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Category: reviews

  • Travis Alexander – Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS”

    Travis Alexander – Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS”

    a review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)

    by Travis Alexander

    ~

    Not long after someone dies in Ethiopia, the edir—friend, relative, or neighbor—takes to the streets to blow a horn and call out the deceased’s name. Thus begins the process of mourning. After this announcement, the edir pitches a tent in front of the bereaved’s home. Over the next three days, mourners congregate in the tent and grieve. By the seventh day, public grieving has largely subsided. More urgency still has passed by the fortieth and eightieth days, by the seventh year. Dagmawi Woubshet opens The Calendar of Loss with a lyrical description of this practice, according to which the temporality of the living attunes itself to the claim of the dead. It’s a fitting introduction, as The Calendar casts Woubshet himself as no less edir than scholar. His particular charge is the AIDS dead from the “early years” of the epidemic—1981 to 1996, when highly active antiretroviral treatment became widely available. It was in 1996 that AIDS, according to certain political constituencies, was rendered nonlethal; according to others, it was even cured.

    The ambition of The Calendar, though, exceeds mourning the AIDS dead in either the form of a memoir or uncritical memorialization. To be sure, there exists a prolific tradition of just this kind of memoirish text, epitomized by writers like Sarah Schulman. Woubshet looks instead to efforts made by AIDS mourners to simultaneously grieve their dead, process the historical contingency of these deaths, and reckon with the probability that their own deaths were on the horizon. As such, these works are “steeped in a ‘poetics of compounding loss’” (3). This idiosyncratic form of mourning not only registers a novel structure of feeling, but, in “confound[ing] and travers[ing] the limits of mourning” renders extant literary and cultural elegaic genres inadequate (3). Evincing his interdisciplinary sensibility, Woubshet trains his analysis on genres running to obituaries, funerals, graffiti art, photography, film, epistolaries, choreography, installations, and of course, the poetic elegy itself. The resulting critical work is a dialogue at the intersection of trauma studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and African Diaspora studies.

    Woubshet organizes the book’s chapters according to the various ways that queer loss was reinserted into a public discourse that had attempted first to conceal it, and then to efface its embodied specificities. To take only one of his most powerful examples, Woubshet addresses how in its traditional form the obituary had functioned as a disciplinary genre of (hetero-) reproductive futurism. In its foregrounding of birth-family kinship networks, the obituary not only omitted mention of gay partners, but reified the futurism (those, especially, children, who live on) that sublimates and mediates such reproductivism. Moreover, these pieces never mentioned AIDS, coyly alluding instead to a “long disease” the deceased had suffered, thereby interring the dead in one last closet. In response to the mainstream news outlets running these posthumously disciplinary remembrances, gay newspapers “arrogated to themselves the authority of the obituary,” emphasizing the cause of death and the queer networks left in the wake of the decedent’s passing, thus both constituting queer counterpublics and protecting the “rights of the queer dead from the normative rites of the living” (59, 61, 67, 84). Woubshet’s ability to demonstrate how works of mourning exhumed the queer body interdicted from the scene of public grief is equally salient in his poetic analysis, centering on figures like Melvin Dixon and Paul Monette and informed by poetry and elegy scholars ranging from Peter Sacks to Max Cavitch to Jonathan Culler. He hastens to remind us that the explicitly fatal homophobia of the 1980s and ’90s has simply been sanitized into the gay liberalism of the present. In its triumphalist projection of gay normalcy and citizenship, gay liberalism (akin to what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism) demands the erasure of AIDS, of the embodied queer past. “[B]y looking for the dead now, therefore,” The Calendar of Loss “challenge[s] gay liberalism’s present undertaking” (23).

    As such, the reformulation of central mourning genres such as the obituary , Woubshet notes, wasn’t demanded simply by the novel epidemiological and biocultural poetics of AIDS itself. It also responded to the unique forms of silence and erasure under which queer loss was placed in the 1980s and 90s by civil and governmental institutions alike. It is this “regulation of the ‘sphere of appearances’” (to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase) that the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) addressed in its motto “Silence = Death” (16). Woubshet argues that the protocols of silence in this era “disprized” mourners of queer loss, “shroud[ing]” their grief “in silence, shame, and disgrace” (4). The texts and performances collected in Calendar refuse this status, and collectively insist that “mourning = survival.”

    In its recuperation of a form of grief that is indeterminate and inconsolable, The Calendar of Loss is also a referendum on the approach to loss and trauma offered by Freudian psychoanalysis, which sets forth a pat binary between normative grief (mourning) and pathological grief (melancholia). Where the mourner eventually replaces his lost object, the melancholic cannot, and languishes. Amid the exigencies of AIDS, however, this binary falls short insofar as it fails to apprehend the fact that for these mourners, death is not a “singular” event, but part of an ever-expanding series of deaths, including—most likely—the mourner’s own (5). The melancholic grief of queer communities constituted by AIDS are certainly not “normal” according to Freud, but neither are they pathological, inasmuch as they “achieve cathexis in mourning itself and in its art and activism. However, […] as newly cathected objects, [these] cannot displace loss; on the contrary, they place loss center stage” (18). In worrying the normal/pathological binary, Woubshet delivers a theoretical instrument to those employing psychoanalysis, and a bracing intervention to a queer theory whose conceptualizations of trauma have unproblematically embraced this conspicuously unqueer binarism for too long.

    Drawing on work by Howard Thurman, Woubshet observes that this non-pathological melancholy finds clear historical expression in the genre of slave songs and black spirituals. In the spirituals as well as in black life generally, “[d]eath and dying are not just ‘unusual, untoward events’ or ‘inevitably end-of-lifespan events,’ but instead punctuate [it] routinely and proleptically” (19). This constant anticipation of loss is central to the conceptions of social death elaborated by scholars such as Orlando Patterson. Thus, the paradigm of black mourning (as in the slave songs) and black life generally, “accommodates” and illuminates early AIDS mourning, particularly in its “insistence that death is ever present, that death is somehow always impending, and that survivors can confront all this death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also often imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice” (5). This comparative work confirms The Calendar Of Loss as the first monograph in the humanities at the intersection of queer theory and African Diaspora studies and allows it to spark a true theoretical commerce between those fields (26).

    Already in this book, in fact, interdisciplinarity has sensitized Woubshet to a liability of queer theory over and above its internalization of Freud’s pathologization of melancholy. I’m speaking here of queer theory’s characterization of the child derived heavily from Lee Edelman’s pathbreaking No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). In this latter account, the figure of the child is not only opposed to the queer subject, but is deployed—insofar as it represents the claims of futurity—to discipline and defer queer pleasure, which represents by contrast not only the present at the expense of the future, but also the very foreclosure of the future itself. In his final chapter, Woubshet details the Sudden Flowers collective, which provides the resources for Ethiopian orphans whose parents were lost to AIDS to create works of art and performances that help mediate their grief. Many of these orphans choose to write letters to their deceased parents in which they chronicle the stages and practices of their mourning, and the sensation of the absence, the lost object(s), they have not (yet) filled or replaced. These children “rely not on idealized figures of innocence and purity to characterize their own experiences, but instead on queer figures of abjection, disparagement, and fearlessness,” thereby “thwart[ing] the naturalized figure of the child as the very embodiment of futurity” (140). The experiences of these children, then, are a living rebuke to the cleanliness of queer theory’s characterization of the child. But Woubshet doesn’t simply gesture to the children of Sudden Flowers to append an asterisk to the queer theory’s anti-natalism, to correctively bolster its critical acumen (though he certainly does accomplish this). While joining Edelman in the latter’s critique of hegemonic natalism, he breaks away in aiming to indicate what we might well call the white privilege of queer theory—the complacency of the latter’s archive, its evident disinterest in the particularities of life in the submerged global south in favor of an aestheticized lumping-together of African people with AIDS under the signifier of unalterable tragedy.

    But more witheringly still, The Calendar of Loss reveals the extent to which queer theory becomes a vested defender, an unwitting academic strategist, in the process of universalizing whiteness. Drawing on Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence, Woubshet recounts how, unlike the image of the white child that gelled (under the auspices of nineteenth-century Romanticism) to figure innocence, purity, and futurity, the black child discursively produced simultaneously (most canonically in the pickaninny) evoked repulsion, abjection, and social death (142). “Emptied of innocence and futurity,” he speculates, “the black child […] cannot be a marker against which queerness can be negatively defined” (142). Hidden behind the tact of Woubshet’s account is the indictment that positions like Edelman’s not only prefer the white child for its compatibility with a given theoretical imperative, but perpetuate a universalization according to which the white child, unburdened by racial marking, becomes the child as such, which iterates in turn the social death (in its rhetorical concealment) of the black child. This revelation represents just one of the fruits of Woubshet’s inflection of queer theory by the itinerary of African Diaspora studies.

    While we might fairly critique Woubshet’s failure to address the role of NGOs (like those that care for Ethiopian Orphans) as the “mendicant orders” (cf. Hardt and Negri) of the very same biopolitical governmentality that allowed AIDS to become a pandemic in the first place, this oversight seems the exception rather than the rule. The Calendar’s more concerning oversight is instead its unintentional reification of vitalist, optimistic, and citizenship-oriented rubrics of affect in its moments of “recuperation.” Consider for example Woubshet’s description of the children in the Sudden Flowers art collective who become “political figure[s], publicly taking on one of the most urgent issues of our time, [while simultaneously] departing from the norm” (144). These children are revealed in turn as “powerful agents, as subjects capable of reflection on and articulation of their experiences” (140). Here these children become deserving of praise insofar as they embrace an active, vigorous relationship with their circumstances. Elsewhere Woubshet will attribute the same valorizing characteristics to the gay American subject of his book too. AIDS mourners “across the Atlantic […] embodied AIDS openly and fearlessly” (5). Here “openly and fearlessly” carries the same sense of vigor and interactivity he attributed to the “powerful,” “agent[ial]” children of Ethiopia.

    Not only do these forms of affect coincide neatly with the behavioral strictures demanded by a late liberalism that exercises itself in intellectual and emotional economies, but they also threaten to undo the depathologization of melancholy executed above. That is to say, where Woubshet had previously claimed to find melancholy non-pathological insofar as it generates a new cathexis (attention to compounding loss), here he seems to smuggle in—through “articulation of […] experiences”—the kind of object-replacement or work-completion characteristic of normative mourning. Indeed, he says so himself in expressing his desire to show that nonnormative mourning “can be ‘productive rather than pathological, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary’” (22). Here Woubshet no longer desires simply a neutral opposition to the pathological (that is, the nonnormative), but—in the term “productive”—casts his lot in with a term derived from the cathectic economy of capital. In turn “social” evokes liberal citizenship and pluralism, while “militant” continues in the valorization of vigorous and positive affect suggested earlier by “powerful,” “agent[ial],” “open,” and “fearless.” Inasmuch as “militancy,” “articulation,” “social[ity],” and “productiv[ity]” address themselves to futurity, they reiterate the natalism that Woubshet in agreement with Edelman deemed unsalvageable.

    Indeed, Edelman himself is perhaps most helpful in diagnosing the forms of complicity I’ve attributed to Woubshet. In a 2006 piece, he cautions us against the trap of “affirm[ing] an angry, uncivil ‘politics of negativity’” (“The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” 821). Insofar as such negativity is “affirmed,” it becomes “little more than Oedipal kitsch,” performing the sentimental and “fundamentalist […] attachment to ‘sense, mastery, and meaning,’” and thereby striking “the pose of negativity while evacuating its force” (822). True negativity, meanwhile, refuses what Adorno calls the “all subjugating identity principle” (Negative Dialectics 320). In his attempt to depathologize queer melancholy, Woubshet pays homage to negativity, spurning the identification between melancholy and pathology. But in framing that melancholy as “militant,” “productive,” “social,” “articulate,” “open,” “fearless,” and certainly “agent[ial],” his negativity is outed as an identity principle in drag. This complicity also lends support to Jasbir Puar’s recent critique of affect theory (“Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity”). For her the latter, in attempting to conceptualize a register of energies and forces uncapturable by a form of governmentality dependent on the capitalization of intellectual and emotional labor, unwittingly finds itself attributing to affect a set of optimistic, buoyant characteristics that are themselves of a piece with the imperatives of productivity and ablement central to late capital in the first place (“Prognosis Time”). While Woubshet’s methodology has no stake in affect, the optimism inherent in his characterizations of melancholic grief and its creative expression—even his exclusionary attention to only those who have taken it upon themselves to create—instantiates the ideological double-bind of Puar’s affect theorists.

    Of course, a productivity that is cyclical and endlessly iterative would be recuperable where one that is teleological would not. And his investment in the trope of the calendar, which evokes a form of articulation that repeats—despite its “militan[cy]”—in stasis, suggests that this is version of productivity Woubshet has in mind. So his flirtation with productivity is potentially aesthetic rather than ideological. Whatever the case may be, The Calendar of Loss remains a rich and urgently needed contribution. When the legacy of AIDS is being submerged, not only by the rhetoric of gay liberalism, but by a generation of queer theorists who have turned their attentions elsewhere, efforts like Woubshet’s to “speak again” its history and “reanimate lives that demand remembering” cannot go unnoticed (xi).


    _____

    Travis Alexander is a Mellon Graduate Fellow at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Though broadly interested in Post-45 literature and visual art, his specific interests cluster around portrayals of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in film, literature, television, and cultural theory between the 1980s and 1990s. Website: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/travis-alexander.

    Back to the essay
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    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1994.
    • Edelman, Lee with Robert L. Caserio, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean. “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 819 – 828.
    • Puar, Jasbir. “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19.2 (2009): 161 – 172.
    • Woubshet, Dagmawi. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
  • Audrey Watters – The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release

    Audrey Watters – The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release

    By Audrey Watters

    ~

    This talk was delivered at Virginia Commonwealth University today as part of a seminar co-sponsored by the Departments of English and Sociology and the Media, Art, and Text PhD Program. The slides are also available here.

    Thank you very much for inviting me here to speak today. I’m particularly pleased to be speaking to those from Sociology and those from the English and those from the Media, Art, and Text departments, and I hope my talk can walk the line between and among disciplines and methods – or piss everyone off in equal measure. Either way.

    This is the last public talk I’ll deliver in 2016, and I confess I am relieved (I am exhausted!) as well as honored to be here. But when I finish this talk, my work for the year isn’t done. No rest for the wicked – ever, but particularly in the freelance economy.

    As I have done for the past six years, I will spend the rest of November and December publishing my review of what I deem the “Top Ed-Tech Trends” of the year. It’s an intense research project that usually tops out at about 75,000 words, written over the course of four to six weeks. I pick ten trends and themes in order to closely at the recent past, the near-term history of education technology. Because of the amount of information that is published about ed-tech – the amount of information, its irrelevance, its incoherence, its lack of context – it can be quite challenging to keep up with what is really happening in ed-tech. And just as importantly, what is not happening.

    So that’s what I try to do. And I’ll boast right here – no shame in that – no one else does as in-depth or thorough job as me, certainly no one who is entirely independent from venture capital, corporate or institutional backing, or philanthropic funding. (Of course, if you look for those education technology writers who are independent from venture capital, corporate or institutional backing, or philanthropic funding, there is pretty much only me.)

    The stories that I write about the “Top Ed-Tech Trends” are the antithesis of most articles you’ll see about education technology that invoke “top” and “trends.” For me, still framing my work that way – “top trends” – is a purposeful rhetorical move to shed light, to subvert, to offer a sly commentary of sorts on the shallowness of what passes as journalism, criticism, analysis. I’m not interested in making quickly thrown-together lists and bullet points. I’m not interested in publishing clickbait. I am interested nevertheless in the stories – shallow or sweeping – that we tell and spread about technology and education technology, about the future of education technology, about our technological future.

    Let me be clear, I am not a futurist – even though I’m often described as “ed-tech’s Cassandra.” The tagline of my website is “the history of the future of education,” and I’m much more interested in chronicling the predictions that others make, have made about the future of education than I am writing predictions of my own.

    One of my favorites: “Books will soon be obsolete in schools,” Thomas Edison said in 1913. Any day now. Any day now.

    Here are a couple of more recent predictions:

    “In fifty years, there will be only ten institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.” – that’s Sebastian Thrun, best known perhaps for his work at Google on the self-driving car and as a co-founder of the MOOC (massive open online course) startup Udacity. The quotation is from 2012.

    And from 2013, by Harvard Business School professor, author of the book The Innovator’s Dilemma, and popularizer of the phrase “disruptive innovation,” Clayton Christensen: “In fifteen years from now, half of US universities may be in bankruptcy. In the end I’m excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn’t mind.”

    Pray for Harvard Business School. No. I don’t think so.

    Both of these predictions are fantasy. Nightmarish, yes. But fantasy. Fantasy about a future of education. It’s a powerful story, but not a prediction made based on data or modeling or quantitative research into the growing (or shrinking) higher education sector. Indeed, according to the latest statistics from the Department of Education – now granted, this is from the 2012–2013 academic year – there are 4726 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States. A 46% increase since 1980. There are, according to another source (non-governmental and less reliable, I think), over 25,000 universities in the world. This number is increasing year-over-year as well. So to predict that the vast vast majority of these schools (save Harvard, of course) will go away in the next decade or so or that they’ll be bankrupt or replaced by Silicon Valley’s version of online training is simply wishful thinking – dangerous, wishful thinking from two prominent figures who will benefit greatly if this particular fantasy comes true (and not just because they’ll get to claim that they predicted this future).

    Here’s my “take home” point: if you repeat this fantasy, these predictions often enough, if you repeat it in front of powerful investors, university administrators, politicians, journalists, then the fantasy becomes factualized. (Not factual. Not true. But “truthy,” to borrow from Stephen Colbert’s notion of “truthiness.”) So you repeat the fantasy in order to direct and to control the future. Because this is key: the fantasy then becomes the basis for decision-making.

    Fantasy. Fortune-telling. Or as capitalism prefers to call it “market research.”

    “Market research” involves fantastic stories of future markets. These predictions are often accompanied with a press release touting the size that this or that market will soon grow to – how many billions of dollars schools will spend on computers by 2020, how many billions of dollars of virtual reality gear schools will buy by 2025, how many billions of dollars of schools will spend on robot tutors by 2030, how many billions of dollars will companies spend on online training by 2035, how big will coding bootcamp market will be by 2040, and so on. The markets, according to the press releases, are always growing. Fantasy.

    In 2011, the analyst firm Gartner predicted that annual tablet shipments would exceed 300 million units by 2015. Half of those, the firm said, would be iPads. IDC estimates that the total number of shipments in 2015 was actually around 207 million units. Apple sold just 50 million iPads. That’s not even the best worst Gartner prediction. In October of 2006, Gartner said that Apple’s “best bet for long-term success is to quit the hardware business and license the Mac to Dell.” Less than three months later, Apple introduced the iPhone. The very next day, Apple shares hit $97.80, an all-time high for the company. By 2012 – yes, thanks to its hardware business – Apple’s stock had risen to the point that the company was worth a record-breaking $624 billion.

    But somehow, folks – including many, many in education and education technology – still pay attention to Gartner. They still pay Gartner a lot of money for consulting and forecasting services.

    People find comfort in these predictions, in these fantasies. Why?

    Gartner is perhaps best known for its “Hype Cycle,” a proprietary graphic presentation that claims to show how emerging technologies will be adopted.

    According to Gartner, technologies go through five stages: first, there is a “technology trigger.” As the new technology emerges, a lot of attention is paid to it in the press. Eventually it reaches the second stage: the “peak of inflated expectations.” So many promises have been made about this technological breakthrough. Then, the third stage: the “trough of disillusionment.” Interest wanes. Experiments fail. Promises are broken. As the technology matures, the hype picks up again, more slowly – this is the “slope of enlightenment.” Eventually the new technology becomes mainstream – the “plateau of productivity.”

    It’s not that hard to identify significant problems with the Hype Cycle, least of which being it’s not a cycle. It’s a curve. It’s not a particularly scientific model. It demands that technologies always move forward along it.

    Gartner says its methodology is proprietary – which is code for “hidden from scrutiny.” Gartner says, rather vaguely, that it relies on scenarios and surveys and pattern recognition to place technologies on the line. But most of the time when Gartner uses the word “methodology,” it is trying to signify “science,” and what it really means is “expensive reports you should buy to help you make better business decisions.”

    Can it really help you make better business decisions? It’s just a curve with some technologies plotted along it. The Hype Cycle doesn’t help explain why technologies move from one stage to another. It doesn’t account for technological precursors – new technologies rarely appear out of nowhere – or political or social changes that might prompt or preclude adoption. And at the end it is simply too optimistic, unreasonably so, I’d argue. No matter how dumb or useless a new technology is, according to the Hype Cycle at least, it will eventually become widely adopted. Where would you plot the Segway, for example? (In 2008, ever hopeful, Gartner insisted that “This thing certainly isn’t dead and maybe it will yet blossom.” Maybe it will, Gartner. Maybe it will.)

    And maybe this gets to the heart as to why I’m not a futurist. I don’t share this belief in an increasingly technological future; I don’t believe that more technology means the world gets “more better.” I don’t believe that more technology means that education gets “more better.”

    Every year since 2004, the New Media Consortium, a non-profit organization that advocates for new media and new technologies in education, has issued its own forecasting report, the Horizon Report, naming a handful of technologies that, as the name suggests, it contends are “on the horizon.”

    Unlike Gartner, the New Media Consortium is fairly transparent about how this process works. The organization invites various “experts” to participate in the advisory board that, throughout the course of each year, works on assembling its list of emerging technologies. The process relies on the Delphi method, whittling down a long list of trends and technologies by a process of ranking and voting until six key trends, six emerging technologies remain.

    Disclosure/disclaimer: I am a folklorist by training. The last time I took a class on “methods” was, like, 1998. And admittedly I never learned about the Delphi method – what the New Media Consortium uses for this research project – until I became a scholar of education technology looking into the Horizon Report. As a folklorist, of course, I did catch the reference to the Oracle of Delphi.

    Like so much of computer technology, the roots of the Delphi method are in the military, developed during the Cold War to forecast technological developments that the military might use and that the military might have to respond to. The military wanted better predictive capabilities. But – and here’s the catch – it wanted to identify technology trends without being caught up in theory. It wanted to identify technology trends without developing models. How do you do that? You gather experts. You get those experts to consensus.

    So here is the consensus from the past twelve years of the Horizon Report for higher education. These are the technologies it has identified that are between one and five years from mainstream adoption:

    It’s pretty easy, as with the Gartner Hype Cycle, to look at these predictions and note that they are almost all wrong in some way or another.

    Some are wrong because, say, the timeline is a bit off. The Horizon Report said in 2010 that “open content” was less than a year away from widespread adoption. I think we’re still inching towards that goal – admittedly “open textbooks” have seen a big push at the federal and at some state levels in the last year or so.

    Some of these predictions are just plain wrong. Virtual worlds in 2007, for example.

    And some are wrong because, to borrow a phrase from the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, they’re “not even wrong.” Take “collaborative learning,” for example, which this year’s K–12 report posits as a mid-term trend. Like, how would you argue against “collaborative learning” as occurring – now or some day – in classrooms? As a prediction about the future, it is not even wrong.

    But wrong or right – that’s not really the problem. Or rather, it’s not the only problem even if it is the easiest critique to make. I’m not terribly concerned about the accuracy of the predictions about the future of education technology that the Horizon Report has made over the last decade. But I do wonder how these stories influence decision-making across campuses.

    What might these predictions – this history of the future – tell us about the wishful thinking surrounding education technology and about the direction that the people the New Media Consortium views as “experts” want the future to take. What can we learn about the future by looking at the history of our imagining about education’s future. What role does powerful ed-tech storytelling (also known as marketing) play in shaping that future? Because remember: to predict the future is to control it – to attempt to control the story, to attempt to control what comes to pass.

