in order to bring into focus the basic paradigms that have determined the development of Anglo-American literary studies throughout its history, and that therefore seem likely at least to condition its possible lines of development in the future” (2017, ix). In North’s account, two paradigms have dominated the field: the “critical” and the “scholarly.” In one of North’s many formulations, scholars are those who treat the study of literature “as a means by which to analyze culture” while critics treat the study of literature “as an opportunity to intervene in culture” (2). While scholars treat literary texts “chiefly as opportunities for producing knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read,” critics use literature as a means of enriching culture by “cultivating new ranges of sensibility, new modes of subjectivity” and “new capacities for experience” (6-7). According to North, the changing fortunes of these two paradigms have shaped the broad history of the field.

Hoping to bring the revolutionary potential of criticism into sharper focus and to explain its current institutional occlusion by the most recent scholarly turn he labels “the historicist/contextualist paradigm,” North proposes an alternative history to the “pre- and post-Theory” narrative, which he believes characterizes most accounts of literary studies. Labeling his own version rather grandly as “the new periodization,” North offers an alternative tripartite historical narrative. In the first period, I. A. Richards puts criticism on a disciplinary footing by developing an “incipiently materialist account of the aesthetic” (x). Richards’s characteristic methods of close reading and practical criticism helped readers, “each from their own specific material situations, to use the aesthetic instruments of literature to cultivate their most useful practical capabilities” (15). In the second period, the project of criticism was taken up by Leavisites and the New Critics, who transformed a materialist aesthetic into an idealist one. That is to say, they shifted the function of close reading and practical criticism from the cultivation of a reader’s aesthetic capabilities to the cultivation of aesthetic judgment. In the third period, which began in the late seventies and continues to our present, the project of criticism was rejected for historicism, reducing close reading and practical criticism to a means of producing historical and cultural knowledge about the contexts in which specific literary texts were written and received. According to North, these three periods of literary criticism map onto three moments in the history of capitalism in the twentieth century: an earlier period between the wars, where a crisis in capitalism raised the possibility of a radical break with the liberal consensus; a period of relative stability, where criticism and scholarship served “real superstructural functions within Keynesianism” (17); and lastly our own present, in which the establishment of a neoliberal order following the crisis of Keynesianism, has resulted in the “complete dominance of the ‘scholar’ model in the form of the historicist/contextualist paradigm” (17).