    It’s both convenient and troubling then these forward-looking reports act as though they have no history of their own; they purposefully minimize or erase their own past. Each year – and I think this is what irks me most – the NMC fails to looks back at what it had predicted just the year before. It never revisits older predictions. It never mentions that they even exist. Gartner too removes technologies from the Hype Cycle each year with no explanation for what happened, no explanation as to why trends suddenly appear and disappear and reappear. These reports only look forward, with no history to ground their direction in.

    I understand why these sorts of reports exist, I do. I recognize that they are rhetorically useful to certain people in certain positions making certain claims about “what to do” in the future. You can write in a proposal that, “According to Gartner… blah blah blah.” Or “The Horizon Reports indicates that this is one of the most important trends in coming years, and that is why we need to commit significant resources – money and staff – to this initiative.” But then, let’s be honest, these reports aren’t about forecasting a future. They’re about justifying expenditures.

    “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” computer scientist Alan Kay once famously said. I’d wager that the easiest way is just to make stuff up and issue a press release. I mean, really. You don’t even need the pretense of a methodology. Nobody is going to remember what you predicted. Nobody is going to remember if your prediction was right or wrong. Nobody – certainly not the technology press, which is often painfully unaware of any history, near-term or long ago – is going to call you to task. This is particularly true if you make your prediction vague – like “within our lifetime” – or set your target date just far enough in the future – “In fifty years, there will be only ten institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.”

    Let’s consider: is there something about the field of computer science in particular – and its ideological underpinnings – that makes it more prone to encourage, embrace, espouse these sorts of predictions? Is there something about Americans’ faith in science and technology, about our belief in technological progress as a signal of socio-economic or political progress, that makes us more susceptible to take these predictions at face value? Is there something about our fears and uncertainties – and not just now, days before this Presidential Election where we are obsessed with polls, refreshing Nate Silver’s website obsessively – that makes us prone to seek comfort, reassurance, certainty from those who can claim that they know what the future will hold?

    “Software is eating the world,” investor Marc Andreessen pronounced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2011. “Over the next 10 years,” he wrote, “I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.” Buy stock in technology companies was really the underlying message of Andreessen’s op-ed; this isn’t another tech bubble, he wanted to reinsure investors. But many in Silicon Valley have interpreted this pronouncement – “software is eating the world” – as an affirmation and an inevitability. I hear it repeated all the time – “software is eating the world” – as though, once again, repeating things makes them true or makes them profound.

    If we believe that, indeed, “software is eating the world,” that we are living in a moment of extraordinary technological change, that we must – according to Gartner or the Horizon Report – be ever-vigilant about emerging technologies, that these technologies are contributing to uncertainty, to disruption, then it seems likely that we will demand a change in turn to our educational institutions (to lots of institutions, but let’s just focus on education). This is why this sort of forecasting is so important for us to scrutinize – to do so quantitatively and qualitatively, to look at methods and at theory, to ask who’s telling the story and who’s spreading the story, to listen for counter-narratives.

    This technological change, according to some of the most popular stories, is happening faster than ever before. It is creating an unprecedented explosion in the production of information. New information technologies, so we’re told, must therefore change how we learn – change what we need to know, how we know, how we create and share knowledge. Because of the pace of change and the scale of change and the locus of change (that is, “Silicon Valley” not “The Ivory Tower”) – again, so we’re told – our institutions, our public institutions can no longer keep up. These institutions will soon be outmoded, irrelevant. Again – “In fifty years, there will be only ten institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.”

    These forecasting reports, these predictions about the future make themselves necessary through this powerful refrain, insisting that technological change is creating so much uncertainty that decision-makers need to be ever vigilant, ever attentive to new products.

    As Neil Postman and others have cautioned us, technologies tend to become mythic – unassailable, God-given, natural, irrefutable, absolute. So it is predicted. So it is written. Techno-scripture, to which we hand over a certain level of control – to the technologies themselves, sure, but just as importantly to the industries and the ideologies behind them. Take, for example, the founding editor of the technology trade magazine Wired, Kevin Kelly. His 2010 book was called What Technology Wants, as though technology is a living being with desires and drives; the title of his 2016 book, The Inevitable. We humans, in this framework, have no choice. The future – a certain flavor of technological future – is pre-ordained. Inevitable.

    I’ll repeat: I am not a futurist. I don’t make predictions. But I can look at the past and at the present in order to dissect stories about the future.

    So is the pace of technological change accelerating? Is society adopting technologies faster than it’s ever done before? Perhaps it feels like it. It certainly makes for a good headline, a good stump speech, a good keynote, a good marketing claim, a good myth. But the claim starts to fall apart under scrutiny.

    This graph comes from an article in the online publication Vox that includes a couple of those darling made-to-go-viral videos of young children using “old” technologies like rotary phones and portable cassette players – highly clickable, highly sharable stuff. The visual argument in the graph: the number of years it takes for one quarter of the US population to adopt a new technology has been shrinking with each new innovation.

    But the data is flawed. Some of the dates given for these inventions are questionable at best, if not outright inaccurate. If nothing else, it’s not so easy to pinpoint the exact moment, the exact year when a new technology came into being. There often are competing claims as to who invented a technology and when, for example, and there are early prototypes that may or may not “count.” James Clerk Maxwell did publish A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. Alexander Graham Bell made his famous telephone call to his assistant in 1876. Guglielmo Marconi did file his patent for radio in 1897. John Logie Baird demonstrated a working television system in 1926. The MITS Altair 8800, an early personal computer that came as a kit you had to assemble, was released in 1975. But Martin Cooper, a Motorola exec, made the first mobile telephone call in 1973, not 1983. And the Internet? The first ARPANET link was established between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in 1969. The Internet was not invented in 1991.

    So we can reorganize the bar graph. But it’s still got problems.

    The Internet did become more privatized, more commercialized around that date – 1991 – and thanks to companies like AOL, a version of it became more accessible to more people. But if you’re looking at when technologies became accessible to people, you can’t use 1873 as your date for electricity, you can’t use 1876 as your year for the telephone, and you can’t use 1926 as your year for the television. It took years for the infrastructure of electricity and telephony to be built, for access to become widespread; and subsequent technologies, let’s remember, have simply piggy-backed on these existing networks. Our Internet service providers today are likely telephone and TV companies; our houses are already wired for new WiFi-enabled products and predictions.

    Economic historians who are interested in these sorts of comparisons of technologies and their effects typically set the threshold at 50% – that is, how long does it take after a technology is commercialized (not simply “invented”) for half the population to adopt it. This way, you’re not only looking at the economic behaviors of the wealthy, the early-adopters, the city-dwellers, and so on (but to be clear, you are still looking at a particular demographic – the privileged half.)

    And that changes the graph again:

    How many years do you think it’ll be before half of US households have a smart watch? A drone? A 3D printer? Virtual reality goggles? A self-driving car? Will they? Will it be fewer years than 9? I mean, it would have to be if, indeed, “technology” is speeding up and we are adopting new technologies faster than ever before.

    Some of us might adopt technology products quickly, to be sure. Some of us might eagerly buy every new Apple gadget that’s released. But we can’t claim that the pace of technological change is speeding up just because we personally go out and buy a new iPhone every time Apple tells us the old model is obsolete. Removing the headphone jack from the latest iPhone does not mean “technology changing faster than ever,” nor does showing how headphones have changed since the 1970s. None of this is really a reflection of the pace of change; it’s a reflection of our disposable income and a ideology of obsolescence.

    Some economic historians like Robert J. Gordon actually contend that we’re not in a period of great technological innovation at all; instead, we find ourselves in a period of technological stagnation. The changes brought about by the development of information technologies in the last 40 years or so pale in comparison, Gordon argues (and this is from his recent book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War), to those “great inventions” that powered massive economic growth and tremendous social change in the period from 1870 to 1970 – namely electricity, sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, and mass communication. But that doesn’t jibe with “software is eating the world,” does it?

    Let’s return briefly to those Horizon Report predictions again. They certainly reflect this belief that technology must be speeding up. Every year, there’s something new. There has to be. That’s the purpose of the report. The horizon is always “out there,” off in the distance.

    But if you squint, you can see each year’s report also reflects a decided lack of technological change. Every year, something is repeated – perhaps rephrased. And look at the predictions about mobile computing:

    • 2006 – the phones in their pockets
    • 2007 – the phones in their pockets
    • 2008 – oh crap, we don’t have enough bandwidth for the phones in their pockets
    • 2009 – the phones in their pockets
    • 2010 – the phones in their pockets
    • 2011 – the phones in their pockets
    • 2012 – the phones too big for their pockets
    • 2013 – the apps on the phones too big for their pockets
    • 2015 – the phones in their pockets
    • 2016 – the phones in their pockets

    This hardly makes the case for technological speeding up, for technology changing faster than it’s ever changed before. But that’s the story that people tell nevertheless. Why?

    I pay attention to this story, as someone who studies education and education technology, because I think these sorts of predictions, these assessments about the present and the future, frequently serve to define, disrupt, destabilize our institutions. This is particularly pertinent to our schools which are already caught between a boundedness to the past – replicating scholarship, cultural capital, for example – and the demands they bend to the future – preparing students for civic, economic, social relations yet to be determined.

    But I also pay attention to these sorts of stories because there’s that part of me that is horrified at the stuff – predictions – that people pass off as true or as inevitable.

    “65% of today’s students will be employed in jobs that don’t exist yet.” I hear this statistic cited all the time. And it’s important, rhetorically, that it’s a statistic – that gives the appearance of being scientific. Why 65%? Why not 72% or 53%? How could we even know such a thing? Some people cite this as a figure from the Department of Labor. It is not. I can’t find its origin – but it must be true: a futurist said it in a keynote, and the video was posted to the Internet.

    The statistic is particularly amusing when quoted alongside one of the many predictions we’ve been inundated with lately about the coming automation of work. In 2014, The Economist asserted that “nearly half of American jobs could be automated in a decade or two.”“Before the end of this century,” Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly announced earlier this year, “70 percent of today’s occupations will be replaced by automation.”

    Therefore the task for schools – and I hope you can start to see where these different predictions start to converge – is to prepare students for a highly technological future, a future that has been almost entirely severed from the systems and processes and practices and institutions of the past. And if schools cannot conform to this particular future, then “In fifty years, there will be only ten institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.”

    Now, I don’t believe that there’s anything inevitable about the future. I don’t believe that Moore’s Law – that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years and therefore computers are always exponentially smaller and faster – is actually a law. I don’t believe that robots will take, let alone need take, all our jobs. I don’t believe that YouTube has been rendered school irrevocably out-of-date. I don’t believe that technologies are changing so quickly that we should hand over our institutions to entrepreneurs, privatize our public sphere for techno-plutocrats.

    I don’t believe that we should cheer Elon Musk’s plans to abandon this planet and colonize Mars – he’s predicted he’ll do so by 2026. I believe we stay and we fight. I believe we need to recognize this as an ego-driven escapist evangelism.

    I believe we need to recognize that predicting the future is a form of evangelism as well. Sure gets couched in terms of science, it is underwritten by global capitalism. But it’s a story – a story that then takes on these mythic proportions, insisting that it is unassailable, unverifiable, but true.

    The best way to invent the future is to issue a press release. The best way to resist this future is to recognize that, once you poke at the methodology and the ideology that underpins it, a press release is all that it is.

    Image credits: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28. And a special thanks to Tressie McMillan Cottom and David Golumbia for organizing this talk. And to Mike Caulfield for always helping me hash out these ideas.
    _____

    Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology – the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. Her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED’s education technology blog MindShift, in the data section of O’Reilly Radar, on Inside Higher Ed, in The School Library Journal, in The Atlantic, on ReadWriteWeb, and Edutopia. She is the author of the recent book The Monsters of Education Technology (Smashwords, 2014) and working on a book called Teaching Machines. She maintains the widely-read Hack Education blog, and writes frequently for The b2 Review Digital Studies magazine on digital technology and education.

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  • Vassilis Lambropoulos – A Review of Aamir Mufti’s “Forget English!”

    Vassilis Lambropoulos – A Review of Aamir Mufti’s “Forget English!”

    514ywdifl6l-_sx327_bo1204203200_Aamir R. Mufti:  Forget English!  Orientalisms and World Literatures (Harvard University Press, 2016)

    Reviewed by Vassilis Lambropoulos

    This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal. 

    Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! exposes the regulatory operations of presumably borderless world literature.  Second, it questions the cultural control of presumably egalitarian global English.  Next, it traces the Orientalist administration of presumably universal colonial knowledge.  Readers may agree with all this despite the repeated warnings that these three systems remain closely implicated not only in the objects of study but also in epistemological critique.  Mufti’s most radical proposition comes last:  The basis of the modern national and global cultural field is the institution of literature, that is, the disciplinary literary regimen that includes the askeses of composition, the exercises of pleasure, the practices of interpretation, and the technologies of education.  Mufti’s critique of critique itself as an aesthetic ethics ought to be disturbing.  In what follows, I will repurpose his project, reshuffling its case studies, to foreground its ultimate target, literary ideology, namely, the constitutive antinomies of the interpretive freedom, the self-imposed limits and controls of aesthetic understanding.  I will do that by narrating the institutional story of “literature” that underlies his anatomy of world literature.

    Mufti proposes that today, as a popular project of translation, circulation, criticism, and scholarship, “world literature” turns an opaque and unequal process of violent appropriation into a supposedly transparent and equal one of free communication.  Its inviting name occludes “the ways in which contemporary critical thinking unwittingly replicates logics of a longer provenance in the colonial and postcolonial eras” (248).  This is particularly evident in multicultural celebrations of the Global South.  Mufti warns against “the triumphalist ‘We are the World’ tone so clearly discernible in the self-staging of world literature in our times.  In many ways, the rubric ‘postcolonial literature’ as used in the Global North now serves as a means of domesticating those radical energies – and not just linguistic or cultural differences – [for example, the now defunct “Bandung” internationalism] into the space of (bourgeois) world literature as varieties of local practice – as Indian, African, or Middle Eastern literary practices, for instance” (92).  Instead of liberal appeals to “diversity” and its token-like selections, what is needed is “a concept of world literature (and practices of teaching it) that work to reveal the ways in which diversity itself (national, religious, civilizational, continental) is a colonial and Orientalist problematic, one that emerges precisely on the plane of equivalence that is literature” (250).  Sensitivity to diversity and respect for difference may express noble sentiments but do nothing to question the values dominating the literary and academic market.

    Studies of scholars in world literature often “are salutary in having emphasized inequality as the primary structural principle of world literary space rather than difference, which has been the dominant preoccupation in the discussion of world literature since the late eighteenth century, including in Goethe’s late-in-life elaboration of the idea of Weltliteratur.  But they give us no account whatsoever of the exact nature of these forms of inequality and the sociocultural logics through which they have historically been instituted, logics of the institution of inequality that incorporate notions and practices of ‘difference’ and proceed precisely through them” (33).  Whether they are describing a “world system” or a “republic of letters,” these scholars fail “to understand the mutual imbrication of inequality and difference” (33) in their operations, which is as short sighted as studying autopoiesis in Niklas Luhmann but not Cornelius Castoriadis.  Mufti does not elaborate a new model of doing world literature.  Instead, he examines how this comprehensive approach to culture has been devised and institutionalized for some two hundred fifty years, starting with the observation that its current resurgence is “a post-1989 development, which has appeared against the background of the larger neoliberal attempt to monopolize all possibilities of the international into the global life of capital.  This mode of appearance of the literatures of the Global South in the literary sphere of the North is thus linked to the disappearance of those varieties of internationalism that had sought in various ways to bypass the circuits of interaction, transmission, and exchange of the emergent global bourgeois order in the postwar and early postcolonial decades in the interest of the decolonizing societies of the South” (91).  Mufti seeks “to unmask and to make available for criticism and analysis” (20) world literature in the twenty first century as the main “field force” (199) of the project to subsume all centrifugal possibilities for an international literature under the monopoly of global cultural capital.  He treats it simultaneously as a “concept,” a “field of study,” and a set of “practices and institutional frameworks” (10), and uses a genealogical approach for a “critical-historical examination of a certain constellation of ideas and practices in its accretions and transformations over time” (19-20).  In what follows I discuss much less the numerous and wonderful cases to focus on the larger historical trajectory produced by this approach.

    The genealogy of world literature begins with the role that “literature as national institution” (3) played “in the emergence of the hierarchies that structure relations between societies in the modern world” (97).  An international literary space first formed in Europe as a structure of rivalries among the traditions (58) emerging in the “intra-European ‘competitive’ vernacularization,” which was later followed by its “colonial absorption and transformation” (76).  The standardization of the vernaculars was a central part of “a project of ethnonational or civilizational nationalism in linguistically diverse and multicultural societies” (148).  This made possible the formation of “literature” as a separate domain of writing and reading out of diverse guild, church, local, and other traditions.  “The nationalization of languages over the past two centuries all over the world . . . transformed former extensive and dispersed cultures of writing . . . into narrowly conceived ethnonational spheres” (146).  Through an extensive philological and interpretive operation “often-overlapping bodies of writing came to acquire, through a process of historicization, distinct personalities as ‘literature’ along national lines” (97).  This is how literature achieves centrality in all constellations of national arts.  “The (now universal) category of literature itself . . . marks this process of assimilation of diverse cultures of writing” (80).  New practices of reading claim existing textual regimes for new purposes and milieus while new elites are also trained to curate them.  “In this process of the acquisition of literary history, the textual corpus acquires, first of all, the attributes of literariness.  That is to say, . . . it enters the world literary system as one among many other literatures, being subject henceforth to the requirements and measures of literariness, replacing the models and modes of evaluation internal to the textual corpus itself.  Furthermore, in the moment of its historicization, it undergoes a shift of orientation within the larger social formation, being reinscribed within a discursive system for the attribution of a literature to a language, understood as the unique possession and mode of expression of a people” (141).

    A foundational act of historicization produced for the first time the terms of a distinct and independent literary history, anchoring a regional tradition in a national logic (143).  When a premodern corpus of undifferentiated writing acquired such a prestigious history, its newly self-regulating “works” entered literary modernity (38-9).   The admission of a corpus “into world literary space as a distinct literary tradition has characteristically taken place since the nineteenth century through its acquisition of a narrative of (‘national’) historical development” (131).  A literary history proper legitimized the literary modernity of a writing tradition by granting it national authority.

    Thus the word “literature” in the term world literature “marks the plane of equivalence and compatibility between historically distinct and particular practices of writing” (240).  The word “world” in “world literature” is a world of nations, the new regimes of sovereignty.  “’World’ and ‘nation’ are in a determinate relationship of mutual reinforcement here, rather than simply one of contradiction or negation” (77).  When world literature is invoked, it is important to keep in mind “the forms of nationalization of language, literature, and culture installed . . . precisely in and through the world-historical process that is the emergence of world literature” (130).  Literature and nation are mutually authenticating and reinforcing:  They confirm the antiquity and autonomy of one another. “The concept and practices of world literature, far from representing the superseding of national forms of identification of language, literature, and culture, emerged for the first time precisely along the forms of . . . nation-thinking” (97).  In addition, world literature played an important role in the orientation of national literatures toward the global space to which every nation could make its own “distinct national contribution” (112).  This role ought to be placed in an even broader global context since it is important to stress that “the emergence and modes of functioning of world literature, as the space of interaction between and articulation of the ‘national’ or regional literatures, are elements of the much-wider historical process of the emergence of the modern, bourgeois state and its dissemination worldwide, under colonial and semicolonial conditions, as the normative state-form of the modern era” (98).  Literature strengthened the claim of the national state against other state forms by giving voice to its organic character.

    It is in this broader context that Mufti introduces world literature as “the (bourgeois) understanding and experience of the world as an assemblage of ‘literary’ or expressive traditions, whose very ground of possibility was the Orientalist knowledge revolution” (90).  Tracing “the historical dialectic of Orientalism and/as world literature” (38) within literary studies since the late 18th century (99), he highlights the production of entirely new objects of study and insists on the central role “that philological Orientalism played in producing and establishing a method and a system for classifying and evaluating diverse forms of textuality, now all processed and codified uniformly as literature” (80).  If national literature was from the beginning world literature too, this was based on Orientalist assumptions.  Mufti’s strong thesis is that “a genealogy of world literature . . . leads to the classical phase of modern Orientalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an enormous assemblage of projects and practices that was the ground for the emergence of the concept of world literature as for the literary and scholarly practices it originally referenced” (19).  The project of philological Orientalism, from the microscopic level of the text to the macroscopic one of the library, produces an entire hermeneutics, which “may be understood as a set of processes for the reorganization of language, literature, and culture on a planetary scale that effected the assimilation of heterogeneous and dispersed bodies of writing onto the plane of equivalence and evaluability that is (world) literature, fundamentally transforming in the process their internal distribution and coherence, their modes of authorization, and their relationship to the larger social order and social imaginaries in their place of origin” (145).  In a nutshell, this is how the colonial Orient was collected, archived, studied, and administered, and the regimes of the truth of the empire established and imposed.

    Orientalism should be understood not only as the apparatus that produced the Orient as a domain of interpretation and administration but additionally as “the cultural system that for the first time articulated a concept of the world as an assemblage of ‘nations’ with distinct expressive traditions, above all ‘literary’ ones.  Orientalism thus played a crucial role in the emergence of the cultural logics of the modern bourgeois world, an element of European self-making, first of all” (35).  In this respect, as in others, the author acknowledges his predecessor, Edward Said, whose  “entire effort in Orientalism was (at one level) to argue for the centrality of Orientalism, as cultural logic and enterprise, to the emergence of modern European culture, to Europe’s self-making” (75).  Mufti illustrates his argument with a fascinating example, proposing that the “lyricization of poetry in the West,” that is, the “gradual expansion of . . . ‘lyric’ norms of expression . . .  to encompass” all practices of reading and writing poetry, is “an intercultural and worldwide process” that can be traced back to the “Orientalist ‘discovery’ of the ‘ancient’ poetic traditions of the ‘Eastern nations’” (71).   By considering the Orient/Occident interplay, a genealogy of the early concepts and practices of world literature shows how a “’lyric’ sensibility emerged in Europe at the threshold of modernity in the encounter with ‘Oriental’ verse and, having taken over the universe of poetic expression in the West, became a benchmark and a test for ‘Oriental’ writing traditions themselves, erasing in the process all memory of its intercultural origins” (74).

    Together, philological Orientalism and (adopting a contrast of Erich Auerbach’s, Herder’s “Nordic” national rather than Vico’s “Latinate civilizatory”) philosophical historicism made the new concept of world literature possible.  The combined Orientalist and historicist thinking legitimized both the different manners of being human and “the same manner of being different” (77).  In addition to its contribution to European self-making, Orientalism contributed to world making as well and deserves to be studied “as an articulated and effective imperial system of cultural mapping, which produced for the first time a conception of the world as an assemblage of civilizational entities, each in possession of its own textual and/or expressive traditions” (20).  Oriental mapping structured “the cultural logic of the modern, bourgeois West in its outward orientation” (11) and facilitated the expansionist “transformation of societies on a world scale” (90).  In non-Western societies it fabricated “forms of cultural authority tied to the claim to authenticity of (religious, cultural, and national) ‘tradition’” (27).

    Orientalism was first activated in the production, periodization, and territorialization of India.  “What the early generation of Orientalists encountered on the subcontinent was not one single culture of writing but rather a loose articulation of different, often overlapping but also mutually exclusive, systems based variously on Persian, Sanskrit, and a large number of the vernacular registers, often more than one in a single language, properly speaking” (104-5).  To make sense of this variety and complexity, they re-structured it completely on the basis of the only model they knew and trusted, the historicist narrative of an evolutionary national history.  “The German and eventually pan-European discourse of world literature is thus fundamentally indebted to and predicated on” (104) the British colonial project of Indological philology, launched near the end of the 18th century.  “It is in this manner, by providing the materials and the practices of a new cosmopolitanism (as well as indigenist or particularist) conception of the world as linguistic and cultural assemblage, that English began to supplant the neoclassical order on the continent in which above all others French and France had provided the norms for literary production” (109).  Non-Western textual traditions entered the literary space as “literature” through the revolution of the philological knowledge that included the “discovery” of classical languages in the East and the invention of their family tree (58).  Eastern writing practices were absorbed into “literature” when their ancient works were classicized, that is, established as the original tradition of a civilization and arranged as its core national canon.