Perhaps the quickest way to trouble the neat binary between the critical and scholarly paradigm which this historical schema presupposes is to think about the role of close reading in so-called historicist/contextualist scholarship. North claims that historicists treat “literary texts chiefly as opportunities for producing knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read” (7). Under this paradigm, close reading entails “a focus on small units of the text for the purposes of understanding what the text has to teach us about histories and cultures” (105). In other words, historicists use literary texts as “diagnostic tools for the analysis of historical and cultural phenomena” (106). But is this actually the case? As a British Romanticist whose period interest dictates a deep engagement with historicist scholarship, I have found historically-oriented scholars do not tend to instrumentalize literary texts in order to produce knowledge about the cultural contexts in which texts were written and read. Rather, most historicist research is in the service of close reading: scholars restore the cultural archive that the work assumes, activates, challenges, and subverts. They do this out of necessity and as a matter of course. Imagine a study of American television comedy two hundred years from now. What kind of historical research would be required before future scholars could offer a “close reading” of an episode of The Simpsons or Seinfeld worthy of that name? Without reconstructing this cultural archive (always, in part, an act of imagination), we miss a text’s rich intertextuality. Historical scholarship here is not using a literary text as a diagnostic instrument to understand a historical and cultural moment; rather, it is using historical knowledge in an endeavor to make the full complexity of the text available to be read. Of course, North knows this because his entire argument is built on the premise that unless we understand the real history of literary studies, we are unable to read it correctly: “to understand the character of the neoliberal order that established within literary studies,” he notes, “we need to reconsider the history from the ground up” (14). In other words, we need to put an object of analysis in its historical context to understand it properly. North laments that the “literary disciplines’ sense of their own history is still stuck in the older two-period mode, and as a result fails to capture the quality of our present moment” (13). In short, bad historical research leads to poor reading. North’s historical corrective is a classic example of the “historicist/contextualist” paradigm in action.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, the revisionary history he proceeds to tell is wrong. It is wrong in its facts and in its method. One example can stand synecdochically for a series of unpersuasive historical claims and moves. According to North, during the eighties and nineties, neoliberal forces within the university systematically favored the scholarly over the critical model of literary studies. In this “professionalized and scientized context, the scholarly model of intellectual inquiry—intellectual work as knowledge production” became the central task of literary study (100). It’s a compelling story. And it’s completely inaccurate. Literary Studies has benefited enormously from the disciplinary histories of Gerald Graff, Louis Menand, Chris Baldick, Bill Readings and many others. Indeed, it is a sobering fact that the accretive crisis in literary studies has stimulated brilliant scholarship in this area. North references many of these scholars. But, having read them, he should know that the disciplinary commitment to professionalism and the scientific model of knowledge production in literary studies predates neoliberalism. It stretches back to the origin of English as a discipline. At the turn of the twentieth century, the first English Departments were composed of scholars—philologists and literary historians—who emphasized the utilitarian and scientific value of their research and pedagogy. Indeed, in the fifties, the new critics successfully lobbied the MLA to add the category of criticism to the association’s mission statement arguing that close reading was a method that produced new knowledge. No matter. Let’s return to North’s convenient morality play. In the late seventies or early eighties, according to North, literary studies opted for a form of professional scholarship, one predicated on “technological expertise, much along the lines of the social sciences” (11). Here the problems with North’s historical methodology kick in. Bracketing for a moment the inaccuracy of such claims, this account begs some questions. Who enacted this shift? Was it a voluntary choice within the discipline, one that occurred outside of broader institutional concerns? Or was it a result of institutional pressure? Did it come from university administrators as a vanguard of neoliberalism? Why would the mandarins of neoliberalism within the academy view disciplinary work as valid only to the degree that it resembled the scientific production of new knowledge? North is silent on these questions of historical agency and motivation; or rather, he resurrects a reductive version of the “base/superstructure” model to account for these paradigmatic institutional changes. That is to say, in North’s mind, the discipline has moved from paradigm to paradigm in lockstep with phase shifts in the capitalist economic order. When the mythical economic base shifted to neoliberalism, the disciplines were bound to follow suit. According to this logic, which North describes, in another fit of intellectual nostalgia, as “the historical materialist line,” the future course of the discipline will depend on the nature of the subsequent phase of capital to emerge out of our current crisis (196). To paraphrase the political quietism of Karl Kautsky, we cannot prepare the coming revolution, we can merely prepare ourselves for it.

Such economic determinism, long jettisoned by Marxist cultural theory, can only lead to a very imprecise account of the current political economy of the academy. Whatever we label the new economic model that is transforming third-level education in the United States and beyond—the continued abuse of “neoliberalism” as a buzzword renders its use increasingly problematic—it has shown itself perfectly happy to accommodate both literary criticism and scholarship. As long as these pursuits generate or do not interrupt the flow of revenue, neoliberalism is content neutral. Without fear of censure, North is free to deploy close reading as a means of training the sensibilities of his students. Many of his students, on the other hand, now find themselves in a far more precarious position. While scholars ranging from David Harvey and Wendy Brown to Philip Mirowski and Angus Bergin have debated the defining characteristics of neoliberalism, all share a sense that neoliberalism involves the curtailment of the state as an instrument of social provision (even as the state’s power grows in the areas of surveillance, incarceration, and the maintenance and extension of free markets and private property rights). Accordingly, at the level of third-level education, neoliberalism manifests itself at the level of funding: funding for programs, for students, and for academic labor. As state and federal funding for third-level education have dried up, the focus of university administrations has shifted to cutting costs and generating revenues, favoring those schools and disciplines that can maximize tuition and endowments. Faculty who run programs feel neoliberalism’s effects in the institution of “true cost accounting” as the metric that decides the survival of individual classes and entire programs. For students, federal grants have been replaced by student loans. As a result, future initiates into the sensibility-expanding capacities of close reading will be increasingly burdened by massive student debt. They will already know capitalism isn’t working for them; they won’t need a close analysis of Wordsworth to tell them that. In those programs that are not generating tuition and whose alumni do not contribute to university endowments, neoliberalism is felt in the shrinking of tenure lines and the massive expansion of graduate and adjunct labor. I couldn’t help reflecting that North, like me, was a graduate student at Columbia and that while he was working on Literary Criticism, Columbia’s graduate students (as was the case while I was there) were fighting to gain recognition for their union and collectively bargain with the university. I wondered why this latest union drive had so little impact on North’s thinking about neoliberalism, literary criticism, and the political economy of universities.

North’s decision to make his history a “concise” one results in some serious and troubling exclusions. North states that his history makes “no programmatic attempt to recover the work of thinkers who have been ignored or marginalized because of their subject position” (viii). Viewing this acknowledgement as adequate restitution, North proceeds to ignore these thinkers throughout Literary Criticism, participating in their continued institutional marginalization. This omission seems particularly perverse when scholars of color historically and institutionally, have pioneered, often at considerable risk to their careers, the practice of literary criticism as political intervention. The scholarship of Edward Said, bell hooks, Spivak, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers (among many others) is invested in making literary studies and questions of aesthetics count politically in the very manner North demands. The failure to discuss these scholars in any depth seems all the more egregious when North is happy to indulge in a kind of victim blaming when assessing their broader impact on the field. The following swipe at feminism must stand in for a long list of North’s leading questions directed at the legacy of feminist, queer, and postcolonial criticism: “To what extent were second-wave feminist critiques of the welfare state likely to secure basic structural changes, and to what extent were they working to replace a material politics with a mere politics of recognition, thereby serving, albeit often inadvertently, as the hand-maidens of neoliberalism?” (58). In a historical narrative that repeatedly understands literary studies as being reshaped by economic forces outside the academy, feminist scholars are accorded a striking degree of agency here as midwives of the new neoliberal order. North’s choice of hand-maiden to characterize the work of his feminist colleagues is particularly unwelcome. At the same time, North claims their entry into the academy in the sixties and seventies had no institutional or disciplinary effects. We can only assume he believes they were too busy helping deliver neoliberalism. North complacently opines that “actual political struggle—the kind that involve a group, or class ‘forcing’ its way into something—does not take place within the world of scholarship” (88). Here as elsewhere, North’s discussion of the efforts by marginalized groups to challenge the academy’s exclusionary culture is not aided by his clubby tone, which comes off as privileged, tweedy, and smug. North goes on to suggest that “people from marginalized groups who entered the academy and became scholars were, in time, no less ‘trained specialists’ than the gentile white men who had tried to keep them out” (91). Perhaps. But in pursuing careers as ‘trained specialists’ these scholars radically transformed university cultures, helped overhaul admission policies, reshaped disciplinary scholarship, opened up the canon, and diversified campuses. As a matter of fact, their entrance into the academy corresponds with the flight of many of those “gentile white men” from the humanities, which is surely one of the factors in literary studies’ increasing institutional marginalization, the nominal focus of North’s work.

North’s ultimate goal is to recover the lost project of literary criticism and his most original and provocative claim is that the “incipient materialist aesthetic” at the root of Richards’s understanding of close reading can be harnessed as an instrument of radical politics. North sees a lot at stake politically in this project of recovery: “The incipiently materialist account of the aesthetic that lies at the root of the discipline and continues to mark its central practice of ‘close reading,’ is properly understood as part of a longer history of resistance to the economic, political, and cultural systems that prevent us from cultivating deeper modes of life” (x). Accordingly, North identifies one of his book’s desired audiences as the radical left: “the collective, or incipient collective, of those who have found themselves in the difficult and vexed position of trying to articulate and even to live a critique, not merely of the excesses of capitalism in its current form, but of capitalism itself” (ix). This is a curious formulation of the radical left, which smacks more of the romantic anti-capitalism of bohemia than the collective and organized political activism of the historical left. Be that as it may, North cites the proper goal of criticism as “a programmatic commitment to using works of literature for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility, with the goal of more general cultural and political change” (3). In the wake of Richards, according to North, literary criticism was “an institutional program of aesthetic education—an attempt to enrich the culture directly by cultivating new ranges of sensibility, new modes of subjectivity, new capacities for experience—using works of literature as a means” (6). Once cultivated, this aesthetic sensibility demands ways of being far richer than those that can be offered by capitalism.