    Mufti documents “that Orientalist theories of cultural difference are grounded in a notion of indigeneity as the condition of culture – a chronotope, properly speaking, of deep habitation in time – and that therefore nationalism is a fundamentally Orientalist cultural impulse” (37).  What he calls the “chronotope of the indigenous” (74) consists of “spatiotemporal figures of habitation” (74) deeply rooted in both place/territory and time/history (129).  Its territorially common ground validates “the authenticity of tradition” (112).  Consequently, the task of genealogical inquiry is “to give a historical account of the acquisition of literary history . . . by a vast, diffuse, and internally differentiated body of writing … a historical (and critical) account of the . . . ascription of historicality . . . structured around the chronotope of the indigenous” (143).  The Orientalist practice of indigenization standardized the pluralist logic of a pre-modern cultural space into a differentiated linguistic-literary field and ushered it into the colonial “world republic of letters.”

    The “dual process of indigenization” (116) of language, literature, and culture, which incorporates of the intertwined strategies of historicism and Orientalism, consisted in classicizing (say, into Sanskrit) a civilization (say, the Indo-Persian one) and vernacularizing (say, into Urdu and Hindi) its cosmopolitanism (say, the subcontinental one).  Τhus, through indigenization, Indian writing essentialized itself into a national literature in order to be admitted to the Orientalist canon of world literature and join the global system of different and unique cultures.  The overlapping colonial cultural projects of indigenization “in the name of return to the origin” (173) and vernacularization as recovery of “authenticity” (251) are inseparable from bourgeois modernization (119).  “It is thus in English as cultural system, broadly conceived – namely, in the new Indology and its wider reception in the Euro-American world – that the subcontinent was first conceived of in the modern era as a single cultural entity, a unique civilization with its roots on the Sanskritic and more particularly Vedic texts of the Aryans. . . .  The idea that India is a unique national civilization in possession of a ‘classical’ culture was first postulated on the terrain of literature, that is, in the very invention of the idea of Indian literature in the course of the philological revolution” (109).  The encounter between Oriental philology and Occidental literature produced a national literary model that inspired the Indian national sentiment and identity (115) and created the “institution of Indian literature” (37, 73).

    I have constructed here the chronological genealogy of world literature that drives Mufti’s argument, the linear story that is plotted in his book through complex discussions of practices, notions, and texts.  The “world” of world literature consists of indigenous cultures using vernaculars to sustain literature as their national institution.  Their heterogeneity is predicated on standardized difference, their cosmopolitanism is based on the nation-state, their unity guaranteed by unequal power relations, and they can all be traced to the Orientalist construction of the colonial archive, be it registry, collection, or museum.  Mufti puts into practice with great integrity and virtuosity his conviction that “the task of criticism today is at the very least the untangling and rearranging of the various elements presently congealed into seemingly distinct and autonomous objects of divergent literary histories.  The critical task of overcoming the colonial logics persistently at work in the formation of literary and linguistic identities today is thus indistinguishable from the task of pushing against the multiple identarian assumptions, colonial and Orientalist in nature, of Hindi and Urdu’s mutual and religiously marked distinctness and autonomy.  A post-colonial philology of this literary and linguistic complex can never adequately claim to be produced from a position uncontaminated by the language polemic that now constitutes it and can only proceed by working through its terms.  This secular-critical task, furthermore, corresponds not to the erection of some image of a heterogeneous past but to the elaboration of the contradictory contemporary situation of language and literature itself” (128-9).  Forgetting English is possible only in English.

    He advocates resistance both to the colonial gaze and national authenticity, asking fellow scholars to “forget” (that is, learn to question by working with) not only English and the “world” in world literature but also the prefix in post-colonial.  “If, on the one hand, I urge world literature studies to take seriously the colonial origins of the very concept and practices they take as their objet of study, on the other, I hope to question the more or less tacit nationalism of many cotemporary attempts to champion the cultural products of the colonial and postcolonial world against the dominance of European and more broadly Western cultures and practices” (53).  This position exemplifies notion of a contrapuntal criticism that takes into account intertwined perspectives and discourses. “No self-described attempt to ‘return’ to tradition, religious or secular, can sustain its claim to be autonomous of ‘the West’ as Other. . . . No attempt at self-definition and self-exploration can therefore bypass a historical critique of the West and its emergence into this particular position of dominance.  And, in this sense, the critique of the West and the logics of its imperial expansion from a postcolonial location is in fact a self-critique, since this location is at least partially a product of that historical process” (153-4).

    While both Orientalism and Occidentalism/Anglicism seek to capture an “one-world” reality, they are caught between the local and the cosmopolitan, the particular and the universal (3).  By consciously operating within these tensions without being at home in either of their poles, the exilic perspective introduced by Auerbach and later advocated by Said can avoid both cosmopolitan detachment and communal narcissism.  An “exilic rethinking of the philology of world literature” (41) would become the basis for a radicalized “philology as homeless practice” (200), for a “historically engaged and linguistically attuned” (241) secular criticism with a “missing homeland” (202).  Supporting neither transnational nor autochthonous social imaginaries, it can provide a dialectically alert account of concrete cultural circumstances “because it captures simultaneously the violent exclusions of the national frame, the material reality of its (physical as well as symbolic) borders, the dire need to overcome its destructive fixations, and its inescapability in the present moment” (194).

    In his conclusion, addressing the central case of post-colonial subcontinent, Mufti supplements the exilic perspective with an additional one, also drawn from twentieth century experience, which promises to offer intrinsic means of study by drawing explicitly on partition as condition and modality since the “politics of linguistic and literary indigenization is a distinct element in the larger historical process that culminated in the religio-political partition of India in 1947 and is thus at the same time an important element in the history of the worldwide institution of world literature” (38).  In a manner reminiscent of the ways in which post-Heideggerian thought puts metaphysics “under erasure,” Mufti puts the subcontinent under partition.  “In light of the historical analysis of the cultural logic of Orientalism-Anglicism operating in the long, fitful, and ongoing process of bourgeois modernization in the subcontinent that I have attempted here, the task of criticism with respect to the field of culture and society in the region is therefore to adopt partition as method, to enter this field and inhabit the processes of its bifurcation, partition not merely as event, result, or outcome but rather as the very modality of culture, a political logic that inheres in the core concepts and practices of the state” (200).  Not a closed part of the past or even its living memory, partition is “the very condition of possibility of nation-statehood and therefore the ever-renewed condition of national experience in the subcontinent” (201).  The political logic of partition is inherent in the normative majoritarianism of the modern nation-state which by definition entails the minoritarization of certain groups and practices, a crisis of legitimacy leading to the partition of society (200-1).  “To argue for partition as method is, therefore, to argue for extracting submerged modes of thinking and feeling from the ongoing historical experience that is partition” (202).

    Furthermore, in the twenty first century this condition operates far beyond the subcontinent.  Ours is a time of proliferating boundaries where the traditional institution of the border of the nation-state is undergoing internal and external challenges and transformations, with some of its functions “redistributed throughout social space” (7) and others globalized, turning it into a “universalized institution” (201).  What is the meaning of world literature in a world where borders are traversing urban, regional, national, and transnational environments and literature often functions as a generalized cartography?  With this question I will proceed to indicate just a few of the many fields of inquiry where this book deserves to be studied and activated.

    Mufti’s notion of “partition as method,” which enriches the problematic of books like Asia as Method:  Toward Deimperialization (21010) by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s and Border as Method (2013) by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, should be of obvious interest to Border Studies, an interdisciplinary field that since the 1980s has been examining geographical, political, economic, cultural, and other boundaries primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and with an emphasis on matters of migration and gender.  The field started by looking at legal, political, and lexical definitions but it has been expanding to consider how borderscapes are narrated, performed, and de-legitimized in the Global South.  An anatomy of world literature would complement current studies of the ways in which, in addition to lands, borderings distribute languages, communities, stories, signs, and jurisdictions.  The order of literature since its national and Oriental origins shows borders working as epistemological devices and markers of relations rather than lines and locations.

    An adjacent and even more interdisciplinary field is the study of territories and their flux in the integrated post-industrial world.  Influenced by the work of Deleuze & Guattari (with their interests from “minor literature” to plateaus to nomadology), it has radically shifted emphasis from the structure to the flow of capital and the dominant econo-semiotic system, which Mufti too has done with literature.  The “assemblage of enunciation” might fit well with his notion of the writing corpus, and the “plane of immanence” with his “plane of equivalence.”  Most importantly, the Deleuzian “rhythm” of difference and repetition would resonate with the contrapuntal circulation of literature in the post-colonial milieu.

    The sociology of culture would benefit greatly from attention to the emergence of the literary sphere and its citizenry, whose members often belong to the national intellectual aristocracy.  Given its interest in the ways in which Bourdieu’s habitus operates according to a logic of practice, it would examine the subfield of literature within the objects, norms, and practices of the cultural field.  Mufti’s work on production and appropriation, and above all domination through symbolic power, provide numerous examples of the kind of capital gained and interest served by disinterested taste as competence and distinction as performance.

    The quest for cultural capital and symbolic power has been driven by the counter-political ideology of the aesthetic state, a milieu and habitus where aesthetic practices constitute the highest form of politics.  Mufti contributes greatly to an understanding of this regime, including the institutions it establishes and cherishes.  The bourgeois subject, who is the citizen of that ideal state, responds to the functional differentiation of society in distinct borderlands with the democratization of art and the sacralization of high culture. Through the proper literary education, fiction and poetry train readers to achieve a Kantian freedom of aesthetic autonomy by giving the interpretive law to themselves above the constraints of any internal or external partition.

    The path from the sociology of culture to its ideology may lead next to its ethics, namely, art as a spiritual ascesis.  Mufti has discussed the political rationality of the humanities and the aesthetically administered university.  His rigorous genealogical approach may be supplemented by Ian Hunter’s interest in humanism and the pre-national state of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the aesthetic discipline of literary cultivation that emerged with Romantic literature and philosophy.  The origins of the philological skills that mobilized Orientalism to create world literature may also lie in a combination of artistic pleasure as worldly ethical competence with literary criticism as a moral practice of the self, that is, in the aesthetico-ethical training of the self in interpretive (self-)problematization which first produced the reader of literature.

    In addition to chronicling the emergence of world literature, Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! reflects on “just about the most encompassing cultural concept of our times, the notion of the systematic totality of the expressive productions of nothing less than humanity in its entirety.” (252).  Through a genealogy of literary comparison it raises the question of doing comparative humanities on a global level.  That is why it ought to have a broad scholarly and pedagogical impact.  This is not a book that scholars may read with profit, and then simply add to their bibliography and syllabus.  It invites reflection on what it means to compare at a time of universal comparability, that is, when everything is comparable (and also appears contemporary) to everything else.  Rather than seeking to add unknown or neglected materials to our canons, it challenges us to reconfigure canon making itself as well as the way we put together panels, collective volumes, or institutes.  Ultimately, Mufti is proposing that, in addition to new critiques, World Humanities needs new ways of constituting the humanities as a common.

    Vassilis Lambropoulos is the C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek in the Departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature of the University of Michigan.  He is the author of Literature as National Institution (1988).

  • Elizabeth Losh — Hiding Inside the Magic Circle: Gamergate and the End of Safe Space

    Elizabeth Losh — Hiding Inside the Magic Circle: Gamergate and the End of Safe Space

    by Elizabeth Losh, The College of William and Mary

    The Gamergate controversy of recent years has brought renewed public attention to issues around online misogyny, as feminist game developers, critics, scholars, and fans of independent video gaming have been targeted by very intense campaigns of digital harassment that seem to threaten their fundamental rights to personal privacy, bodily safety, and sexual agency. Feminists under attack by users of the hashtag #GamerGate complain of being silenced, as they report being disciplined for imagined infractions of supposed sexual, social, journalistic, and ludic norms in computational culture with punishing messages of censure, ridicule, exclusion, and violence. As noted by the mainstream news media, extremely aggressive tactics have been deployed, including leaking women’s sensitive private information – such as unlisted addresses and social security numbers – to the web (a practice known as “doxxing”), placing false reports with law enforcement or emergency first responders (a practice known as “swatting”), and highly personalized stalking with rapid escalations of threats of graphic violence that are often sexualized as rape or racialized as lynching. Although it may be important for the eloquent first-person testimony of the terrorized women themselves to be given priority as speech acts that command attention in resisting prevailing misogyny, the women’s antagonists often are allowed to remain invisible. Furthermore, allies presuming to advocate for the feminist victims of Gamergate may not adequately honor their stated wishes for peace, privacy, and closure that those experiencing online violence may express (Quinn 2015). This essay attempts to examine the larger discursive context of Gamergate and why hardcore gamers who were fans of AAA videogames – often with military storylines and first-person shooter game mechanics – constructed a seemingly illogical and paranoid explanatory theory about so-called “social justice warriors” (Bokhari et al. 2015) or “SJWs,” pursuing unfair advantage to sway the game industry.

    How do we understand how Gamergaters’ claims for noninterference and sovereignty in game worlds and online forums function alongside their claims for no-holds-barred investigations and public debates? Common rhetorical tactics deployed by Gamergaters include using rights-based language to further this specific variant of the men’s rights movement (Esmay 2014) and making appeals to the values of a supposedly rational public sphere (MSMPlan 2015). As these hardcore gaming fans deny the materiality, affect, embodiment, labor, and situatedness of new media, they also affirm positive notions about the exceptionalism of a realm defined – in Nicholas Negroponte’s terms – by bits rather than atoms. Gamergaters are particularly vehement in denying that “online violence” is a possibility with tweets such as “>violence >online pick one” and “will you please point me to the online killing fields where all the bodies from violence online are kept?” (Wernimont 2015). The Gamergate vision of digital culture is one of disembodied and immaterial interactions in which emotional harm is considered to be nonviolent.

    According to Gamergate accounts, the assumption that hardcore gamers representing masculine white privilege were under attack was also apparently buttressed by a number of online articles by game journalists suggesting that that the species was endangered and soon to be extinct. Gamers were declared “over” (Alexander 2014), at their “end” (Golding 2014), or facing the “death” of their collective identity (Plunkett 2014). The arguments made for years by feminist game collectives for pursuing the large market share in lower-status “casual” games, often played by women, had finally seemed to create inroads for independent developers. At the same time Gamergaters described their defensive position as a response to what they often characterized as a feminist “incursion” or “invasion” of gaming that was conceptualized as a substantive attack or threat to gamers. So-called “men’s rights” proponents – who may characterize themselves as “Men’s Human Rights Activists” – differentiated themselves from the distributed and heterogeneous population of gamers but also proclaimed that “the same people attacking Gamergate have been attacking us for years, using exactly the same tactics” (Esmay 2014). According to Breitbart columnist Yiannopoulos (2014a), “cultural warriors” arrived on the scene of gaming like “genocidal, psychopathic aliens in Independence Day;” these “social justice warriors” allegedly attempted to colonize a diverse community, but their “killjoy” advances were repelled and defenders declared them “not welcome in the gaming community.” According to this columnist, supposedly “politeness and persistence” had guaranteed victory in “the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.” While Sara Ahmed (2010) has explicitly called for self-identified “feminist killjoys” to disrupt the perpetuation of patriarchal false consciousness and the enforcement of positive affect in society, the perceived opponents of Gamergate are often cast as the aggressors despite what may be deep desires to participate in the gaming communities that exclude them.

    Decades before Gamergate, Dutch game theorist Johan Huizinga (2014) described what he called the “magic circle” of the temporary world constituted by a game, which appears to function as an isolated “consecrated spot” within which “special rules obtain” for performances apart from everyday concerns (10). Gamergaters often use similar terminology to discuss how game spaces should be intended to serve as a refuge from real-world behavioral constraints and the restrictions of social roles, as in the case of one Breitbart blogger seeking to exclude “angry feminists” and “unethical journalists” from interference with game play.

    Gamers, as dozens of readers have told me in the relatively short time I have been covering the controversy now called #GamerGate, play games to escape the frustrations and absurdities of everyday life. That’s why they object so strongly to having those frustrations injected into their online worlds. The war in the gaming industry isn’t about right versus left, or tolerance versus bigotry: it’s between those who leverage video games to fight proxy wars about other things, introducing unwanted and unwarranted tension and misery, and those who simply want to enjoy themselves. (Yiannopoulos 2014a)

    Gamergate advocates claim that video games are expected to be arenas where gamers can assert their sovereignty and self-determination in spaces that can’t be “leveraged” or annexed to “fight proxy wars” by non-gamer outsiders.

    According to Huizinga (2014), the arena of game play is characterized by the freedom of voluntary participation, disinterested behavior, and an opposition to serious conduct. Similar criteria also often are presented as premises for action in the rhetoric of Gamergate enthusiasts in their comments on various sites for public debate. For example, feminist game developers and critics may be accused of coercing and manipulating potential allies who are journalists through sexual liaisons, romantic promises, or appeals to social justice that invoke guilt and shame. Feminist opponents of Gamergaters are also characterized on sites such as Breitbart as “self-promoters” and “opportunists” and labeled as “egotistical” people who “beg for sympathy and cash” (Yiannopoulos 2014b). Thus, according to the logic of free choice, feminist “social justice-oriented art” in digital culture is aimed at “robbing players of agency and individualism” in every possible kind of engagement (Yiannopoulos 2014b).

    Personal freedom and a separation from material interests or a profit motive are often cited as ethical values shared by Gamergate, although many of its tactics are not at all solemn or high-minded. Active Gamergaters on the Escapist and 8chan emphasize their own diverse and distributed structure, and these anarchic swarms of participants take action “for the lulz,” much as members of Anonymous and 4chan have engaged in outing and calling out campaigns (Coleman 2013). Images of feminist gamers are altered with editing software, phrases like “online violence” are mocked, and fake identities are manufactured with puns and inside jokes. For example, in a crowd-funding effort to promote women in games who disavowed feminist “SJWs,” Gamergate forum members created an elaborate green-eyed and hoodie-wearing fictional persona intended to represent a pro-Gamergate libertarian “everywoman.” The avatar dubbed “Vivian James” wears the four-leafed clover of 4chan, “tough-loves video games,” and “loathes dishonesty and hypocrisy” (“The Birth of Vivian” 2015).

    While Gamergaters emphasize “personal responsibility” and “individual agency” (Yiannopoulos 2014b) as values, feminist critics tend to emphasize interdependence and states of being always-already subject to the coercions of others. In Huizinga’s (2014) terms, feminists inside the magic circle may be perceived as “spoil-sports” who must be “ejected” from the “community,” because they are attempting to break the magic world by failing to acknowledge its misogynistic conventions (11-12). As Anastasia Salter (2016) notes, in Huizinga’s analysis the spoil-sport is most visible in “boys’ games,” thereby establishing solidarity around youthful masculinity as the norm.

    By discussing misogyny in different venues for conversation among networked publics in game forums, blogs, or vlogging communities, and even within live multi-player gaming itself, feminists are cast as a disruptive presence.  Social justice warriors must be treated as aggressors to be repulsed by Gamergaters from the magic circles of game worlds in order to reclaim these spaces and return them to their proper exceptional status and thus maintain their security from real-world incursions.

    Of course, the concept of “safe space” has been central to the history of the women’s liberation movement and its associated consciousness-raising efforts. After all, feminists have reasoned that safe space might be necessary to explore intimate issues about sexuality and reproductive health – which might even include techniques for gynecological self-examination championed by foundational texts like Our Bodies, Ourselves – and safe space would also be needed to share confidences about personal histories of rape, domestic violence, and other forms of gendered trauma. How safe space is constituted can be developed along a number of different axes. For example, as awareness about “microaggressions” – a term used to describe the automatic or unconscious utterance of subtle insults (Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso 2000) – has proliferated, participants at feminist events may be asked to be mindful of their own assumptions, privileges, and power relations in social gatherings. The full sensorium of potential kinds of assault may also be invoked in defining safe spaces, so those speaking loudly or wearing scent may be prohibited from these activities to protect those intolerant, averse, or allergic to certain stimuli.

    Feminists themselves have been reevaluating the assumed need for safe space for a variety of reasons. While media outlets grappling with the concept of “trigger warnings” may characterize any special treatment of vulnerable individuals as coddling or “hiding from scary ideas” (Shulevitz 2015), feminists themselves are often concerned about how the gestures of exclusion mandated by protective impulses enforce particular norms counter to the goal of empowerment. Some argue that “brave spaces” that encourage public acts of asserting identity or declaring solidarity may be more productive than private “safe spaces” (Fox 2004). Homogeneous safe spaces designed for the security of cisgendered whites may be criticized as excluding transgender people (Browne 2009) or people of color (Halberstam 2014). As Betty Sasaki (2002) observes, “safety” can become “the code word for the absence of conflict, a tacit and seductive invitation to collude with the unspoken ideological machinery of the institutional family” (47). And Donadey (2009) points out the irony “that radical feminist pedagogy tends to replicate the assumptions of the bourgeois concept of the public sphere” (214).

    In addition to using the #Gamergate and #SJW (for “social justice warrior”) hashtags on social media platforms such as Twitter, Gamergate adherents frequently use #NotYourShield, which indicates that feminists shouldn’t be shielded from criticism merely because they might claim alliances with underrepresented groups, such as women or minorities, given the fact that members of these groups might not identify with feminism or feel exploited, disenfranchised, or excluded from hardcore gaming communities. #NotYourShield allies of Gamergate may embrace the quintessential hardcore gamer identity of AAA titles with military themes, or may indicate that they are content with conventionally feminized casual games played on mobile devices and don’t want to interfere with so-called “real” games. While Gamergaters may protect the borders of their own magic circles, they criticize those who claim feminist discourse operates in safe spaces devoid of challenges from opponents. Affixing the #NotYourShield piece of metadata to a message supports Gamergaters’ contentions that feminists use the victimization of women and people of color to shield themselves unfairly from rebuttals or tests of truth claims. In videos such as “#NotYourShield – We Are Gamers,” choruses of voices are carefully curated to emphasize “corruption” and “censorship” as features of feminism, and “transparency” and call-out culture as features of Gamergate.

    Although Huizinga’s (2014) magic circle may be more open to public spectatorship than the private sphere of feminist safe space, it is also a zone of exception that is marked off by “secrecy” and “disguise,” according to Homo Ludens (13). Even if the rules for the magic circle are assumed to be uncontested, and the space of play is accepted as apart from the everyday world, the exceptional territory of game play could be a space of less violence (if mockery of authoritarian rulers is tolerated in the case of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque) or more violence (if physical injuries from contact sports are permitted that would normally be prosecuted as assault). Nonetheless, according to Edward Castronova (2007), the membrane of the magic circle “can be considered a shield of sorts, protecting the fantasy world from the outside world. The inner world needs defining and protecting because it is necessary that everyone who goes there adhere to the different set of rules” (147).

    Feminist game critics have begun to question Huizinga’s (2014) concept of a zone of exceptionalism, particularly as the legal, economic, and social consequences of game play are manifested in a variety of “real world” contexts. For example, Mia Consalvo (2009) challenges Castronova’s belief that “fantasy worlds” are a separate domain: “even as he might wish for such spaces, such worlds must inevitably leave the hands of their creators and are then taken up (and altered, bent, modified, extended) by players or users—indicating that the inviolability of the game space is a fiction, as is the magic circle, as pertaining to digital games” (411). Within game spaces of conflict and collaboration, players may bring different agendas into the magic circle, and thus it might be more difficult than Huizinga (or Castronova) imagines to reach consensus about the common rules of play. For example, when a guild of players in World of Warcraft decided to hold a funeral in an area for player-versus-player combat, other participants justified attacking the solemn ceremony in a coordinated raid on the grounds of asserting existing play conventions (Losh 2009). Consalvo further claims the static, formalist vision of bounded play that is grounded in structuralist theory, which is articulated by Huizinga and his disciples, ignores the fact that context is constantly being evaluated by players. Instead of the magic circle, she posits that players “exist or understand ‘reality’ through recourse to various frames” (415).

    For women, queer and transgender persons, and people of color who identify as gamers, neither magic circle nor safe space often seem descriptive of the harsh settings of their game play experiences. As Lisa Nakamura (2012) observes, playing as a woman, a person of color, or a queer person requires extraordinary game skills and talent at a level of hyper-accomplishment because of the extremely rigorous “difficulty setting” of playing in an identity position other than straight white male. Unfortunately, to be an exceptional individual in an exceptional space is often punished rather than rewarded. Moreover, as a woman of color, Shonte Daniels (2014) has insisted that “gaming never was a safe space for women” because “their identity makes them vulnerable to threats or harassment.” However, she also speculates that Gamergate may prove to be “both a blessing and a curse,” given how much attention to online misogyny has been generated by the intensity and egregiousness of Gamergate behavior.

    Many date the Gamergate controversy from fall 2014 – when harassment of dozens of feminists in the videogame industry, including game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu and cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, made headlines. However, online misogyny and gender-based aggression have had a long history in digital culture that goes back to bulletin boards, MOOs, and MUDs and the existence of virtual rape in early forms of cyberspace (Dibbell 1998). To coordinate the current campaign of harassment, IRC channels and online forums such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan were used by an anonymous and amorphous group that came to be represented by the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate after actor Adam Baldwin deployed a familiar suffix associated with prominent political cover-ups. According to the Wikipedia entry, Gamergate “has been described as a manifestation of a culture war over gaming culture diversification, artistic recognition and social criticism of video games, and the gamer social identity. Some of the people using the Gamergate hashtag allege collusion among feminists, progressives, journalists and social critics, which they believe is the cause of increasing social criticism in video game reviews” (“Gamergate Controversy” 2015).

    It is worth noting that Wikipedia’s handling of its own distributed labor practices defining Gamergate has had a contentious history that included a personal invitation to Gamergaters from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to contribute to improving the Gamergate article (Wales 2014), a pointed rejection of financial contributions to Wikipedia from Gamergaters (“So I Decided to Email Jimbo” 2014), and a defense of banning Wikipedia editors perceived as biased against Gamergate (Beaudette 2014). Ironically, during this intense period of engagement with the “toxic” participants of Gamergate eventually dismissed by Wales, Wikipedia often deployed a rhetoric about volunteerism, disinterested conduct, and playing by a neutral set of rules that paralleled similar rhetorical appeals from Gamergaters.

    Attention to this recent controversy – about who is a gamer and what is a game – has already generated a literature of scholarly response that focuses, as this essay does, on Gamergate rhetoric itself. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw’s (2015) essay, “A Conspiracy of Fishes,” analyzes how a particular cultural moment in which “masculine gaming culture became aware of and began responding to feminist game scholars” produced conspiratorial discourses with a specific internal logic that shouldn’t be dismissed as nonsensical:

    It is less useful to consider the validity of a conspiracy in terms of actual persecution, and is more potent if we look at it in terms of a combination of perceived persecution and an examination of the anxieties that the conspiracy is articulating. From this perspective, we can look at gaming culture as a somewhat marginalized group: For years those who have participated in gaming culture have defended their interests in spite of claims by popular media and (some) academics blaming it for violence, racism, and sexism. A perceived threat opens a venue for those who feel their culture has been misunderstood—regardless of whether they are the oppressors or the ones being oppressed. It is easy to negate and mark the claims of this group as inconsequential, but it is more powerful to consider the cultural realities that underline those claims. (217)

    As Chess and Shaw point out, the gamer identity may function in the context of other kinds of intersectional identities in which subjects for which the personal is political can be imagined as oppressors in one context and the oppressed in another.

    In addition to deploying a primary strategy about constructing a narrative about persecution aimed at a marginalized group, Gamergate is also concerned with the secondary strategy of mapping supposed networks of influence across publication venues, media genres, knowledge domains, political spheres, and economic sectors. Such Gamergate infographics seem to have begun with visualizations that were often reminiscent of Wanted posters, in which names and photographs of individual offenders were clustered in particular interest areas. For example, 4chan assembled a list of “SJW Game Journalists” that was republished on Reddit, which goes far beyond the initial allegations of impropriety about game reviewing at Kotaku to target writers at over a dozen other publications.

    As Gamergaters go down the “rabbit hole” of exploring possible connections and exposing hidden networks, they eventually claim political and educational institutions as agents in the conspiracy with a particular focus on DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association, which was founded in 2003 and holds an international conference each year. One diagram shows the tentacles of DiGRA extending into online venues for gaming news and reviews, such as Kotaku, Gamasutra, and Polygon, as well as mainstream publications with a print tradition, such as The Guardian and TIME, and conference venues for many AAA games, such as the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), which was founded in 1988 with a focus on fostering more creativity in the industry. Pictures of offender/participants in the network continued to be featured in this denser and more recursive form of network mapping, as though facial recognition would be a key literacy for Gamergaters.

    It is worth noting that many feminists would describe DiGRA as far from being a haven organization from misogyny, given existing biases in game studies that may privilege academics with ties to computer science, corporate start-ups, or other male dominated fields. Members of the feminist game collective Ludica have described strong reactions of denial when they declared at DiGRA in 2007 that the “power elite of the game industry is a predominately white, and secondarily Asian, male-dominated corporate and creative elite that represents a select group of large, global publishing companies in conjunction with a handful of massive chain retail distributors” and thus constitutes a “hegemonic” power that “determines which technologies will be deployed, and which will not; which games will be made, and by which designers; which players are important to design for, and which play styles will be supported” (Fron et al. 2007). The rhetoric of the Ludica manifestos about how games and gamers were being defined too rigidly by an industry enamored of AAA titles often ran counter to the origin stories of organizations such as GDC and SIGGRAPH.

    The third key strategy of Gamergaters – in addition to the fabricating the persecution narrative and the influence maps – is formulating threats of financial retaliation. If liberal members of the press and academic and professional associations in game studies and game development benefit from a supposed flow of money, social capital, and privileged access to career advancement, libertarian Gamergaters will thwart them with economic threats. This creates a paradoxical dynamic in which Gamergaters both assert an ethos of economic disinterest – because gaming is supposed to be a non-profit/non-wage activity that is separate from accumulation of capital in the real world – and seek to exercise their collective power to crowdfund sympathizers, and boycott, divest, and freeze assets of feminist allies and ally organizations. Advertisers are besieged with consumer complaints about the ethics of reporting in game publications, university employees are reported to administrators with accusations about frittering away public funds, and even donations to Wikipedia are withdrawn by indignant Gamergaters.

    Because feminists supposedly use financial interest as a lever, Gamergaters must also use financial interest as a way to assert the fairness, neutrality, and civility of a rational public sphere, which is tied to their fourth strategy about policing discourse. In regulating language in order to keep it freely flowing in a neoliberal marketplace of ideas so that the best notions will be the most valued, hyperbolic and hysterical feminist “strawmanning” and “insulting” very explicitly will not be tolerated by Gamergaters. In insisting that harassers are a statistically insignificant fraction of their movement in a counterfactual account of their power to terrorize targets and dominate channels of communication, language reminiscent of Robert’s Rules of Order can be as commonly encountered in Gamergate discourses as more stereotypical forms of trolling.

    This does not mean that the campaigns of Gamergate to construct us-and-them narratives, to make explicit and to visualize connections in social networks, to block some financial transactions and facilitate others, and to regulate discourse with structures of rational dialogue, leveling effects, and tone policing are not misogynistic. They defend and enable doxxing, swatting, and stalking behaviors that undermine the very barriers between virtual reality and material existence that are central to their contradictory ideologies of exceptionalism and common jurisdiction.

    The need for nurturing diversity among game players and developers (Fron et al. 2007) has been a work in progress for the better part of a decade, but in the wake of Gamergate, hundreds of prominent signatories who asserted the “right to play games, criticize games and make games without getting harassed or threatened” published an “open letter to the gaming community” (IGDA 2014). The fact that this pointed defense of feminist gamers, critics, and designers also used rights-based language might be instructive for better understanding the discursive context of Gamergate as well.

    The Italian biopolitical philosopher Roberto Esposito (2010, 2011) has theorized that two conflicting modalities of “community” and “immunity” operate when members either accept or resist the obligations of the social contract. Looking at the rhetoric of Gamergaters about the magic circle and how they caricature the rhetoric of feminists about safe space, we see how these oppositions are underexamined, and we can ask why opportunities for reflection and reflexive thinking about intersectionality are being foreclosed.

    Works Cited

    • Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Alexander, Leigh. 2014. “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over.” Gamasutra, August 28. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php.
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  • Zachary Loeb – What Technology Do We Really Need? – A Critique of the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum

    Zachary Loeb – What Technology Do We Really Need? – A Critique of the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    Technological optimism is a dish best served from a stage. Particularly if it’s a bright stage in front of a receptive and comfortably seated audience, especially if the person standing before the assembled group is delivering carefully rehearsed comments paired with compelling visuals, and most importantly if the stage is home to a revolving set of speakers who take turns outdoing each other in inspirational aplomb. At such an event, even occasional moments of mild pessimism – or a rogue speaker who uses their fifteen minutes to frown more than smile – serve to only heighten the overall buoyant tenor of the gathering. From TED talks to the launching of the latest gizmo by a major company, the person on a stage singing the praises of technology has become a familiar cultural motif. And it is a trope that was alive and drawing from that well at the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum, the theme of which was “The Tech We Need.”

    Over the course of two days some three-dozen speakers and a similar number of panelists gathered to opine on the ways in which technology is changing democracy to a rapt and appreciative audience. The commentary largely aligned with the sanguine spirit animating the founding manifesto of the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) – which frames the Internet as a potent force set to dramatically remake and revitalize democratic society. As the manifesto boldly decrees, “the realization of ‘Personal Democracy,’ where everyone is a full participant, is coming” and it is coming thanks to the Internet. The two days of PDF 2016 consisted of a steady flow of intelligent, highly renowned, well-meaning speakers expounding on the conference’s theme to an audience largely made up of bright caring individuals committed to answering that call. To attend an event like PDF and not feel moved, uplifted or inspired by the speakers would be a testament to an empathic failing. How can one not be moved? But when one’s eyes are glistening and when one’s heart is pounding it is worth being wary of the ideology in which one is being baptized.

    To critique an event like the Personal Democracy Forum – particularly after having actually attended it – is something of a challenge. After all, the event is truly filled with genuine people delivering (mostly) inspiring talks. There is something contagious about optimism, especially when it presents itself as measured optimism. And besides, who wants to be the jerk grousing and grumbling after an activist has just earned a standing ovation? Who wants to cross their arms and scoff that the criticism being offered is precisely the type that serves to shore up the system being criticized? Pessimists don’t often find themselves invited to the after party. Thus, insofar as the following comments – and those that have already been made – may seem prickly and pessimistic it is not meant as an attack upon any particular speaker or attendee. Many of those speakers truly were inspiring (and that is meant sincerely), many speakers really did deliver important comments (that is also meant sincerely), and the goal here is not to question the intentions of PDF’s founders or organizers. Yet prominent events like PDF are integral to shaping the societal discussions surrounding technology – and therefore it is essential to be willing to go beyond the inspirational moments and ask: what is really being said here?

    For events like PDF do serve to advance an ideology, whether they like it or not. And it is worth considering what that ideology means, even if it forces one to wipe the smile from one’s lips. And when it comes to PDF much of its ideology can be discovered simply by dissecting the theme for the 2016 conference: “The Tech We Need.”

    “The Tech”

    What do you (yes, you) think of when you hear the word technology? After all, it is a term that encompasses a great deal, which is one of the reasons why Leo Marx (1997) was compelled to describe technology as a “hazardous concept.” Eyeglasses are technology, but so too is Google Glass. A hammer is technology, and so too is a smart phone. In other words, when somebody says “technology is X” or “technology does Q” or “technology will result in R” it is worth pondering whether technology really is, does or results in those things, or if what is being discussed is really a particular type of technology in a particular context. Granted, technology remains a useful term, it is certainly a convenient shorthand (one which very many people [including me] are guilty of occasionally deploying), but in throwing the term technology about so casually it is easy to obfuscate as much as one clarifies. At PDF it seemed as though a sentence was not complete unless it included a noun, a verb and the word technology – or “tech.” Yet what was meant by “tech” at PDF almost always meant the Internet or a device linked to the Internet – and qualifying this by saying “almost” is perhaps overly generous.

    Thus the Internet (as such), web browsers, smart phones, VR, social networks, server farms, encryption, other social networks, apps, and websites all wound up being pleasantly melted together into “technology.” When “technology” encompasses so much a funny thing begins to happen – people speak effusively about “technology” and only name specific elements when they want to single something out for criticism. When technology is so all encompassing who can possibly criticize technology? And what would it mean to criticize technology when it isn’t clear what is actually meant by the term? Yes, yes, Facebook may be worthy of mockery and smart phones can be used for surveillance but insofar as the discussion is not about the Internet but “technology” on what grounds can one say: “this stuff is rubbish”? For even if it is clear that the term “technology” is being used in a way that focuses on the Internet if one starts to seriously go after technology than one will inevitably be confronted with the question “but aren’t hammers also technology?” In short, when a group talks about “the tech” but by “the tech” only means the Internet and the variety of devices tethered to it, what happens is that the Internet appears as being synonymous with technology. It isn’t just a branch or an example of technology, it is technology! Or to put this in sharper relief: at a conference about “the tech we need” held in the US in 2016 how can one avoid talking about the technology that is needed in the form of water pipes that don’t poison people? The answer: by making it so that the term “technology” does not apply to such things.

    The problem is that when “technology” is used to only mean one set of things it muddles the boundaries of what those things are, and what exists outside of them. And while it does this it allows people to confidently place trust in a big category, “technology,” whereas they would probably have been more circumspect if they were just being asked to place trust in smart phones. After all, “the Internet will save us” doesn’t have quite the same seductive sway as “technology will save us” – even if the belief is usually put more eloquently than that. When somebody says “technology will save us” people can think of things like solar panels and vaccines – even if the only technology actually being discussed is the Internet. Here, though, it is also vital to approach the question of “the tech” with some historically grounded modesty in mind. For the belief that technology is changing the world and fundamentally altering democracy is nothing new. The history of technology (as an academic field) is filled with texts describing how a new tool was perceived as changing everything – from the compass to the telegraph to the phonograph to the locomotive to the [insert whatever piece of technology you (the reader) can think of]. And such inventions were often accompanied by an, often earnest, belief that these inventions would improve everything for the better! Claims that the Internet will save us, invoke déjà vu for those with a familiarity with the history of technology. Carolyn Marvin’s masterful study When Old Technologies Were New (1988) examines the way in which early electrical communications methods were seen at the time of their introduction, and near the book’s end she writes:

    Predictions that strife would cease in a world of plenty created by electrical technology were clichés breathed by the influential with conviction. For impatient experts, centuries of war and struggle testified to the failure of political efforts to solve human problems. The cycle of resentment that fueled political history could perhaps be halted only in a world of electrical abundance, where greed could not impede distributive justice. (206)

    Switch out the words ”electrical technology” for “Internet technology” and the above sentences could apply to the present (and the PDF forum) without further alterations. After all, PDF was certainly a gathering of “the influential” and of “impatient experts.”

    And whenever “tech” and democracy are invoked in the same sentence it is worth pondering whether the tech is itself democratic, or whether it is simply being claimed that the tech can be used for democratic purposes. Lewis Mumford wrote at length about the difference between what he termed “democratic” and “authoritarian” technics – in his estimation “democratic” systems were small scale and manageable by individuals, whereas “authoritarian” technics represented massive systems of interlocking elements where no individual could truly assert control. While Mumford did not live to write about the Internet, his work makes it very clear that he did not consider computer technologies to belong to the “democratic” lineage. Thus, to follow from Mumford, the Internet appears as a wonderful example of an “authoritarian” technic (it is massive, environmentally destructive, turns users into cogs, runs on surveillance, cannot be controlled locally, etc…) – what PDF argues for is that this authoritarian technology can be used democratically. There is an interesting argument there, and it is one with some merit. Yet such a discussion cannot even occur in the confusing morass that one finds oneself in when “the tech” just means the Internet.

    Indeed, by meaning “the Internet” but saying “the tech” groups like PDF (consciously or not) pull a bait and switch whereby a genuine consideration of what “the tech we need” simply becomes a consideration of “the Internet we need.”

    “We”

    Attendees to the PDF conference received a conference booklet upon registration; it featured introductory remarks, a code of conduct, advertisements from sponsors, and a schedule. It also featured a fantastically jarring joke created through the wonders of, perhaps accidental, juxtaposition; however, to appreciate the joke one needed to open the booklet so as to be able to see the front and back cover simultaneously. Here is what that looked like:

    Personal Democracy Forum (2016)

    Get it?

    Hilarious.

    The cover says “The Tech We Need” emblazoned in blue over the faces of the conference speakers, and the back is an advertisement for Microsoft stating: “the future is what we make it.” One almost hopes that the layout was intentional. For, who the heck is the “we” being discussed? Is it the same “we”? Are you included in that “we”? And this is a question that can be asked of each of those covers independently of the other: when PDF says “we” who is included and who is excluded? When Microsoft says “we” who is included and who is excluded? Of course, this gets muddled even more when you consider that Microsoft was the “presenting sponsor” for PDF and that many of the speakers at PDF have funding ties to Microsoft. The reason this is so darkly humorous is that there is certainly an argument to be made that “the tech we need” has no place for mega-corporations like Microsoft, while at the same time the booklet assures that “the future is what we [Microsoft] make it.” In short: the future is what corporations like Microsoft will make it…which might be very different from the kind of tech we need.

    In considering the “we” of PDF it is worth restating that this is a gathering of well-meaning individuals who largely seem to want to approach the idea of “we” with as much inclusivity as possible. Yet defining a “we” is always fraught, speaking for a “we” is always dangerous, and insofar as one can think of PDF with any kind of “we” (or “us”) in mind the only version of the group that really emerges is one that leans heavily towards describing the group actually present at the event. And while one can certainly speak about the level (or lack) of diversity at the PDF event – the “we” who came together at PDF is not particularly representative of the world. This was also brought into interesting relief in some other amusing ways: throughout the event one heard numerous variations of the comment “we all have smart phones” – but this did not even really capture the “we” of PDF. While walking down the stairs to a session one day I clearly saw a man (wearing a conference attendee badge) fiddling with a flip-phone – I suppose he wasn’t included in the “we” of “we all have smart phones.” But I digress.

    One encountered further issues with the “we” when it came to the political content of the forum. While the booklet states, and the hosts repeated over and over, that the event was “non-partisan” such a descriptor is pretty laughable. Those taking to the stage were a procession of people who had cut their teeth working for MoveOn and the activists represented continually self-identified as hailing from the progressive end of the spectrum. The token conservative speaker who stepped onto the stage even made a self-deprecating joke in which she recognized that she was one of only a handful (if that) of Republicans present. So, again, who is missing from this “we”? One can be a committed leftist and genuinely believe that a figure like Donald Trump is a xenophobic demagogue – and still recognize that some of his supporters might have offered a very interesting perspective to the PDF conversation. After all, the Internet (“the tech”) has certainly been used by movements on the right as well – and used quite effectively at that. But this part of a national “we” was conspicuously absent from the forum even if they are not nearly so absent from Twitter, Facebook, or the population of people owning smart phones. Again, it is in no way shape or form an endorsement of anything that Trump has said to point out that when a forum is held to discuss the Internet and democracy that it is worth having the people you disagree with present.

    Another question of the “we” that is worth wrestling with revolves around the way in which events like PDF involve those who offer critical viewpoints. If, as is being argued here, PDF’s basic ideology is that the Internet (“the tech”) is improving people’s lives and will continue to do so (leading towards “personal democracy”) – it is important to note that PDF welcomed several speakers who offered accounts of some of the shortcomings of the Internet. Figures including Sherry Turkle, Kentaro Toyama, Safiya Noble, Kate Crawford, danah boyd, and Douglas Rushkoff all took the stage to deliver some critical points of view – and yet in incorporating such voices into the “we” what occurs is that these critiques function less as genuine retorts and more as safety valves that just blow off a bit of steam. Having Sherry Turkle (not to pick on her) vocally doubt the empathetic potential of the Internet just allows the next speaker (and countless conference attendees) to say “well, I certainly don’t agree with Sherry Turkle.” Nevertheless, one of the best ways to inoculate yourself against the charge of unthinking optimism is to periodically turn the microphone over to a critic. But perhaps the most important things that such critics say are the ways in which they wind up qualifying their comments – thus Turkle says “I’m not anti-technology,” Toyama disparages Facebook only to immediately add “I love Facebook,” and fears regarding the threat posed by AI get laughed off as the paranoia of today’s “apex predators” (rich white men) being concerned that they will lose their spot at the top of the food chain. The environmental costs of the cloud are raised, the biased nature of algorithms is exposed – but these points are couched against a backdrop that says to the assembled technologists “do better” not “the Internet is a corporately controlled surveillance mall, and it’s overrated.” The heresies that are permitted are those that point out the rough edges that need to be rounded so that the pill can be swallowed. To return to the previous paragraph, this is not to say that PDF needs to invite John Zerzan or Chellis Glendinning to speak…but one thing that would certainly expose the weaknesses of the PDF “we” is to solicit viewpoints that genuinely come from outside of that “we.” Granted, PDF is more TED talk than FRED talk.

    And of course, and most importantly, one must think of the “we” that goes totally unheard. Yes, comments were made about the environmental cost of the cloud and passing phrases recognized mining – but PDF’s “we” seems to mainly refer to a “we” defined as those who use the Internet and Internet connected devices. Miners, those assembling high-tech devices, e-waste recyclers, and the other victims of those processes are only a hazy phantom presence. They are mentioned in passing, but not ever included fully in the “we.” PDF’s “the tech we need” is for a “we” that loves the Internet and just wants it to be even better and perhaps a bit nicer, while Microsoft’s we in “the future is what we make it” is a “we” that is committed to staying profitable. But amidst such statements there is an even larger group saying: “we are not being included.” That unheard “we” being the same “we” from the classic IWW song “we have fed you all for a thousand years” (Green et al 2016). And as the second line of that song rings out “and you hail us still unfed.”

    “Need”

    When one looks out upon the world it is almost impossible not to be struck by how much is needed. People need homes, people need –not just to be tolerated – but accepted, people need food, people need peace, people need stability, people need the ability to love without being subject to oppression, people need to be free from bigotry and xenophobia, people need…this list could continue with a litany of despair until we all don sackcloth. But do people need VR headsets? Do people need Facebook or Twitter? Do those in the possession of still-functioning high-tech devices need to trade them in every eighteen months? Of course it is important to note that technology does have an important role in meeting people’s needs – after all “shelter” refers to all sorts of technology. Yet, when PDF talks about “the tech we need” the “need” is shaded by what is meant by “the tech” and as was previously discussed that really means “the Internet.” Therefore it is fair to ask, do people really “need” an iPhone with a slightly larger screen? Do people really need Uber? Do people really need to be able to download five million songs in thirty seconds? While human history is a tale of horror it requires a funny kind of simplistic hubris to think that World War II could have been prevented if only everybody had been connected on Facebook (to be fair, nobody at PDF was making this argument). Are today’s “needs” (and they are great) really a result of a lack of technology? It seems that we already have much of the tech that is required to meet today’s needs, and we don’t even require new ways to distribute it. Or, to put it clearly at the risk of being grotesque: people in your city are not currently going hungry because they lack the proper app.