Here then is an attempt to articulate a political program for literary studies. Unfortunately, at the precise point where North’s argument needs to get into the details, unsupported pronouncements proliferate. The task of “higher students of literature,” writes North, is the “development of new methods for cultivating subjectivities and collectivities” (20). North never explains why and how literature is a good instrument for such work. Why would it be an effective instrument as opposed to say critical theory, cultural studies, political science, sociology, mindfulness, or yoga? He also struggles to delimit the category of literature. Conceding the sustained difficulty literary scholars have had securing a stable category of “literature,” North can still complacently ask, “Is it too naive, given our investigation of Williams’s cunning critique of the category of the literary, to object that the justification for literary studies surely has to rest, at some stage, on the concept of literature?” (108). The simple, if inconvenient, answer to this question is “yes, it is too naive.” Wanting a stable concept of literature doesn’t make one exist. The discipline has a rich body of work over the course of the twentieth century dedicated to establishing the quality of  “literariness” that might distinguish literary and non-literary texts. These various projects were fascinating, but ultimately unsuccessful. Doubling down, however, North declares that “a discipline needs to justify its object of study, not just its method for studying it” (108). If that is the case, literary studies is in trouble. Even North cannot be consistent here and a supplement immediately and necessarily appears in this anxious declaration: “For of course literary and other aesthetic texts are particularly rich training grounds for all sorts of capabilities and sensibilities” (my emphasis, 109). Of course they are. And of course, we won’t ask what these “other aesthetic texts” might be. Finally, it is never made entirely clear in what manner Richards’ aesthetic is “incipiently materialist” (x). If I follow North’s argument, Richards’ aesthetic is materialist because it refuses to set up the aesthetic as “a self-sufficient category insulated from the rest of life” (30). Richards asks us to shift our focus from artworks in themselves to the relationship between artworks and their audience. The experience of art elicits a set of complex cognitive and affective processes deeply imbricated in the reader’s life world. And yet I can imagine an aesthetic theory that provides a rich account of the mental and affective nature of our encounter with art that is not materialist. I found myself wishing that North had more carefully delineated the materialism of Richards’s approach as well as explain what is at stake politically in designating it materialist in the first place.

For those of us working within the discipline who had registered a certain fatigue with the constant hand-wringing, the countless articles and conference panels diagnosing “the crisis in the humanities,” and the elegies on the demise of literary studies, the alacrity with which the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and n+1 have championed Literary Criticism is reason enough to take notice of North’s book. For the most part, reviewers have joined North in piling on the discipline and its practitioners, endorsing the book’s conclusion that literary studies is truly in a parlous state. Perhaps we literary scholars can take comfort from the fact that if we are worth kicking (even when we’re down), then we still matter. Apart from offering these dubious consolations, however, the book’s critical reception serves as an important barometer: it confirms that recent efforts to revamp the discipline (distance reading, the cognitive turn, digital and public humanities, the ecological turn) have failed to win over a skeptical public, a public that includes state legislators, university administrators, prospective students and their parents. In other words, those stakeholders who will decide whether the discipline has a future. The broad embrace of North’s old-school model of criticism suggests that many outside the discipline remain unconvinced of the value of these latest developments in literary studies. But the need for an engagement with North’s book goes beyond the fact that its reception highlights the discipline’s ongoing public relations problem. If North’s book failed to answer any of the important questions it raises, it did persuade me that our discipline could benefit from a genuine history of materialist aesthetics that might include Richards, but would stretch further back to William Hazlitt and Edmund Burke and would include figures ranging from Herbert Marcuse and Spivak to Paul de Man and Sianne Ngai. One of the goals of such a history would be to bring into sharp focus the political implications of the kinds of aesthetic education we offer our students. Now that is a hole worth filling.

Dermot Ryan is professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750-1820 (2013).