    The question of “need” flows from both the notion of “the tech” and “we” – and as was previously mentioned it would be easy to put forth a compelling argument that “the tech we need” involves water pipes that don’t poison people with lead, but such an argument is not made when “the tech” means the Internet and when the “we” has already reached the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If one takes a more expansive view of “the tech” and “we” than the range of what is needed changes accordingly. This issue – the way “tech” “we” and “need” intersect – is hardly a new concern. It is what prompted Ivan Illich (1973) to write, in Tools for Conviviality, that:

    People need new tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves. (10)

    Granted, it is certainly fair to retort “but who is the ‘we’ referred to by Illich” or “why can’t the Internet be the type of tool that Illich is writing about” – but here Illich’s response would be in line with the earlier referral to Mumford. Namely: accusations of technological determinism aside, maybe it’s fair to say that some technologies are oversold, and maybe the occasional emphasis on the way that the Internet helps activists serves as a patina that distracts from what is ultimately an environmentally destructive surveillance system. Is the person tethered to their smart phone being served by that device – or are they serving it? Or, to allow Illich to reply with his own words:

    As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers. (11)

    Mindfulness apps, cameras on phones that can be used to film oppression, new ways of downloading music, programs for raising money online, platforms for connecting people on a political campaign – the user is empowered as a citizen but this empowerment tends to involve needing the proper apps. And therefore that citizen needs the proper device to run that app, and a good wi-fi connection, and… the list goes on. Under the ideology captured in the PDF’s “the tech we need” to participate in democracy becomes bound up with “to consume the latest in Internet innovation.” Every need can be met, provided that it is the type of need, which the Internet can meet. Thus the old canard “to the person with a hammer every problem looks like a nail” finds its modern equivalent in “to the person with a smart phone and a good wi-fi connection, every problem looks like one that can be solved by using the Internet.” But as for needs? Freedom from xenophobia and oppression are real needs – undoubtedly – but the Internet has done a great deal to disseminate xenophobia and prop up oppressive regimes. Continuing to double down on the Internet seems like doing the same thing “we” have been doing and expecting different results because finally there’s an “app for that!”

    It is, again, quite clear that those assembled at PDF came together with well-meaning attitudes, but as Simone Weil (2010) put it:

    Intentions, by themselves, are not of any great importance, save when their aim is directly evil, for to do evil the necessary means are always within easy reach. But good intentions only count when accompanied by the corresponding means for putting them into effect. (180)

    The ideology present at PDF emphasizes that the Internet is precisely “the means” for the realization of its attendees’ good intentions. And those who took to the stage spoke rousingly of using Facebook, Twitter, smart phones, and new apps for all manner of positive effects – but hanging in the background (sometimes more clearly than at other times) is the fact that these systems also track their users’ every move and can be used just as easily by those with very different ideas as to what “positive effects” look like. The issue of “need” is therefore ultimately a matter not simply of need but of “ends” – but in framing things in terms of “the tech we need” what is missed is the more difficult question of what “ends” do we seek. Instead “the tech we need” subtly shifts the discussion towards one of “means.” But, as Jacques Ellul, recognized the emphasis on means – especially technological ones – can just serve to confuse the discussion of ends. As he wrote:

    It must always be stressed that our civilization is one of means…the means determine the ends, by assigning us ends that can be attained and eliminating those considered unrealistic because our means do not correspond to them. At the same time, the means corrupt the ends. We live at the opposite end of the formula that ‘the ends justify the means.’ We should understand that our enormous present means shape the ends we pursue. (Ellul 2004, 238)

    The Internet and the raft of devices and platforms associated with it are a set of “enormous present means” – and in celebrating these “means” the ends begin to vanish. It ceases to be a situation where the Internet is the mean to a particular end, and instead the Internet becomes the means by which one continues to use the Internet so as to correct the current problems with the Internet so that the Internet can finally achieve the… it is a snake eating its own tail.

    And its own tale.

    Conclusion: The New York Ideology

    In 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron penned an influential article that described what they called “The Californian Ideology” which they characterized as

    promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. (Barbrook and Cameron 2001, 364)

    As the placing of a state’s name in the title of the ideology suggests, Barbrook and Cameron were setting out to describe the viewpoint that was underneath the firms that were (at that time) nascent in Silicon Valley. They sought to describe the mixture of hip futurism and libertarian politics that worked wonderfully in the boardroom, even if there was now somebody in the boardroom wearing a Hawaiian print shirt – or perhaps jeans and a hoodie. As companies like Google and Facebook have grown the “Californian Ideology” has been disseminated widely, and though such companies periodically issued proclamations about not being evil and claimed that connecting the world was their goal they maintained their utopian confidence in the “independence of cyberspace” while directing a distasteful gaze towards the “dinosaurs” of representative democracy that would dare to question their zeal. And though it is a more recent player in the game, one is hard-pressed to find a better example than Uber of the fact that this ideology is alive and well.

    The Personal Democracy Forum is not advancing the Californian Ideology. And though the event may have featured a speaker who suggested that the assembled “we” think of the “founding fathers” as start-up founders – the forum continually returned to the questions of democracy. While the Personal Democracy Forum shares the “faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies” with Silicon Valley startups it seems less “free-wheeling” and more skeptical of “entrepreneurial zeal.” In other words, whereas Barbrook and Cameron spoke of “The Californian Ideology” what PDF makes clear is that there is also a “New York Ideology.” Wherein the ideological hallmark is an embrace of the positive potential of new information technologies tempered by the belief that such potential can best be reached by taming the excesses of unregulated capitalism. Where the Californian Ideology says “libertarian” the New York Ideology says “liberation.” Where the Californian Ideology celebrates capital the New York Ideology celebrates the power found in a high-tech enhanced capitol. The New York Ideology balances the excessive optimism of the Californian Ideology by acknowledging the existence of criticism, and proceeds to neutralize this criticism by making it part and parcel of the celebration of the Internet’s potential. The New York Ideology seeks to correct the hubris of the Californian Ideology by pointing out that it is precisely this hubris that turns many away from the faith in the “emancipatory potential.” If the Californian Ideology is broadcast from the stage at the newest product unveiling or celebratory conference, than the New York Ideology is disseminated from conferences like PDF and the occasional skeptical TED talk. The New York Ideology may be preferable to the Californian Ideology in a thousand ways – but ultimately it is the ideology that manifests itself in the “we” one encounters in the slogan “the tech we need.”

    Or, to put it simply, whereas the Californian Ideology is “wealth meaning,” the New York Ideology is “well-meaning.”

    Of course, it is odd and unfair to speak of either ideology as “Californian” or “New York.” California is filled with Californians who do not share in that ideology, and New York is filled with New Yorkers who do not share in that ideology either. Yet to dub what one encounters at PDF to be “The New York Ideology” is to indicate the way in which current discussions around the Internet are not solely being framed by “The Californian Ideology” but also by a parallel position wherein faith in Internet enabled solutions puts aside its libertarian sneer to adopt a democratic smile. One could just as easily call the New York Ideology the “Tech On Stage Ideology” or the “Civic Tech Ideology” – perhaps it would be better to refer to the Californian Ideology as the SV Ideology (silicon valley) and the New York Ideology as the CV ideology (civic tech). But if the Californian Ideology refers to the tech campus in Silicon Valley than the New York Ideology refers to the foundation based in New York – that may very well be getting much of its funding from the corporations that call Silicon Valley home. While Uber sticks with the Californian Ideology, companies like Facebook have begun transitioning to the New York Ideology so that they can have their panoptic technology and their playgrounds too. Whilst new tech companies emerging in New York (like Kickstarter and Etsy) make positive proclamations about ethics and democracy by making it seem that ethics and democracy are just more consumption choices that one picks from the list of downloadable apps.

    The Personal Democracy Forum is a fascinating event. It is filled with intelligent individuals who speak of democracy with unimpeachable sincerity, and activists who really have been able to use the Internet to advance their causes. But despite all of this, the ideological emphasis on “the tech we need” remains based upon a quizzical notion of “need,” a problematic concept of “we,” and a reductive definition of “tech.” For statements like “the tech we need” are not value neutral – and even if the surface ethics are moving and inspirational, sometimes a problematic ideology is most easily disseminated when it takes care to dispense with ideologues. And though the New York Ideology is much more subtle than the Californian Ideology – and makes space for some critical voices – it remains a vehicle for disseminating an optimistic faith that a technologically enhanced Moses shall lead us into the high-tech promised land.

    The 2016 Personal Democracy Forum put forth an inspirational and moving vision of “the tech we need.”

    But when it comes to promises of technological salvation, isn’t it about time that “we” stopped getting our hopes up?

    Coda

    I confess, I am hardly free of my own ideological biases. And I recognize that everything written here may simply be dismissed of by those who find it hypocritical that I composed such remarks on a computer and then posted them online. But I would say that the more we find ourselves using technology the more careful we must be that we do not allow ourselves to be used by that technology.

    And thus, I shall simply conclude by once more citing a dead, but prescient, pessimist:

    I have no illusions that my arguments will convince anyone. (Ellul 1994, 248)

    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently working towards a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ideologies that develop in response to technological change, and the ways in which technology factors into ethical philosophy – particularly in regards of the way in which Jewish philosophers have written about ethics and technology. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck, where an earlier version of this post first appeared, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay
    _____

    Works Cited

    • Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron. 2001. “The Californian Ideology.” In Peter Ludlow, ed., Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates and Pirate Utopias. Cambridge: MIT Press. 363-387.
    • Ellul, Jacques. 2004. The Political Illusion. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.
    • Ellul, Jacques. 1994. A Critique of the New Commonplaces. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.
    • Green, Archie, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno. 2016. The Big Red Songbook: 250+ IWW Songs! Oakland, CA: PM Press.
    • Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row.
    • Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
    • Marx, Leo. 1997. “‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Social Research 64:3 (Fall). 965-988.
    • Mumford, Lewis. 1964. “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.” in Technology and Culture, 5:1 (Winter). 1-8.
    • Weil, Simone. 2010. The Need for Roots. London: Routledge.
  • Bradley J. Fest – The Function of Videogame Criticism

    Bradley J. Fest – The Function of Videogame Criticism

    a review of Ian Bogost, How to Talk about Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

    by Bradley J. Fest

    ~

    Over the past two decades or so, the study of videogames has emerged as a rigorous, exciting, and transforming field. During this time there have been a few notable trends in game studies (which is generally the name applied to the study of video and computer games). The first wave, beginning roughly in the mid-1990s, was characterized by wide-ranging debates between scholars and players about what they were actually studying, what aspects of videogames were most fundamental to the medium.[1] Like arguments about whether editing or mise-en-scène was more crucial to the meaning-making of film, the early, sometimes heated conversations in the field were primarily concerned with questions of form. Scholars debated between two perspectives known as narratology and ludology, and asked whether narrative or play was more theoretically important for understanding what makes videogames unique.[2] By the middle of the 2000s, however, this debate appeared to be settled (as perhaps ultimately unproductive and distracting—i.e., obviously both narrative and play are important). Over the past decade, a second wave of scholars has emerged who have moved on to more technical, theoretical concerns, on the one hand, and more social and political issues, on the other (frequently at the same time). Writers such as Patrick Crogan, Nick Dyer-Witherford, Alexander R. Galloway, Patrick Jagoda, Lisa Nakamura, Greig de Peuter, Adrienne Shaw, McKenzie Wark, and many, many others write about how issues such as control and empire, race and class, gender and sexuality, labor and gamification, networks and the national security state, action and procedure can pertain to videogames.[3] Indeed, from a wide sampling of contemporary writing about games, it appears that the old anxieties regarding the seriousness of its object have been put to rest. Of course games are important. They are becoming a dominant cultural medium; they make billions of dollars; they are important political allegories for life in the twenty-first century; they are transforming social space along with labor practices; and, after what many consider a renaissance in independent game development over the past decade, some of them are becoming quite good.

    Ian Bogost has been one of the most prominent voices in this second wave of game criticism. A media scholar, game designer, philosopher, historian, and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost has published a number of influential books. His first, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006), places videogames within a broader theoretical framework of comparative media studies, emphasizing that games deserve to be approached on their own terms, not only because they are worthy of attention in and of themselves but also because of what they can show us about the ways other media operate. Bogost argues that “any medium—poetic, literary, cinematic, computational—can be read as a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning. I call these general instances of procedural expression, unit operations” (2006, 9). His second book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007), extends his emphasis on the material, discrete processes of games, arguing that they can and do make arguments; that is, games are rhetorical, and they are rhetorical by virtue of what they and their operator can do, their procedures: games make arguments through “procedural rhetoric.”[4] The publication of Persuasive Games in particular—which he promoted with an appearance on The Colbert Report (2005–14)—saw Bogost emerge as a powerful voice in the broad cohort of second wave writers and scholars.

    But I feel that the publication of Bogost’s most recent book, How to Talk about Videogames (2015), might very well end up signaling the beginning of a third phase of videogame criticism. If the first task of game criticism was to formally define its object, and the second wave of game studies involved asking what games can and do say about the world, the third phase might see critics reflecting on their own processes and procedures, thinking, not necessarily about what videogames are and do, but about what videogame criticism is and does. How to Talk about Videogames is a book that frequently poses the (now quite old) question: what is the function of criticism at the present time? In an industry dominated by multinational media megaconglomerates, what should the role of (academic) game criticism be? What can a handful of researchers and scholars possibly do or say in the face of such a massive, implacable, profit-driven industry, where every announcement about future games further stokes its rabid fan base of slobbering, ravening hordes to spend hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours consuming a form known for its spectacular violence, ubiquitous misogyny, and myopic tribalism? What is the point of writing about games when the videogame industry appears to happily carry on as if nothing is being said at all, impervious to any conversation that people may be having about its products beyond what “fans” demand?

    To read the introduction and conclusion of Bogost’s most recent book, one might think that, suggestions about their viability aside, both the videogame industry and the critical writing surrounding it are in serious crisis, and the matter of the cultural status of the videogame has hardly been put to rest. As a scholar, critic, and designer who has been fairly consistent in positively exploring what digital games can do, what they can uniquely accomplish as a process-based medium, it is striking, at least to this reviewer, that Bogost begins by anxiously admitting,

    whenever I write criticism of videogames, someone strongly invested in games as a hobby always asks the question “is this parody?” as if only a miscreant or a comedian or a psychopath would bother to invest the time and deliberateness in even thinking, let alone writing about videogames with the seriousness that random, anonymous Internet users have already used to write about toasters, let alone deliberate intellectuals about film or literature! (Bogost 2015, xi–xii)

    Bogost calls this kind of attention to the status of his critical endeavor in a number of places in How to Talk about Videogames. The book shows him involved in that untimely activity of silently but implicitly assessing his body of work, reflectively approaching his critical task with cautious trepidation. In a variety of moments from the opening and closing of the book, games and criticism are put into serious question. Videogames are puerile, an “empty diversion” (182), and without value; “games are grotesque. . . . [they] are gross, revolting, heaps of arbitrary anguish” (1); “games are stupid” (9); “that there could be a game criticism [seems] unlikely and even preposterous” (181). In How to Talk about Videogames, Bogost, at least in some ways, is giving up his previous fight over whether or not videogames are serious aesthetic objects worthy of the same kind of hermeneutic attention given to more established art forms.[5] If games are predominantly treated as “perversion, excess” (183), a symptom of “permanent adolescence” (180), as unserious, wasteful, unproductive, violently sadistic entertainments—perhaps there is a reason. How to Talk about Videogames shows Bogost turning an intellectual corner toward a decidedly ironic sense of his role as a critic and the worthiness of his critical object.

    Compare Bogost’s current pessimism with the optimism of his previous volume, How to Do Things with Videogames (2011), to which How to Talk about Videogames functions as a kind of sequel or companion. In this earlier book, he is rather more affirmative about the future of the videogame industry (and, by proxy, videogame criticism):

    What if we allowed that videogames have many possible goals and purposes, each of which couples with many possible aesthetics and designs to create many possible player experiences, none of which bears any necessary relationship to the commercial videogame industry as we currently know it. The more games can do, the more the general public will become accepting of, and interested in, the medium in general. (Bogost 2011, 153)

    2011’s How to Do Things with Videogames aims to bring to the table things that previous popular and scholarly approaches to videogames had ignored in order to show all the other ways that videogames operate, what they are capable of beyond mere mimetic simulation or entertaining distraction, and how game criticism might allow their audiences to expand beyond the province of the “gamer” to mirror the diversified audiences of other media. Individual chapters are devoted to how videogames produce empathy and inspire reverence; they can be vehicles for electioneering and promotion; games can relax, titillate, and habituate; they can be work. Practicing what he calls “media microecology,” a critical method that “seeks to reveal the impact of a medium’s properties on society . . . through a more specialized, focused attention . . . digging deep into one dark, unexplored corner of a media ecosystem” (2011, 7), Bogost argues that game criticism should be attentive to more than simply narrative or play. The debates that dominated the early days of critical game studies, in this regard, only account for a rather limited view of what games can do. Appearing at a time when many were arguing that the medium was beginning to reach aesthetic maturity, Bogost’s 2011 book sounds a note of hope and promise for the future of game studies and the many unexplored possibilities for game design.

    How to Talk about Videogames

    I cannot really overstate, however, the ways in which How to Talk about Videogames, published four years later, shows Bogost reversing tack, questioning his entire enterprise.[6] Even with the appearance of such a serious, well-received game as Gone Home (2013)—to which he devotes a particularly scathing chapter about what the celebration of an ostensibly adolescent game tells us about contemporaneity—this is a book that repeatedly emphasizes the cultural ghetto in which videogames reside. Criticism devoted exclusively to this form risks being “subsistence criticism. . . . God save us from a future of game critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study” (188). Despite previous claims about videogames “[helping] us expose and interrogate the ways we engage the world in general, not just the ways that computational systems structure or limit that experience” (Bogost 2006, 40), How to Talk about Videogames is, at first glance, a book that raises the question of not only how videogames should be talked about, but whether they have anything to say in the first place.

    But it is difficult to gauge the seriousness of Bogost’s skepticism and reluctance given a book filled with twenty short essays of highly readable, informative, and often compelling criticism. (The disappointingly short essay, “The Blue Shell Is Everything That’s Wrong with America”—in which he writes: “This is the Blue Shell of collapse, the Blue Shell of financial hubris, the Blue Shell of the New Gilded Age” [26]—particularly stands out in the way that it reads an important if overlooked aspect of a popular game in terms of larger social issues.) For it is, really, somewhat unthinkable that someone who has written seven books on the subject would arrive at the conclusion that “videogames are a lot like toasters. . . . Like a toaster, a game is both appliance and hearth, both instrument and aesthetic, both gadget and fetish. It’s preposterous to do game criticism, like it’s preposterous to do toaster criticism” (ix and xii).[7] Bogost’s point here is rhetorical, erring on the side of hyperbole in order to emphasize how videogames are primarily process-based—that they work and function like toasters perhaps more than they affect and move like films or novels (a claim with which I imagine many would disagree), and that there is something preposterous in writing criticism about a process-based technology. A decade after emphasizing videogames’ procedurality in Unit Operations, this is a way for him to restate and reemphasize these important claims for the more popular audience intended for How to Talk about Videogames. Games involve actions, which make them different from other media that can be more passively absorbed. This is why videogames are often written about in reviews “full of technical details and thorough testing and final, definitive scores delivered on improbably precise numerical scales” (ix). Bogost is clear. He is not a reviewer. He is not assessing games’ ability to “satisfy our need for leisure [as] their only function.” He is a critic and the critic’s activity, even if his object resembles a toaster, is different.

    But though it is apparent why games might require a different kind of criticism than other media, what remains unclear is what Bogost believes the role of the critic ought to be. He says, contradicting the conclusion of How to Do Things with Videogames, that “criticism is not conducted to improve the work or the medium, to win over those who otherwise would turn up their noses at it. . . . Rather, it is conducted to get to the bottom of something, to grasp its form, context, function, meaning, and capacities” (xii). This seems like somewhat of a mistake, and a mistake that ignores both the history of criticism and Bogost’s own practice as a critic. Yes, of course criticism should investigate its object, but even Matthew Arnold, who emphasized “disinterestedness . . . keeping aloof from . . . ‘the practical view of things,’” also understood that such an approach could establish “a current of fresh and true ideas” (Arnold 1993 [1864], 37 and 49). No matter how disinterested, criticism can change the ways that art and the world are conceived and thought about. Indeed, only a sentence later it is difficult to discern what precisely Bogost believes the function of videogame criticism to be if not for improving the work, the medium, the world, if not for establishing a current from which new ideas might emerge. He writes that criticism can “venture so far from ordinariness of a subject that the terrain underfoot gives way from manicured path to wilderness, so far that the words that we would spin tousle the hair of madness. And then, to preserve that wilderness and its madness, such that both the works and our reflections on them become imbricated with one another and carried forward into the future where others might find them anew” (xii; more on this in a moment). It is clear that Bogost understands the mode of the critic to be disinterested and objective, to answer ‘the question ‘What is even going on here?’” (x), but it remains unclear why such an activity would even be necessary or worthwhile, and indeed, there is enough in the book that points to criticism being a futile, unnecessary, parodic, parasitic, preposterous endeavor with no real purpose or outcome. In other words, he may say how to talk about videogames, but not why anyone would ever really want to do so.

    I have at least partially convinced myself that Bogost’s claims about videogames being more like toasters than other art forms, along with the statements above regarding the disreputable nature of videogames, are meant as rhetorical provocations, ironic salvos to inspire from others more interesting, rigorous, thoughtful, and complex critical writing, both of the popular and academic stripe. I also understand that, as he did in Unit Operations, Bogost balks at the idea of a critical practice wholly devoted to videogames alone: “the era of fields and disciplines ha[s] ended. The era of critical communities ha[s] ended. And the very idea of game criticism risks Balkanizing games writing from other writing, severing it from the rivers and fields that would sustain it” (187). But even given such an understanding, it is unclear who precisely is suggesting that videogame criticism should be a hermetically sealed niche cut off from the rest of the critical tradition. It is also unclear why videogame criticism is so preposterous, why writing it—even if a critic’s task is limited to getting “to the bottom of something”—is so divorced from the current of other works of cultural criticism. And finally, given what are, at the end of the day, some very good short essays on games that deserve a thoughtful readership, it is unclear why Bogost has framed his activity in such a negatively self-aware fashion.

    So, rather than pursue a discussion about the relative merits and faults of Bogost’s critical self-reflexivity, I think it worth asking what changed between his 2011 and 2015 books, what took him from being a cheerleader—albeit a reticent, tempered, and disinterested one—to questioning the very value of videogame criticism itself. Why does he change from thinking about the various possibilities for doing things with videogames to thinking that “entering a games retail outlet is a lot like entering a sex shop or a liquor store . . . game shops are still vaguely unseemly” (182)?[8] I suspect that such events as 2014’s Gamergate—when independent game designer Zoe Quinn, critic Anita Sarkeesian, and others were threatened and harassed for their feminist views—the generally execrable level of discourse found on internet comments pages, and the questionable cultural identity of the “gamer,” probably account for some of Bogost’s malaise.[9] Indeed, most of the essays found in How to Talk about Videogames initially appeared online, largely in The Atlantic (where he is an editor) and Gamasutra, and, I have to imagine, suffered for it in their comments sections. With this change in audience and platform, it seems to follow that the opening and closing of How to Talk about Videogames reflect a general exhaustion with the level of discourse from fans, companies, and internet trolls. How can criticism possibly thrive or have an impact in a community that so frequently demonstrates its intolerance and rage toward other modes of thinking and being that might upset its worldview and sense of cultural identity? How does one talk to those who will not listen?

    And if these questions perhaps sound particularly apt today—that the “gamer” might bear an awfully striking resemblance to other headline-grabbing individuals and groups dominating the public discussion in the months after the publication of Bogost’s book, namely Donald J. Trump and his supporters—they should. I agree with Bogost that it can be difficult to see the value of criticism at a time when many United States citizens appear, at least on the surface, to be actively choosing to be uncritical. (As Philip Mirowski argues, the promotion of “ignorance [is] the lynchpin in the neoliberal project” [2013, 96].) Given such a discursive landscape, what is the purpose of writing, even in Bogost’s admirably clear (yet at times maddeningly spare) prose, if no amount of stylistic precision or rhetorical complexity—let alone a mastery of basic facts—can influence one’s audience? How to Talk about Videogames is framed as a response to the anti-intellectual atmosphere of the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and it is an understandably despairing one. As such, it is not surprising that Bogost concludes that criticism has no role to play in improving the medium (or perhaps the world) beyond mere phenomenological encounter and description given the social fabric of life in the 2010s. In a time of vocally racist demagoguery, an era witnessing a rising tide of reactionary nationalism in the US and around the world, a period during which it often seems like no words of any kind can have any rhetorical effect at all—procedurally or otherwise—perhaps the best response is to be quiet. But I also think that this is to misunderstand the function of critical thought, regardless of what its object might be.

    To be sure, videogame creators have probably not yet produced a Citizen Kane (1941), and videogame criticism has not yet produced a work like Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). I am unconvinced, however, that such future accomplishments remain out of reach, that videogames are barred from profound aesthetic expression, and that writing about games preclude the heights attained by previous criticism simply because of some ill-defined aspect of the medium which prevents it from ever aspiring to anything beyond mere craft. Is a study of the Metal Gear series (1987–2015) similar to Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) really all that preposterous? Is Mario forever denied his own Samuel Johnson simply because he is composed of code rather than words? For if anything is unclear about Bogost’s book, it is what precisely prohibits videogames from having the effects and impacts of other art forms, why they are restricted to the realm of toasters, incapable of anything beyond adolescent poiesis. Indeed, Bogost’s informative and incisive discussion about Ms. Pac-Man (1981), his thought-provoking interpretation of Mountain (2014), or the many moments of accomplished criticism in his previous books—for example, his masterful discussion of the “figure of fascination” in Unit Operations—betray such claims.[10]

    Matthew Arnold once famously suggested that creativity and criticism were intimately linked, and I believe it might be worthwhile to remember this for the future of videogame criticism:

    It is the business of the critical power . . . “in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature. (Arnold 1993 [1864], 29)

    In other words, criticism has a vital role to play in the development of an art form, especially if an art form is experiencing contraction or stagnation. Whatever disagreements I might have with Arnold, I too believe that criticism and creativity are indissolubly linked, and further, that criticism has the power to shape and transform the world. Bogost says that “being a critic is not an enjoyable job . . . criticism is not pleasurable” (x). But I suspect that there may still be many who share Arnold’s view of criticism as a creative activity, and maybe the problem is not that videogame criticism is akin to preposterous toaster criticism, but that the function of videogame criticism at the present time is to expand its own sense of what it is doing, of what it is capable, of how and why it is written. When Bogost says he wants “words that . . . would . . . tousle the hair of madness,” why not write in such a fashion (Bogost’s controlled style rarely approaches madness), expanding criticism beyond mere phenomenological summary at best or zombified parasitism at worst. Consider, for instance, Jonathan Arac: “Criticism is literary writing that begins from previous literary writing. . . . There need not be a literary avant-garde for criticism to flourish; in some cases criticism itself plays a leading cultural role” (1989, 7). If we are to take seriously Bogost’s point about how the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Gone Home reveals the aesthetic and political impoverishment of the medium, then it is disappointing to see someone so well-positioned to take a leading cultural role in shaping the conversation about how videogames might change or transform surrendering the field.

    Forget analogies. What if videogame criticism were to begin not from comparing games to toasters but from previous writing, from the history of criticism, from literature and theory, from theories of art and architecture and music, from rhetoric and communication, from poetry? For, given the complex mediations present in even the simplest games—i.e., games not only involve play and narrative, but raise concerns about mimesis, music, sound, spatiality, sociality, procedurality, interface effects, et cetera—it increasingly makes less and less sense to divorce or sequester games from other forms of cultural study or to think that videogames are so unique that game studies requires its own critical modality. If Bogost implores game critics not to limit themselves to a strictly bound, niche field uninformed by other spheres of social and cultural inquiry, if game studies is to go forward into a metacritical third wave where it can become interested in what makes videogames different from other forms and self-reflexively aware of the variety of established and interconnecting modes of cultural criticism from which the field can only benefit, then thinking about the function of criticism historically should guide how and why games are written about at the present time.

    Before concluding, I should also note that something else perhaps changed between 2011 and 2015, namely, Bogost’s alignment with the philosophical movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. In 2012, he published Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, a book that picks up some of the more theoretical aspects of Unit Operations and draws upon the work of Graham Harman and other anti-correlationists to pursue a flat ontology, arguing that the job of the philosopher “is to amplify the black noise of objects to make the resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, their unit operations” (Bogost 2012, 34). Rather than continue pursuing an anthropocentric, correlationist philosophy that can only think about objects in relation to human consciousness, Bogost claims that “the answer to correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate but the acknowledgment of endless ones, all self-absorbed, obsessed by givenness rather than by turpitude” (78). He suggests that philosophy should extend the possibility of phenomenological encounter to all objects, to all units, in his parlance; let phenomenology be alien and weird; let toasters encounter tables, refrigerators, books, climate change, Pittsburgh, Higgs boson particles, the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, bagels, et cetera.[11]

    Though this is not the venue to pursue a broader discussion of Bogost’s philosophical writing, I mention his speculative turn because it seems important for understanding his changing attitudes about criticism. That is, as Graham Harman’s 2012 essay, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” negatively demonstrates, it is unclear what a flat ontology has to say, if anything, about art, what such a philosophy can bring to critical, hermeneutic activity.[12] Indeed, regardless of where one stands with regard to object-oriented ontology and other speculative realisms, what these philosophies might offer to critics seems to be one of the more vexing and polarizing intellectual questions of our time. Hermeneutics may very well prove inescapably “correlationist,” and, indeed, no matter how disinterested, historical. It is an open question whether or not one can ground a coherent and worthwhile critical practice upon a flat ontology. I am tempted to suspect not. I also suspect that the current trends in continental philosophy, at the end of the day, may not be really interested in criticism as such, and perhaps that is not really such a big deal. Criticism, theory, and philosophy are not synonymous activities nor must they be. (The question about criticism vis-à-vis alien phenomenology also appears to have motivated the Object Lessons series that Bogost edits.) This is all to say, rather than ground videogame criticism in what may very well turn out to be an intellectual fad whose possibilities for writing worthwhile criticism remain somewhat dubious, perhaps there may be more ripe currents and streams—namely, the history of criticism—that can inform how we write about videogames. Criticism may be steered by keeping in view many polestars; let us not be overly swayed by what, for now, burns brightest. For an area of humanistic inquiry that is still very much emerging, it seems a mistake to assume it can and should be nothing more than toaster criticism.

    In this review I have purposefully made few claims about the state of videogames. This is partly because I do not feel that any more work needs to be done to justify writing about the medium. It is also partly because I feel that any broad statement about the form would be an overgeneralization at this point. There are too many games being made in too many places by too many different people for any all-encompassing statement about the state of videogame art to be all that coherent. (In this, I think Bogost’s sense of the need for a media microecology of videogames is still apropos.) But I will say that the state of videogame criticism—and, strangely enough, particularly the academic kind—is one of the few places where humanistic inquiry seems, at least to me, to be growing and expanding rather than contracting or ossifying. Such a generally positive and optimistic statement about a field of the humanities may not adhere to present conceptions about academic activity (indeed, it might even be unfashionable!), which seem to more generally despair about the humanities, and rightfully so. Admitting that some modes of criticism might be, at least in some ways, exhausted, would be an important caveat, especially given how the past few years have seen a considerable amount of reflection about contemporary modes of academic criticism—e.g., Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) or Eric Hayot’s “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do” (2014). But I think that, given how the anti-intellectual miasma that has long been present in US life has intensified in recent years, creeping into seemingly every discourse, one of the really useful functions of videogame criticism may very well be its potential ability to allow reflection on the function of criticism itself in the twenty-first century. If one of the most prominent videogame critics is calling his activity “preposterous” and his object “adolescent,” this should be a cause for alarm, for such claims cannot but help to perpetuate present views about the worthlessness of the humanities. So, I would like to modestly suggest that, rather than look to toasters and widgets to inform how we talk about videogames, let us look to critics and what they have written. Edward W. Said once wrote: “for in its essence the intellectual life—and I speak here mainly about the social sciences and the humanities—is about the freedom to be critical: criticism is intellectual life and, while the academic precinct contains a great deal in it, its spirit is intellectual and critical, and neither reverential nor patriotic” (1994, 11). If one can approach videogames—of all things!—in such a spirit, perhaps other spheres of human activity can rediscover their critical spirit as well.

    _____

    Bradley J. Fest will begin teaching writing this fall at Carnegie Mellon University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in boundary 2 (interviews here and here), Critical Quarterly, Critique, David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (Bloomsbury, 2014), First Person Scholar, The Silence of Fallout (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), Studies in the Novel, and Wide Screen. He is also the author of a volume of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), and a chapbook, “The Shape of Things,” was selected as finalist for the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize and is forthcoming in Verse. Recent poems have appeared in Empty Mirror, PELT, PLINTH, TXTOBJX, and Small Po(r)tions. He previously reviewed Alexander R. Galloway’s The Interface Effect for The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

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    _____

    NOTES

    [1] On some of the first wave controversies, see Aarseth (2001).

    [2] For a representative sample of essays and books in the narratology versus ludology debate from the early days of academic videogame criticism, see Murray (1997 and 2004), Aarseth (1997, 2003, and 2004), Juul (2001), and Frasca (2003).

    [3] For representative texts, see Crogan (2011), Dyer-Witherford and Peuter (2009), Galloway (2006a and 2006b), Jagoda (2013 and 2016), Nakamura (2009), Shaw (2014), and Wark (2007). My claims about the vitality of the field of game studies are largely a result of having read these and other critics. There have also been a handful of interesting “videogame memoirs” published recently. See Bissell (2010) and Clune (2015).

    [4] Bogost defines procedurality as follows: “Procedural representation takes a different form than written or spoken representation. Procedural representation explains processes with other processes. . . . [It] is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language” (2007, 9). For my own discussion of proceduralism, particularly with regard to The Stanley Parable (2013) and postmodern metafiction, see Fest (forthcoming 2016).

    [5] For instance, in the concluding chapter of Unit Operations, Bogost writes powerfully and convincingly about the need for a comparative videogame criticism in conversation with other forms of cultural criticism, arguing that “a structural change in our thinking must take place for videogames to thrive, both commercially and culturally” (2006, 179). It appears that the lack of any structural change in the nonetheless wildly thriving—at least financially—videogame industry has given Bogost serious pause.

    [6] Indeed, at one point he even questions the justification for the book in the first place: “The truth is, a book like this one is doomed to relatively modest sales and an even more modest readership, despite the generous support of the university press that publishes it and despite the fact that I am fortunate enough to have a greater reach than the average game critic” (Bogost 2015, 185). It is unclear why the limited reach of his writing might be so worrisome to Bogost given that, historically, the audience for, say, poetry criticism has never been all that large.

    [7] In addition to those previously mentioned, Bogost has also published Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009) and, with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (2010). Also forthcoming is Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2016).

    [8] This is, to be sure, a somewhat confusing point. Are not record stores, book stores, and video stores (if such things still exist), along with tea shops, shoe stores, and clothing stores “retail establishment[s] devoted to a singular practice” (Bogost 2015, 182–83)? Are all such establishments unseemly because of the same logic? What makes a game store any different?

    [9] For a brief overview of Gamergate, see Winfield (2014). For a more detailed discussion of both the cultural and technological underpinnings of Gamergate, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the algorithmic governance of sites such as Reddit or 4chan and online misogyny and harassment, see Massanari’s (2015) important essay. For links to a number of other articles and essays on gaming and feminism, see Ligman (2014) and The New Inquiry (2014). For essays about contemporary “gamer” culture, see Williams (2014) and Frase (2014). On gamers, Bogost writes in a chapter titled “The End of Gamers” from his previous book: “as videogames broaden in appeal, being a ‘gamer’ will actually become less common, if being a gamer means consuming games as one’s primary media diet or identifying with videogames as a primary part of one’s identity” (2011, 154).

    [10] See Bogost (2006, 73–89). Also, to be fair, Bogost devotes a paragraph of the introduction of How to Talk about Videogames to the considerable affective properties of videogames, but concludes the paragraph by saying that games are “Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk-flavored chewing gum” (Bogost 2015, ix), which, I feel, considerably undercuts whatever aesthetic value he had just ascribed to them.

    [11] In Alien Phenomenology Bogost calls such lists “Latour litanies” (2012, 38) and discusses this stylistic aspect of object-oriented ontology at some length in the chapter, “Ontography” (35–59).

    [12] See Harman (2012). Bogost addresses such concerns in the conclusion of Alien Phenomenology, responding to criticism about his study of the Atari 2600: “The platform studies project is an example of alien phenomenology. Yet our efforts to draw attention to hardware and software objects have been met with myriad accusations of human erasure: technological determinism most frequently, but many other fears and outrages about ‘ignoring’ or ‘conflating’ or ‘reducing,’ or otherwise doing violence to ‘the cultural aspects’ of things. This is a myth” (2012, 132).

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    WORKS CITED

    • Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
    • ———. 2001. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1, no. 1. http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html.
    • ———. 2003. “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis.” Game Approaches: Papers from spilforskning.dk Conference, August 28–29. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Aarseth.pdf.
    • ———. 2004. “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 45–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Arac, Jonathan. 1989. Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Arnold, Matthew. 1993 (1864). “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini, 26–51. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    • Bissell, Tom. 2010. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Pantheon.
    • Bogost, Ian. 2006. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
    • ———. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • ———. 2009. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT
    • Press.
    • ———. 2011. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. 2015. How to Talk about Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. Forthcoming 2016. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. New York: Basic Books.
    • Bogost, Ian, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. 2010. Newsgames: Journalism at Play.
    • Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Clune, Michael W. 2015. Gamelife: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
    • Crogan, Patrick. 2011. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Tehnoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Dyer-Witherford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Fest, Bradley J. Forthcoming 2016. “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction.” “Videogame Adaptation,” edited by Kevin M. Flanagan, special issue, Wide Screen.
    • Frasca, Gonzalo. 2003. “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 221–36. New York: Routledge.
    • Frase, Peter. 2014.  “Gamer’s Revanche.” Peter Frase (blog), September 3. http://www.peterfrase.com/2014/09/gamers-revanche/.
    • Galloway, Alexander R. 2006a. “Warcraft and Utopia.” Ctheory.net, February 16. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=507.
    • ———. 2006b. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Harman, Graham. 2012. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43, no. 2: 183–203.
    • Hayot, Eric. 2014. “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1: 53–77.
    • Jagoda, Patrick. 2013. “Gamification and Other Forms of Play.” boundary 2 40, no. 2: 113–44.
    • ———. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Juul, Jesper. 2001. “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” Game Studies 1, no. 1. http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/.
    • Ligman, Chris. 2014. “August 31st.” Critical Distance, August 31. http://www.critical-distance.com/2014/08/31/august-31st/.
    • Massanari, Adrienne . 2015. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society, OnlineFirst, October 9.
    • Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso.
    • Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • ———. 2004. “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 1–11. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Nakamura, Lisa. 2009. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 2: 128–44.
    • The New Inquiry. 2014. “TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism.” New Inquiry, September 2. http://thenewinquiry.com/features/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
    • Said, Edward W. 1994. “Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler.” boundary 2 21, no. 3: 1–18.
    • Shaw, Adrienne. 2014. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Williams, Ian. “Death to the Gamer.” Jacobin, September 9. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/death-to-the-gamer/.
    • Winfield, Nick. 2014. “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.” New York Times, October 15. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/technology/gamergate-women-video-game-threats-anita-sarkeesian.html.

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  • Audrey Watters – Public Education Is Not Responsible for Tech’s Diversity Problem

    Audrey Watters – Public Education Is Not Responsible for Tech’s Diversity Problem

    By Audrey Watters

    ~

    On July 14, Facebook released its latest “diversity report,” claiming that it has “shown progress” in hiring a more diverse staff. Roughly 90% of its US employees are white or Asian; 83% of those in technical positions at the company are men. (That’s about a 1% improvement from last year’s stats.) Black people still make up just 2% of the workforce at Facebook, and 1% of the technical staff. Those are the same percentages as 2015, when Facebook boasted that it had hired 7 Black people. “Progress.”

    In this year’s report, Facebook blamed the public education system its inability to hire more people of color. I mean, whose fault could it be?! Surely not Facebook’s! To address its diversity problems, Facebook said it would give $15 million to Code.org in order to expand CS education, news that was dutifully reported by the ed-tech press without any skepticism about Facebook’s claims about its hiring practices or about the availability of diverse tech talent.

    The “pipeline” problem, writes Dare Obasanjo, is a “big lie.” “The reality is that tech companies shape the ethnic make up of their employees based on what schools & cities they choose to hire from and where they locate engineering offices.” There is diverse technical talent, ready to be hired; the tech sector, blinded by white, male privilege, does not recognize it, does not see it. See the hashtag #FBNoExcuses which features more smart POC in tech than work at Facebook and Twitter combined, I bet.

    Facebook’s decision to “blame schools” is pretty familiar schtick by now, I suppose, but it’s still fairly noteworthy coming from a company whose founder and CEO is increasingly active in ed-tech investing. More broadly, Silicon Valley continues to try to shape the future of education – mostly by defining that future as an “engineering” or “platform” problem and then selling schools and parents and students a product in return. As the tech industry utterly fails to address diversity within its own ranks, what can we expect from its vision for ed-tech?!

    My fear: ed-tech will ignore inequalities. Ed-tech will expand inequalities. Ed-tech will, as Edsurge demonstrated this week, simply co-opt the words of people of color in order to continue to sell its products to schools. (José Vilson has more to say about this particular appropriation in this week’s #educolor newsletter.)

    And/or: ed-tech will, as I argued this week in the keynote I delivered at the Digital Pedagogy Institute in PEI, confuse consumption with “innovation.” “Gotta catch ’em all” may be the perfect slogan for consumer capitalism; but it’s hardly a mantra I’m comfortable chanting to push for education transformation. You cannot buy your way to progress.

    All of the “Pokémon GO will revolutionize education” claims have made me incredibly angry, even though it’s a claim that’s made about every single new product that ed-tech’s early adopters find exciting (and clickbait-worthy). I realize there are many folks who seem to find a great deal of enjoyment in the mobile game. Hoorah. But there are some significant issues with the game’s security, privacy, its Terms of Service, its business model, and its crowd-sourced data model – a data model that reflects the demographics of those who played an early version of the game and one that means that there are far fewer “pokestops” in Black neighborhoods. All this matters for Pokémon GO; all this matters for ed-tech.

    Pokémon GO.
    Pokémon GO

    Pokémon GO is just the latest example of digital redlining, re-inscribing racist material policies and practices into new, digital spaces. So when ed-tech leaders suggest that we shouldn’t criticize Pokémon GO, I despair. I really do. Who is served by being silent!? Who is served by enforced enthusiasm? How does ed-tech, which has its own problems with diversity, serve to re-inscribe racist policies and practices because its loudest proponents have little interest in examining their own privileges, unless, as José points out, it gets them clicks?

    Sigh.
    _____

    Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology – the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. Her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED’s education technology blog MindShift, in the data section of O’Reilly Radar, on Inside Higher Ed, in The School Library Journal, in The Atlantic, on ReadWriteWeb, and Edutopia. She is the author of the recent book The Monsters of Education Technology (Smashwords, 2014) and working on a book called Teaching Machines. She maintains the widely-read Hack Education blog, and writes frequently for The b2 Review Digital Studies magazine on digital technology and education.

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  • Gavin Mueller – Civil Disobedience in the Age of Cyberwar

    Gavin Mueller – Civil Disobedience in the Age of Cyberwar

    a review of Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

    by Gavin Mueller

    ~

    Molly Sauter’s The Coming Swarm begins in an odd way. Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, confesses in the book’s foreword that he disagrees with the book’s central argument: that distributed denial of service (DDoS) actions, where specific websites and/or internet servers are overwhelmed by traffic and knocked offline via the coordinated activity of many computers acting together, should be viewed as a legitimate means of protest.[1] “My research demonstrated that these attacks, once mounted by online extortionists as a form of digital protection racket, were increasingly being mounted by governments as a way of silencing critics,” Zuckerman writes (xii). Sauter’s argument, which takes the form of this slim and knotty book, ultimately does not convince Zuckerman, though he admits he is “a better scholar and a better person” for having engaged with the arguments contained within. “We value civic arguments, whether they unfold in the halls of government, a protest encampment, or the comments thread of an internet post because we believe in the power of deliberation” (xv). This promise of the liberal public sphere is what Sauter grapples with throughout the work, to varying levels of success.

    The Coming Swarm is not a book about DDoS activities in general. As Sauter notes, “DDoS is a popular tactic of extortion, harassment, and silencing” (6): its most common uses come from criminal organizations and government cyberwar operations. Sauter is not interested in these kinds of actions, which encompass the vast majority of DDoS uses. (DDoS itself is a subset of all denial of service or DoS attacks.) Instead they focus on self-consciously political DDoS attacks, first carried out by artist-hacker groups in the 1990s (the electrohippies and the Electronic Disturbance Theater) and more recent actions by the group Anonymous.[2] All told, these are a handful of actions, barely numbering in the double digits, and spread out over two decades. The focus on this small minority of cases can make the book’s argument seem question-begging, since Sauter does not make clear how and why it is legitimate to analyze exclusively those few instances of a widespread phenomenon that happen to conform to an author’s desired outlook. At one level, this is a general problem throughout the book, since Sauter’s analysis is confined to what they call “activist DDoS,” yet the actual meaning of this term is rarely interrogated: viewed from the perspective of the actors, many of the DDoS actions Sauter dismisses by stipulation could also be–and likely are–viewed as “activism.”

    From its earliest inception, political DDoS actions were likened to “virtual sit-ins”: activists use their computers’ ability to ping a server to clog up its functioning, potentially slowing or bringing its activity to a stand-still. This situated the technique within a history of nonviolent civil disobedience, particularly that of the Civil Rights Movement. This metaphor has tended to overdetermine the debate over the use of DDoS in activist contexts, and Sauter is keen to move on from the connection: “such comparisons on the part of the media and the public serve to only stifle innovation within social movements and political action, while at the same time cultivating a deep and unproductive nostalgia for a kind of ‘ideal activism’ that never existed” (22-3). Sauter argues that not only does this leave out contributions to the Civil Rights Movement that the mainstream finds less than respectable; it helps rule out the use of disruptive and destructive forms of activism in future movements.

    This argument has merit, and many activists who want to move beyond nonviolent civil disobedience into direct action forms of political action appear to agree with it. Yet Sauter still wants to claim the label of civil disobedience for DDoS actions that they at other moments discard: “activist DDoS actions are not meaningfully different from other actions within the history of civil disobedience… novelty cannot properly exempt activist DDoS from being classified as a tactic of civil disobedience” (27). However, the main criticisms of DDoS as civil disobedience have nothing to do with its novelty. As Evgeny Morozov points out in his defense of DDoS as a political tactic, “I’d argue, however, that the DDoS attacks launched by Anonymous were not acts of civil disobedience because they failed one crucial test implicit in Rawls’s account: Most attackers were not willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions.” Novelist and digital celebrity Cory Doctorow, who opposes DDoS-based activism, echoes this concern: “A sit-in derives its efficacy not from merely blocking the door to some objectionable place, but from the public willingness to stand before your neighbours and risk arrest and bodily harm in service of a moral cause, which is itself a force for moral suasion.” The complaint is not that DDoS fails to live up to the standards of the Civil Rights Movement, or that it is too novel. It is that it often fails the basic test of civil disobedience: potentially subjecting oneself to punishment as a form of protest that lays bare the workings of the state.

    Zuckerman’s principle critique of Sauter’s arguments is that DDoS, by shutting down sites, censors speech opposed by activists rather than promoting their dissenting messages. Sauter has a two-pronged response to this. First, they say that DDoS attacks make the important point that the internet is not really a public space. Instead, it is controlled by private interests, with large corporations managing the vast majority of online space. This means that no arguments may rest, implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption that the internet is a Habermasian public sphere. Second, Sauter argues, by their own admission counterintuitively, that DDoS, properly contextualized as part of “communicative capitalism,” is itself a form of speech.

    Communicative capitalism is a term developed by Jodi Dean as part of her critique of the Habermasian vision of the internet as a public sphere. With the commodification of online speech, “the exchange value of messages overtakes their use value” (58). The communication of messages is overwhelmed by the priority to circulate content of any kind: “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production” (56). For Dean, this logic undermines political effects from internet communication: “The proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite – the post-political formation of communicative capitalism” (53). If, Sauter argues, circulation itself becomes the object of communication, the power of DDoS is to disrupt that circulation of context. “In that context the interruption of that signal becomes an equally powerful contribution…. Under communicative capitalism, it is possible that it is the intentional creation of disruptions and silence that is the most powerful contribution” (29).

    However, this move is contrary to the point of Dean’s concept; Dean specifically rejects the idea that any kind of communicative activity puts forth real political antagonism. Dean’s argument is, admittedly, an overreach. While capital cares little for the specificity of messages, human beings do: as Marx notes, exchange value cannot exist without a use value. Sauter’s own “counterintuitive” use of Dean points to a larger difficulty with Sauter’s argument: it remains wedded to a liberal understanding of political action grounded in the idea of a public sphere. Even when Sauter moves on to discussing DDoS as disruptive direct action, rather than civil disobedience, they return to the discursive tropes of the public sphere: DDoS is “an attempt to assert a fundamental view of the internet as a ‘public forum’ in the face of its attempted designation as ‘private property’” (45). Direct action is evaluated by its contribution to “public debate,” and Sauter even argues that DDoS actions during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests did not infringe on the “rights” of delegates to attend the event because they were totally ineffective. This overlooks the undemocratic and illiberal character of the WTO itself, whose meetings were held behind closed doors (one of the major rhetorical points of the protest), and it implies that the varieties of direct action that successfully blockaded meetings could be morally compromised. These kinds of actions, bereft of an easy classification as forms of speech or communication, are the forms of antagonistic political action Dean argues cannot be found in online space.

    In this light, it is worth returning to some of the earlier theorizations of DDoS actions. The earliest DDoS activists the electrohippies and Electronic Disturbance Theater documented the philosophies behind their work, and Rita Raley’s remarkable book Tactical Media presented a bracing theoretical synthesis of DDoS as an emergent critical art-activist practice. EDT’s most famous action deployed its FloodNet DDoS tool in pro-Zapatista protests. Its novel design incorporated something akin to speech acts: for example, it pinged servers belonging to the Mexican government with requests for “human rights,” leading to a return message “human rights not found on this server,” a kind of technopolitical pun. Yet Raley rejects a theorization of online political interventions strictly in terms of their communicative value. Rather they are a curious hybrid of artistic experiment and militant interrogation, a Deleuzian event where one endeavors “to act without knowing the situation into which one will be propelled, to change things as they exist” (26).

    The goal of EDT’s actions was not simply to have a message be heard, or even to garner media attention: as EDT’s umbrella organization the Critical Art Ensemble puts it in Electronic Civil Disobedience, “The indirect approach of media manipulation using a spectacle of disobedience designed to muster public sympathy and support is a losing proposition” (15). Instead, EDT took on the prerogatives of conceptual art — to use creative practice to pose questions and provoke response — in order to probe the contours of the emerging digital terrain and determine who would control it and how. That their experiments quickly raised the specter of terrorism, even in a pre-9/11 context, seemed to answer this. As Raley describes, drawing from RAND cyberwar researchers, DDoS and related tactics “shift the Internet ‘from the public sphere model and casts it more as conflicted territory bordering on a war zone.’” (44).

    While Sauter repeatedly criticizes treating DDoS actions as criminal, rather than political, acts, the EDT saw its work as both, and even analogous to terrorism. “Not that the activists are initiating terrorist practice, since no one dies in hyperreality, but the effect of this practice can have the  same consequence as terrorism, in that state and corporate power vectors will haphazardly return fire with weapons that have destructive material (and even mortal) consequences” (25). Indeed, civil disobedience is premised on exploiting the ambiguities of activities that can be considered both crime and politics. Rather than attempt to fix distinctions after the fact, EDT recognized the power of such actions precisely in collapsing these distinctions. EDT did criticize the overcriminalization of online activity, as does Sauter, whose analysis of the use of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prosecute DDoS activities is some of the book’s strongest and most useful material.

    Sauter prefers the activities of Anonymous to the earlier actions by the electrohippies and EDT (although EDT co-founder Ricardo Dominguez has been up to his old tricks: he was investigated by the FBI and threatened with revocation of tenure for a “virtual sit-in” against the University of California system during the student occupations of 2010). This is because Anonymous’ actions, with their unpretentious lulzy ardor and open-source tools, “lower the barriers to entry” to activism (104): in other words, they leverage the internet’s capacity to increase participation. For Sauter, the value in Anonymous’ use of its DDoS tool, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, against targets such as the MPAA and PayPal “lay in the media attention and new participants it attracted, who sympathized with Anonymous’ views and could participate in future actions” (115). The benefit of collaborative open-source development is similar, as is the tool’s feature that allows a user to contribute their computer to a “voluntary botnet” called the “FUCKING HIVE MIND” which “allows for the temporary sharing of an activist identity, which subsequently becomes more easily adopted by those participants who opt to remain involved” (130). This tip of the hat to theorists of participatory media once again reveals the notion of a democratic public sphere as a regulative ideal for the text.

    The price of all this participation is that a “lower level of commitment was required” (129) from activists, which is oddly put forth as a benefit. In fact, Sauter criticizes FloodNet’s instructions — “send your own message to the error log of the institution/symbol of Mexican Neo-Liberalism of your choice” — as relying upon “specialized language that creates a gulf between those who already understand it and those who do not” (112). Not only is it unclear to me what the specialized language in this case is (“neoliberalism” is a widely used, albeit not universally understood term), but it seems paramount that individuals opting to engage in risky political action should understand the causes for which they are putting themselves on the line. Expanding political participation is a laudable goal, but not at the expense of losing the content of politics. Furthermore, good activism requires training: several novice Anons were caught and prosecuted for participating in DDoS actions due to insufficient operational security measures.

    What would it mean to take seriously the idea that the internet is not, in fact, a public sphere, and that, furthermore, the liberal notion of discursive and communicative activities impacting the decisions of rational individuals does not, in fact, adequately describe contemporary politics? Sauter ends up in a compelling place, one akin to the earlier theorists of DDoS: war. After all, states are one of the major participants in DDoS, and Sauter documents how Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) used Denial of Service attacks, even though deemed illegal, against Anonymous itself. The involvement of state actors “could portend the establishment of a semipermanent state of cyberwar” with activists rebranded as criminals and even terrorists. This is consonant with Raley’s analysis of EDT’s own forays into online space. It also recalls the radical political work of ultraleft formations such as Tiqqun (I had anticipated that The Coming Swarm was a reference to The Coming Insurrection though this does not seem to be the case), for whom war, specifically civil war, becomes the governing metaphor for antagonistic political practice under Empire.

    This would mean that the future of DDoS actions and other disruptive online activism would not be in its mobilization of speech, but in its building of capacities and organization of larger politicized formations. This could potentially be an opportunity to consider the varieties of DDoS so often bracketed away, which often rely on botnets and operate in undeniably criminal ways. Current hacker formations use these practices in political ways (Ghost Squad has recently targeted the U.S. military, cable news stations, the KKK and Black Lives Matters among others with DDoS, accompanying each action with political manifestos). While Sauter claims, no doubt correctly, that these activities are “damaging to [DDoS’s] perceived legitimacy as an activist tactic (160), they also note that measures to circumvent DDoS “continue to outstrip the capabilities of nearly all activist campaigns” (159). If DDoS has a future as a political tactic, it may be in the zones beyond what liberal political theory can touch.

    Notes

    [1] Instances of DDoS are typically referred to in both the popular press and by hacktivsts as “attacks.” Sauter prefers the term “actions,” a usage I follow here.

    [2] I follow Sauter’s preferred usage of the pronouns “they” and “them.”

    Works Cited

    • Critical Art Ensemble. 1996. Electronic Civil Disobedience. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
    • Dean, Jodi. 2005. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” Cultural Politics 1.1. 51-74.
    • Raley, Rita. 2009. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Sauter, Molly. 2014. The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

    _____

    Gavin Mueller (@gavinsaywhat) holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication at the University of Texas-Dallas. He previously reviewed Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous for The b2 Review.

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  • Zachary Loeb – Mars is Still Very Far Away

    Zachary Loeb – Mars is Still Very Far Away

    a review of McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red (Verso, 2015)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    There are some games where a single player wins, games where a group of players wins, and then there are games where all of the players can share equally in defeat. Yet regardless of the way winners and losers are apportioned, there is something disconcerting about a game where the rules change significantly when one is within sight of victory. Suddenly the strategy that had previously assured success now promises defeat and the confused players are forced to reconsider all of the seemingly right decisions that have now brought them to an impending loss. It may be a trifle silly to talk of winners and losers in the Anthropocene, with its bleak herald climate change, but the epoch in which humans have become a geological force is one in which the strategies that propelled certain societies towards victory no longer seem like such wise tactics. With victory seeming less and less certain it is easy to assume defeat is inevitable.

    Molecular_Red_300dpi_CMYK-max_221-dc0af21fb3204cf05919dfce4acafe57

    “Let’s not despair” is the retort McKenzie Wark offers on the first page of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. The book approaches the Anthropocene as both a challenge and an opportunity, not for seeing who can pen the grimmest apocalyptic dirge but for developing new forms of critical theory. Prevailing responses to the Anthropocene – ranging from faith in new technology, to confidence in the market, to hopes for accountability, to despairing of technology – all strike Wark as insufficient, what he deems necessary are theories (which will hopefully lead to solutions) that recognize the ways in which the aforementioned solutions are entangled with each other. For Wark the coming crumbling of the American system was foreshadowed by the collapse of the Soviet system – and thus Molecular Red looks back at Soviet history to consider what other routes could have been taken there, before he switches his focus back to the United States to search for today’s alternate routes. Molecular Red reads aspects of Soviet history through the lens of “what if?” in order to consider contemporary questions from the perspective “what now?” As he writes: “[t]here is no other world, but it can’t be this one” (xxi).

    Molecular Red is an engaging and interesting read that introduces its readers to a raft of under-read thinkers – and its counsel against despair is worth heeding.  And yet, by the book’s end, it is easy to come away with a sense that while it is true that “there is no other world” that it will, alas, almost certainly be exactly this one.

    Before Wark introduces individual writers and theorists he first unveils the main character of his book: “the Carbon Liberation Front” (xiv). In Wark’s estimation the Carbon Liberation Front (CLF from this point forward) represents the truly victorious liberation movement of the past centuries. And what this liberation movement has accomplished is the freeing of – as the name suggests – carbon, an element which has been burnt up by humans in pursuit of energy with the result being an atmosphere filled with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. “The Anthropocene runs on carbon” (xv), and seeing as the scientists who coined the term “Anthropocene” used it to mark the period wherein glacial ice cores began to show a concentration of green house gases, such as CO2 and Ch4 – the CLF appears as a force one cannot ignore.

    Turning to Soviet history, Wark works to rescue Lenin’s rival Alexander Bogdanov from being relegated to a place as a mere footnote. Yet, Wark’s purpose is not to simply emphasize that Lenin and Bogdanov had different ideas regarding what the Bolsheviks should have done, what is of significance in Bogdanov is not questions of tactics but matters of theory. In particular Wark highlights Bogdanov’s ideas of “proletkult” and “tektology” while also drawing upon Bogdanov’s view of nature – he conceived of this “elusive category” as “simply that which labor encounters” (4, italics in original text). Bogdanov’s tektology was to be “a new way of organizing knowledge” while proletkult was to be “a new practice of culture” – as Wark explains “Bogdanov is not really trying to write philosophy so much a to hack it, to repurpose it for something other than the making of more philosophy” (13). Tektology was an attempt to bring together the lived experience of the proletariat along with philosophy and science – to create an active materialism “based on the social production of human existence” (18) and this production sees Nature as the realm within which laboring takes place. Or, as Wark eloquently puts it, tektology “is a way of organizing knowledge for difficult times…and perhaps also for the strange times likely to come in the twenty-first century” (40). Proletkult (which was an actual movement for some time) sought “to change labor, by merging art and work; to change everyday life…and to change affect” (35) – its goal was not to create proletarian culture but to provide a proletarian “point of view.” Deeply knowledgeable about science, himself a sort of science-fiction author (he wrote a quasi-utopian novel set on Mars called Red Star), and hopeful that technological advances would make workers more like engineers and artists, Bogdanov strikes Wark as “not the present writing about the future, but the past writing to the future” (59). Wark suggests that “perhaps Bogdanov is the point to which to return” (59) hence Wark’s touting of tektology, proletkult and Bogdanov’s view of nature.

    While Wark makes it clear that Bogdanov’s ideas did have some impact in Soviet Russia, their effect was far less than what it could have been – and thus Bogdanov’s ideas remain an interesting case of “what if?” Yet, in the figure of Andrey Platonov, Wark finds an example of an individual whose writings reached towards proletkult. Wark sees Platonov as “the great writer of our planet of slums” (68). The fiction written by Platonov, his “(anti)novellas” as Wark calls them, are largely the tales of committed and well-meaning communists whose efforts come to naught. For Platonov’s characters failure is a constant companion, they struggle against nature in the name of utopianism and find that they simply must keep struggling. In Platonov’s work one finds a continual questioning of communism’s authoritarian turn from below, his “Marxism is an ascetic one, based on the experience of sub-proletarian everyday life” (104). And while Platonov’s tales are short on happy endings, Wark detects hope amidst the powerlessness, as long as life goes on, for “if one can keep living then everything is still possible” (80). Such is the type of anti-cynicism that makes Platonov’s Marxism worth considering – it finds the glimmer of utopia on the horizon even if it never seems to draw closer.

    From the cold of the Soviet winter, Wark moves to the birthplace of the Californian Ideology – an ideology which Wark suggests has won the day: “it has no outside, and it is accelerating” (118). Yet, as with the case of Soviet communism, Wark is interested in looking for the fissures within the ideology, and instead of opining on Barbook and Cameron’s term moves through Ernst Mach and Paul Feyerabend en route to a consideration of Donna Haraway. Wark emphasizes how Haraway’s Marxism “insists on including nonhuman actors” (136) – her techno-science functions as a way of further breaking down the barrier that had been constructed between humans and nature. Shattering this divider is necessary to consider the ways that life itself has become caught up with capital in the age of patented life forms like OncoMouse. Amidst these entanglements Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” appears to have lost none of its power – Wark sees that “cyborgs are monsters, or rather demonstrations, in the double sense of to show and to warn, of possible worlds” (146). Such a show of possibilities is to present alternatives even when, “There’s no mother nature, no father science, no way back (or forward) to integrity” (150). Returning to Bogdanov, Wark writes that “Tektology is all about constructing temporary shelter in the world” (150) – and the cyborg identity is simultaneously what constructs such shelter and seeks haven within it. Beyond Haraway, Wark considers the work of Karen Barad and Paul Edwards, in order to further illustrate that “we are at one and the same time a product of techno-science and yet inclined to think ourselves separate from it” (165). Haraway, and the web of thinkers with which Wark connects her, appear as a way to reconnect with “something like the classical Marxist and Bogdanovite open-mindedness toward the sciences” (179).

    After science, Wark transitions to discussing the science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson – in particular his Mars trilogy. Robinson’s tale of the scientist/technicians colonizing Mars and their attempts to create a better world on the one they are settling is a demonstration of how “the struggle for utopia is both technical and political, and so much else besides” (191). The value of the Mars trilogy, with its tale of revolutions, both successful and unsuccessful, and its portrayal of a transformed Earth, is in the slow unfolding of revolutionary change. In Red Mars (the first book of the trilogy, published in 1992) there is not a glorious revolution that instantly changes everything, but rather “the accumulation of minor, even molecular, elements of a new way of life and their negotiations with each other” (194). At work in the ruminations of the main characters of Red Mars, Wark detects something reminiscent of tektology even as the books themselves seem like a sort of proletkult for the Anthropocene.

    Molecular Red’s tour of oft overlooked, or overly neglected thinkers, is an argument for a reengagement with Marxism, but a reengagement that willfully and carefully looks for the paths not taken. The argument is not that Lenin needs to be re-read, but that Bogdanov needs to be read. Wark does not downplay the dangers of the Anthropocene, but he refuses to wallow in dismay or pine for a pastoral past that was a fantasy in the first place. For Wark, we are closely entwined with our technology and the idea that it should all be turned off is a nonstarter. Molecular Red is not a trudge through the swamps of negativity, rather it’s a call: “Let’s use the time and information and everyday life still available to us to begin the task, quietly but in good cheer, of thinking otherwise, of working and experimenting” (221).

    Wark does not conclude Molecular Red by reminding his readers that they have nothing to lose but their chains. Rather he reminds them that they still have a world to win.  

    Molecular Red begins with an admonishment not to despair, and ends with a similar plea not to lose hope. Granted, in order to find this hope one needs to be willing to consider that the causes for hopelessness may themselves be rooted in looking for hope in the wrong places. Wark argues, that by embracing techno-science, reveling in our cyborg selves, and creating new cultural forms to help us re-imagine our present and future – the left can make itself relevant once more. As a call for the left to embrace technology and look forward Molecular Red occupies a similar cultural shelf-space as that filled by recent books like Inventing the Future and Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts. Which is to say that those who think that what is needed is “a frank acknowledgment of the entangling of our cyborg bodies within the technical” (xxi), those who think that the left needs to embrace technology with greater gusto, will find Molecular Red’s argument quite appealing. As for those who disagree – they will likely not find their minds changed by Molecular Red.

    As a writer Wark has a talent for discussing dense theoretical terms in a readable and enjoyable format throughout Molecular Red. Regardless of what one ultimately thinks of Wark’s argument, one of the major strengths of Molecular Red is the way it introduces readers to overlooked theorists. After reading Wark’s chapters on Bogdanov and Platonov the reader certainly understands why Wark finds their work so engrossing and inspiring. Similarly, Wark makes a compelling case for the continued importance of Haraway’s cyborg concept and his treatment of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is an apt demonstration of incorporating science fiction into works of theory. Amidst all of the grim books out there about the Anthropocene, Molecular Red is refreshing in its optimism. This is “Theory for the Anthropocene,” as the book’s subtitle puts it, but it is positive theory.

    Granted, some of Wark’s linguistic flourishes become less entertaining over time – “the carbon liberation front” is an amusing concept at first but by the end of Molecular Red the term is as likely to solicit an eye-roll as introspection. A great deal of carbon has certainly been liberated, but has this been the result of a concerted effort (a “liberation front”) or has this been the result of humans not fully thinking through the consequences of technology? Certainly there are companies that have made fortunes through “liberating” carbon, but who is ultimately responsible for “the carbon liberation front?” One might be willing to treat terms like “liberation front” with less scrutiny were they not being used in a book so invested in re-vitalizing leftist theory. Does not a “liberation front” imply a movement with an ideology? It seems that the liberation of carbon is more of an accident of a capitalist ideology than the driver of that ideology itself. It may seem silly to focus upon the uneasy feeling that accompanies the term “carbon liberation front” but this is an example of a common problem with Molecular Red – the more one thinks about some of the premises the less satisfying Wark’s arguments become.

    Given Wark’s commitment to reconfiguring Marxism for the Anthropocene it is unsurprising that he should choose to devote much of his attention to labor. This is especially fitting given the emphasis that Bogdanov and Platonov place on labor. Wark clearly finds much to approve of in Bogdanov’s idea that “all workers would become more like engineers, and also more like artists” (28). These are largely the type of workers one encounters in Robinson’s work and who are, generally, the heroes of Platonov’s tales, they make up a sort of “proto-hacker class” (90). It is an interesting move from the Soviet laborer to the technician/artists/hacker of Robinson – and it is not surprising that the author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004) should view hackers in such a romantic light. Yet Molecular Red is not a love letter to hackers, which makes it all the more interesting that labor in the Anthropocene is not given broader consideration. Bogdanov might have hoped that automation would make workers more like engineers and artists – but is there not still plenty of laboring going on in the Anthropocene? There is a heck of a lot of labor that goes into making the high-tech devices enjoyed by technicians, hackers and artists – though it may be a type of labor that is more convenient to ignore as it troubles the idea that workers are all metamorphosing into technician/artist/hackers. Given Platonov’s interest in the workers who seemed abandoned by the utopian promises they had been told it is a shame that Molecular Red does not pay greater attention to the forgotten workers of the Anthropocene. Yet, contemporary miners of minerals for high-tech doodads, device assemblers, e-waste recyclers, and the impoverished citizens of areas already suffering the burdens of climate change have more in common with the forgotten proletarians of Platonov than with the utopian scientists of Robinson’s Red Mars.

    One way to read Molecular Red is as a plea to the left not to give up on techno-science. Though it seems worth wondering to what extent the left has actually done anything like this. Some on the left may be less willing to conclude that the Internet is the solution to every problem (“some” does not imply “the majority”), but agitating for green technologies and alternative energies seems a pretty clear demonstration that far from giving up on technology many on the left still approach it with great hope. Wark is arguing for “something like the classical Marxist and Bogdanovite open-mindedness toward the sciences…rather than the Heidegger-inflected critique of Marcuse and others” (179). Yet in looking at contemporary discussions around techno-science and the left, it does not seem that the “Heidegger-inflected critique of Marcuse and others” is particularly dominant. There may be a few theorists here and there still working to advance a rigorous critique of technology – but as the recent issues on technology from The Nation and Jacobin both show – the left is not currently being controlled by a bogey-man of Marcuse. Granted, this is a shame, for Molecular Red could have benefited from engaging with some of the critics of Marxism’s techno-utopian streak. Indeed, is the problem the lack of “open-mindedness toward the sciences” or that being open-minded has failed thus far to do much to stall the Anthropocene? Or is it that, perhaps, the left simply needs to prepare itself for being open-minded about geo-engineering? Wark describes the Anthropocene as being a sort of metabolic rift and cautions that “to reject techno-science altogether is to reject the means of knowing about metabolic rift” (180). Yet this seems to be something of a straw-man argument – how many critics are genuinely arguing that people should “reject techno-science”? Perhaps John Zerzan has a much wider readership than I knew.

    Molecular Red cautions its readers against despair but the text has a significant darkness about it. Wark writes “we are cyborgs, making a cyborg planet with cyborg weather, a crazed, unstable disingression, whose information and energy systems are out of joint” (180) – but the knowledge that “we are cyborgs” does little to help the worker who has lost her job without suddenly becoming an engineer/artist, “a cyborg planet” does nothing to heal the sicknesses of those living near e-waste dumps, and calling it “cyborg weather” does little to help those who are already struggling to cope with the impacts of climate change. We may be cyborgs, but that doesn’t mean the Anthropocene will go easy on us. After all, the scientists in the Mars trilogy may work on transforming that planet into a utopia but while they are at it things do not exactly go well back on Earth. When Wark writes that “here among the ruins, something living yet remains” (xxii) he is echoing the ideology behind every anarcho-punk record cover that shows a better life being built on the ruins of the present world. But another feature of those album covers, and the allusion to “among the ruins,” is that the fact that some “living yet remains” is a testament to all of the dying that has also transpired.

    McKenzie Wark has written an interesting and challenging book in Molecular Red and it is certainly a book with which it is worth engaging. Regardless of whether or not one is ultimately convinced by Wark’s argument, his final point will certainly resonate with those concerned about the present but hopeful for the future.

    After all, we still have a world to win.
    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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  • Ending the World as We Know It: Alexander R. Galloway in Conversation with Andrew Culp

    Ending the World as We Know It: Alexander R. Galloway in Conversation with Andrew Culp

    by Alexander R. Galloway and Andrew Culp
    ~

    Alexander R. Galloway: You have a new book called Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I particularly like the expression “canon of joy” that guides your investigation. Can you explain what canon of joy means and why it makes sense to use it when talking about Deleuze?

    Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

    Andrew Culp: My opening is cribbed from a letter Gilles Deleuze wrote to philosopher and literary critic Arnaud Villani in the early 1980s. Deleuze suggests that any worthwhile book must have three things: a polemic against an error, a recovery of something forgotten, and an innovation. Proceeding along those three lines, I first argue against those who worship Deleuze as the patron saint of affirmation, second I rehabilitate the negative that already saturates his work, and third I propose something he himself was not capable of proposing, a “hatred for this world.” So in an odd twist of Marx on history, I begin with those who hold up Deleuze as an eternal optimist, yet not to stand on their shoulders but to topple the church of affirmation.

    The canon portion of “canon of joy” is not unimportant. Perhaps more than any other recent thinker, Deleuze queered philosophy’s line of succession. A large portion of his books were commentaries on outcast thinkers that he brought back from exile. Deleuze was unwilling to discard Nietzsche as a fascist, Bergson as a spiritualist, or Spinoza as a rationalist. Apparently this led to lots of teasing by fellow agrégation students at the Sorbonne in the late ’40s. Further showing his strange journey through the history of philosophy, his only published monograph for nearly a decade was an anti-transcendental reading of Hume at a time in France when phenomenology reigned. Such an itinerant path made it easy to take Deleuze at his word as a self-professed practitioner of “minor philosophy.” Yet look at Deleuze’s outcasts now! His initiation into the pantheon even bought admission for relatively forgotten figures such as sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Deleuze’s popularity thus raises a thorny question for us today: how do we continue the minor Deleuzian line when Deleuze has become a “major thinker”? For me, the first step is to separate Deleuze (and Guattari) from his commentators.

    I see two popular joyous interpretations of Deleuze in the canon: unreconstructed Deleuzians committed to liberating flows, and realists committed to belief in this world. The first position repeats the language of molecular revolution, becoming, schizos, transversality, and the like. Some even use the terms without transforming them! The resulting monotony seals Deleuze and Guattari’s fate as a wooden tongue used by people still living in the ’80s. Such calcification of their concepts is an especially grave injustice because Deleuze quite consciously shifted terminology from book to book to avoid this very outcome. Don’t get me wrong, I am deeply indebted to the early work on Deleuze! I take my insistence on the Marxo-Freudian core of Deleuze and Guattari from one of their earliest Anglophone commentators, Eugene Holland, who I sought out to direct my dissertation. But for me, the Tiqqun line “the revolution was molecular, and so was the counter-revolution” perfectly depicts the problem of advocating molecular politics. Why? Today’s techniques of control are now molecular. The result is that control societies have emptied the molecular thinker’s only bag of tricks (Bifo is a good test case here), which leaves us with a revolution that only goes one direction: backward.

    I am equally dissatisfied by realist Deleuzians who delve deep into the early strata of A Thousand Plateaus and away from the “infinite speed of thought” that motivates What is Philosophy? I’m thinking of the early incorporations of dynamical systems theory, the ’90s astonishment over everything serendipitously looking like a rhizome, the mid-00s emergence of Speculative Realism, and the ongoing “ontological” turn. Anyone who has read Manuel DeLanda will know this exact dilemma of materiality versus thought. He uses examples that slow down Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to something easily graspable. In his first book, he narrates history as a “robot historian,” and in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, he literally traces the last thousand years of economics, biology, and language back to clearly identifiable technological inventions. Such accounts are dangerously compelling due to their lucidity, but they come at a steep cost: android realism dispenses with Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring subject, which is necessary for a theory of revolution by way of the psychoanalytic insistence on the human ability to overcome biological instincts (e.g. Freud’s Instincts and their Vicissitudes and Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Realist interpretations of Deleuze conceive of the subject as fully of this world. And with it, thought all but evaporates under the weight of this world. Deleuze’s Hume book is an early version of this criticism, but the realists have not taken heed. Whether emergent, entangled, or actant, strong realists ignore Deleuze and Guattari’s point in What is Philosophy? that thought always comes from the outside at a moment when we are confronted by something so intolerable that the only thing remaining is to think.

    Galloway: The left has always been ambivalent about media and technology, sometimes decrying its corrosive influence (Frankfurt School), sometimes embracing its revolutionary potential (hippy cyberculture). Still, you ditch technical “acceleration” in favor of “escape.” Can you expand your position on media and technology, by way of Deleuze’s notion of the machinic?

    Culp: Foucault says that an episteme can be grasped as we are leaving it. Maybe we can finally catalogue all of the contemporary positions on technology? The romantic (computer will never capture my soul), the paranoiac (there is an unknown force pulling the strings), the fascist-pessimist (computers will control everything)…

    Deleuze and Guattari are certainly not allergic to technology. My favorite quote actually comes from the Foucault book in which Deleuze says that “technology is social before it is technical” (6). The lesson we can draw from this is that every social formation draws out different capacities from any given technology. An easy example is from the nomads Deleuze loved so much. Anarcho-primitivists speculate that humans learn oppression with the domestication of animals and settled agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. Diverging from the narrative, Deleuze celebrates the horse people of the Eurasian steppe described by Arnold Toynbee. Threatened by forces that would require them to change their habitat, Toynbee says, they instead chose to change their habits. The subsequent domestication of the horse did not sew the seeds of the state, which was actually done by those who migrated from the steppes after the last Ice Age to begin wet rice cultivation in alluvial valleys (for more, see James C Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed). On the contrary, the new relationship between men and horses allowed nomadism to achieve a higher speed, which was necessary to evade the raiding-and-trading used by padi-states to secure the massive foreign labor needed for rice farming. This is why the nomad is “he who does not move” and not a migrant (A Thousand Plateaus, 381).

    Accelerationism attempts to overcome the capitalist opposition of human and machine through the demand for full automation. As such, it peddles in technological Proudhonism that believes one can select what is good about technology and just delete what is bad. The Marxist retort is that development proceeds by its bad side. So instead of flashy things like self-driving cars, the real dot-communist question is: how will Amazon automate the tedious, low-paying jobs that computers are no good at? What happens to the data entry clerks, abusive-content managers, or help desk technicians? Until it figures out who will empty the recycle bin, accelerationism is only a socialism of the creative class.

    The machinic is more than just machines–it approaches technology as a question of organization. The term is first used by Guattari in a 1968 paper titled “Machine and Structure” that he presented to Lacan’s Freudian School of Paris, a paper that would jumpstart his collaboration with Deleuze. He argues for favoring machine to structure. Structures transform parts of a whole by exchanging or substituting particularities so that every part shares in a general form (in other words, the production of isomorphism). An easy political example is the Leninist Party, which mediates the particularized private interests to form them into the general will of a class. Machines instead treat the relationship between things as a problem of communication. The result is the “control and communication” of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which connects distinct things in a circuit instead of implanting a general logic. The word “machine” never really caught on but the concept has made inroads in the social sciences, where actor-network theory, game theory, behaviorism, systems theory, and other cybernetic approaches have gained acceptance.

    Structure or machine, each engenders a different type of subjectivity, and each realizes a different model of communication. The two are found in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari note two different types of state subject formation: social subjection and machinic enslavement (456-460). While it only takes up a few short pages, the distinction is essential to Bernard Stiegler’s work and has been expertly elaborated by Maurizio Lazzarato in the book Signs and Machines. We are all familiar with molar social subjection synonymous with “agency”–it is the power that results from individuals bridging the gap between themselves and broader structures of representation, social roles, and institutional demands. This subjectivity is well outlined by Lacanians and other theorists of the linguistic turn (Virno, Rancière, Butler, Agamben). Missing from their accounts is machinic enslavement, which treats people as simply cogs in the machine. Such subjectivity is largely overlooked because it bypasses existential questions of recognition or self-identity. This is because machinic enslavement operates at the level of the infra-social or pre-individual through the molecular operators of unindividuated affects, sensations, desires not assigned to a subject. Offering a concrete example, Deleuze and Guattari reference Mumford’s megamachines of surplus societies that create huge landworks by treating humans as mere constituent parts. Capitalism revived the megamachine in the sixteenth century, and more recently, we have entered the “third age” of enslavement marked by the development of cybernetic and informational machines. In place of the pyramids are technical machines that use humans at places in technical circuits where computers are incapable or too costly, e.g. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

    I should also clarify that not all machines are bad. Rather, Dark Deleuze only trusts one kind of machine, the war machine. And war machines follow a single trajectory–a line of flight out of this world. A major task of the war machine conveniently aligns with my politics of techno-anarchism: to blow apart the networks of communication created by the state.

    Galloway: I can’t resist a silly pun, cannon of joy. Part of your project is about resisting a certain masculinist tendency. Is that a fair assessment? How do feminism and queer theory influence your project?

    Culp: Feminism is hardwired into the tagline for Dark Deleuze through a critique of emotional labor and the exhibition of bodies–“A revolutionary Deleuze for today’s digital world of compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure.” The major thread I pull through the book is a materialist feminist one: something intolerable about this world is that it demands we participate in its accumulation and reproduction. So how about a different play on words: Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, who refuses the sexual contract that requires women to appear outwardly grateful and agreeable? Or better yet, Joy Division? The name would associate the project with post-punk, its conceptual attack on the mainstream, and the band’s nod to the sexual labor depicted in the novella House of Dolls.

    My critique of accumulation is also a media argument about connection. The most popular critics of ‘net culture are worried that we are losing ourselves. So on the one hand, we have Sherry Turkle who is worried that humans are becoming isolated in a state of being “alone-together”; and on the other, there is Bernard Stiegler, who thinks that the network supplants important parts of what it means to be human. I find this kind of critique socially conservative. It also victim-blames those who use social media the most. Recall the countless articles attacking women who take selfies as part of self-care regimen or teens who creatively evade parental authority. I’m more interested in the critique of early ’90s ‘net culture and its enthusiasm for the network. In general, I argue that network-centric approaches are now the dominant form of power. As such, I am much more interested in how the rhizome prefigures the digitally-coordinated networks of exploitation that have made Apple, Amazon, and Google into the world’s most powerful corporations. While not a feminist issue on its face, it’s easy to see feminism’s relevance when we consider the gendered division of labor that usually makes women the employees of choice for low-paying jobs in electronics manufacturing, call centers, and other digital industries.

    Lastly, feminism and queer theory explicitly meet in my critique of reproduction. A key argument of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus is the auto-production of the real, which is to say, we already live in a “world without us.” My argument is that we need to learn how to hate some of the things it produces. Of course, this is a reworked critique of capitalist alienation and exploitation, which is a system that gives to us (goods and the wage) only because it already stole them behind our back (restriction from the means of subsistence and surplus value). Such ambivalence is the everyday reality of the maquiladora worker who needs her job but may secretly hope that all the factories burn to the ground. Such degrading feelings are the result of the compromises we make to reproduce ourselves. In the book, I give voice to them by fusing together David Halperin and Valerie Traub’s notion of gay shame acting as a solvent to whatever binds us to identity and Deleuze’s shame at not being able to prevent the intolerable. But feeling shame is not enough. To complete the argument, we need to draw out the queer feminist critique of reproduction latent in Marx and Freud. Détourning an old phrase: direct action begins at the point of reproduction. My first impulse is to rely on the punk rock attitude of Lee Edelman and Paul Preciado’s indictment of reproduction. But you are right that they have their masculinist moments, so what we need is something more post-punk–a little less aggressive and a lot more experimental. Hopefully Dark Deleuze is that.

    Galloway: Edelman’s “fuck Annie” is one of the best lines in recent theory. “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” (No Future, 29). Your book claims, in essence, that the Fuck Annies are more interesting than the Aleatory Materialists. But how can we escape the long arm of Lucretius?

    Culp: My feeling is that the politics of aleatory materialism remains ambiguous. Beyond the literal meaning of “joy,” there are important feminist takes on the materialist Spinoza of the encounter that deserve our attention. Isabelle Stengers’s work is among the most comprehensive, though the two most famous are probably Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and Karen Barad’s agential realism. Curiously, while New Materialism has been quite a boon for the art and design world, its socio-political stakes have never been more uncertain. One would hope that appeals to matter would lend philosophical credence to topical events such as #blacklivesmatter. Yet for many, New Materialism has simply led to a new formalism focused on material forms or realist accounts of physical systems meant to eclipse the “epistemological excesses” of post-structuralism. This divergence was not lost on commentators in the most recent issue of of October, which functioned as a sort of referendum on New Materialism. On the hand, the issue included a generous accounting of the many avenues artists have taken in exploring various “new materialist” directions. Of those, I most appreciated Mel Chen’s reminder that materialism cannot serve as a “get out of jail free card” on the history of racism, sexism, ablism, and speciesism. While on the other, it included the first sustained attack on New Materialism by fellow travelers. Certainly the New Materialist stance of seeing the world from the perspective of “real objects” can be valuable, but only if it does not exclude old materialism’s politics of labor. I draw from Deleuzian New Materialist feminists in my critique of accumulation and reproduction, but only after short-circuiting their world-building. This is a move I learned from Sue Ruddick, whose Theory, Culture & Society article on the affect of the philosopher’s scream is an absolute tour de force. And then there is Graham Burnett’s remark that recent materialisms are like “Etsy kissed by philosophy.” The phrase perfectly crystallizes the controversy, but it might be too hot to touch for at least a decade…

    Galloway: Let’s focus more on the theme of affirmation and negation, since the tide seems to be changing. In recent years, a number of theorists have turned away from affirmation toward a different set of vectors such as negation, eclipse, extinction, or pessimism. Have we reached peak affirmation?

    Culp: We should first nail down what affirmation means in this context. There is the metaphysical version of affirmation, such as Foucault’s proud title as a “happy positivist.” In this declaration in Archaeology of Knowledge and “The Order of Discourse,” he is not claiming to be a logical positivist. Rather, Foucault is distinguishing his approach from Sartrean totality, transcendentalism, and genetic origins (his secondary target being the reading-between-the-lines method of Althusserian symptomatic reading). He goes on to formalize this disagreement in his famous statement on the genealogical method, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Despite being an admirer of Sartre, Deleuze shares this affirmative metaphysics with Foucault, which commentators usually describe as an alternative to the Hegelian system of identity, contradiction, determinate negation, and sublation. Nothing about this “happily positivist” system forces us to be optimists. In fact, it only raises the stakes for locating how all the non-metaphysical senses of the negative persist.

    Affirmation could be taken to imply a simple “more is better” logic as seen in Assemblage Theory and Latourian Compositionalism. Behind this logic is a principle of accumulation that lacks a theory of exploitation and fails to consider the power of disconnection. The Spinozist definition of joy does little to dispel this myth, but it is not like either project has revolutionary political aspirations. I think we would be better served to follow the currents of radical political developments over the last twenty years, which have been following an increasingly negative path. One part of the story is a history of failure. The February 15, 2003 global demonstration against the Iraq War was the largest protest in history but had no effect on the course of the war. More recently, the election of democratic socialist governments in Europe has done little to stave off austerity, even as economists publicly describe it as a bankrupt model destined to deepen the crisis. I actually find hope in the current circuit of struggle and think that its lack of alter-globalization world-building aspirations might be a plus. My cues come from the anarchist black bloc and those of the post-Occupy generation who would rather not pose any demands. This is why I return to the late Deleuze of the “control societies” essay and his advice to scramble the codes, to seek out spaces where nothing needs to be said, and to establish vacuoles of non-communication. Those actions feed the subterranean source of Dark Deleuze‘s darkness and the well from which comes hatred, cruelty, interruption, un-becoming, escape, cataclysm, and the destruction of worlds.

    Galloway: Does hatred for the world do a similar work for you that judgment or moralism does in other writers? How do we avoid the more violent and corrosive forms of hate?

    Culp: Writer Antonin Artaud’s attempt “to have done with the judgment of God” plays a crucial role in Dark Deleuze. Not just any specific authority but whatever gods are left. The easiest way to summarize this is “the three deaths.” Deleuze already makes note of these deaths in the preface to Difference and Repetition, but it only became clear to me after I read Gregg Flaxman’s Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy. We all know of Nietzsche’s Death of God. With it, Nietzsche notes that God no longer serves as the central organizing principle for us moderns. Important to Dark Deleuze is Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche, who is part of a conspiracy against all of humanity. Why? Because even as God is dead, humanity has replaced him with itself. Next comes the Death of Man, which we can lay at the feet of Foucault. More than any other text, The Order of Things demonstrates how the birth of modern man was an invention doomed to fail. So if that death is already written in sand about to be washed away, then what comes next? Here I turn to the world, worlding, and world-building. It seems obvious when looking at the problems that plague our world: global climate change, integrated world capitalism, and other planet-scale catastrophes. We could try to deal with each problem one by one. But why not pose an even more radical proposition? What if we gave up on trying to save this world? We are already awash in sci-fi that tries to do this, though most of it is incredibly socially conservative. Perhaps now is the time for thinkers like us to catch up. Fragments of Deleuze already lay out the terms of the project. He ends the preface to Different and Repetition by assigning philosophy the task of writing apocalyptic science fiction. Deleuze’s book opens with lightning across the black sky and ends with the world swelling into a single ocean of excess. Dark Deleuze collects those moments and names it the Death of This World.

    Galloway: Speaking of climate change, I’m reminded how ecological thinkers can be very religious, if not in word then in deed. Ecologists like to critique “nature” and tout their anti-essentialist credentials, while at the same time promulgating tellurian “change” as necessary, even beneficial. Have they simply replaced one irresistible force with another? But your “hatred of the world” follows a different logic…

    Culp: Irresistible indeed! Yet it is very dangerous to let the earth have the final say. Not only does psychoanalysis teach us that it is necessary to buck the judgment of nature, the is/ought distinction at the philosophical core of most ethical thought refuses to let natural fact define the good. I introduce hatred to develop a critical distance from what is, and, as such, hatred is also a reclamation of the future in that it is a refusal to allow what-is to prevail over what-could-be. Such an orientation to the future is already in Deleuze and Guattari. What else is de-territorialization? I just give it a name. They have another name for what I call hatred: utopia.

    Speaking of utopia, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of utopia in What is Philosophy? as simultaneously now-here and no-where is often used by commentators to justify odd compromise positions with the present state of affairs. The immediate reference is Samuel Butler’s 1872 book Erewhon, a backward spelling of nowhere, which Deleuze also references across his other work. I would imagine most people would assume it is a utopian novel in the vein of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. And Erewhon does borrow from the conventions of utopian literature, but only to skewer them with satire. A closer examination reveals that the book is really a jab at religion, Victorian values, and the British colonization of New Zealand! So if there is anything that the now-here of Erewhon has to contribute to utopia, it is that the present deserves our ruthless criticism. So instead of being a simultaneous now-here and no-where, hatred follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion in A Thousand Plateaus to “overthrow ontology” (25). Therefore, utopia is only found in Erewhon by taking leave of the now-here to get to no-where.

    Galloway: In Dark Deleuze you talk about avoiding “the liberal trap of tolerance, compassion, and respect.” And you conclude by saying that the “greatest crime of joyousness is tolerance.” Can you explain what you mean, particularly for those who might value tolerance as a virtue?

    Culp: Among the many followers of Deleuze today, there are a number of liberal Deleuzians. Perhaps the biggest stronghold is in political science, where there is a committed group of self-professed radical liberals. Another strain bridges Deleuze with the liberalism of John Rawls. I was a bit shocked to discover both of these approaches, but I suppose it was inevitable given liberalism’s ability to assimilate nearly any form of thought.

    Herbert Marcuse recognized “repressive tolerance” as the incredible power of liberalism to justify the violence of positions clothed as neutral. The examples Marcuse cites are governments who say they respect democratic liberties because they allow political protest although they ignore protesters by labeling them a special interest group. For those of us who have seen university administrations calmly collect student demands, set up dead-end committees, and slap pictures of protestors on promotional materials as a badge of diversity, it should be no surprise that Marcuse dedicated the essay to his students. An important elaboration on repressive tolerance is Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion. She argues that imperialist US foreign policy drapes itself in tolerance discourse. This helps diagnose why liberal feminist groups lined up behind the US invasion of Afghanistan (the Taliban is patriarchal) and explains how a mere utterance of ISIS inspires even the most progressive liberals to support outrageous war budgets.

    Because of their commitment to democracy, Brown and Marcuse can only qualify liberalism’s universal procedures for an ethical subject. Each criticizes certain uses of tolerance but does not want to dispense with it completely. Deleuze’s hatred of democracy makes it much easier for me. Instead, I embrace the perspective of a communist partisan because communists fight from a different structural position than that of the capitalist.

    Galloway: Speaking of structure and position, you have a section in the book on asymmetry. Most authors avoid asymmetry, instead favoring concepts like exchange or reciprocity. I’m thinking of texts on “the encounter” or “the gift,” not to mention dialectics itself as a system of exchange. Still you want to embrace irreversibility, incommensurability, and formal inoperability–why?

    Culp: There are a lot of reasons to prefer asymmetry, but for me, it comes down to a question of political strategy.

    First, a little background. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of exchange is important to Anti-Oedipus, which was staged through a challenge to Claude Lévi-Strauss. This is why they shift from the traditional Marxist analysis of mode of production to an anthropological study of anti-production, for which they use the work of Pierre Clastres and Georges Bataille to outline non-economic forms of power that prevented the emergence of capitalism. Contemporary anthropologists have renewed this line of inquiry, for instance, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who argues in Cannibal Metaphysics that cosmologies differ radically enough between peoples that they essentially live in different worlds. The cannibal, he shows, is not the subject of a mode of production but a mode of predation.

    Those are not the stakes that interest me the most. Consider instead the consequence of ethical systems built on the gift and political systems of incommensurability. The ethical approach is exemplified by Derrida, whose responsibility to the other draws from the liberal theological tradition of accepting the stranger. While there is distance between self and other, it is a difference that is bridged through the democratic project of radical inclusion, even if such incorporation can only be aporetically described as a necessary-impossibility. In contrast, the politics of asymmetry uses incommensurability to widen the chasm opened by difference. It offers a strategy for generating antagonism without the formal equivalence of dialectics and provides an image of revolution based on fundamental transformation. The former can be seen in the inherent difference between the perspective of labor and the perspective of capital, whereas the latter is a way out of what Guy Debord calls “a perpetual present.”

    Galloway: You are exploring a “dark” Deleuze, and I’m reminded how the concepts of darkness and blackness have expanded and interwoven in recent years in everything from afro-pessimism to black metal theory (which we know is frighteningly white). How do you differentiate between darkness and blackness? Or perhaps that’s not the point?

    Culp: The writing on Deleuze and race is uneven. A lot of it can be blamed on the imprecise definition of becoming. The most vulgar version of becoming is embodied by neoliberal subjects who undergo an always-incomplete process of coming more into being (finding themselves, identifying their capacities, commanding their abilities). The molecular version is a bit better in that it theorizes subjectivity as developing outside of or in tension with identity. Yet the prominent uses of becoming and race rarely escaped the postmodern orbit of hybridity, difference, and inclusive disjunction–the White Man’s face as master signifier, miscegenation as anti-racist practice, “I am all the names of history.” You are right to mention afro-pessimism, as it cuts a new way through the problem. As I’ve written elsewhere, Frantz Fanon describes being caught between “infinity and nothingness” in his famous chapter on the fact of blackness in Black Skin White Masks. The position of infinity is best championed by Fred Moten, whose black fugitive is the effect of an excessive vitality that has survived five hundred years of captivity. He catches fleeting moments of it in performances of jazz, art, and poetry. This position fits well with the familiar figures of Deleuzo-Guattarian politics: the itinerant nomad, the foreigner speaking in a minor tongue, the virtuoso trapped in-between lands. In short: the bastard combination of two or more distinct worlds. In contrast, afro-pessimism is not the opposite of the black radical tradition but its outside. According to afro-pessimism, the definition of blackness is nothing but the social death of captivity. Remember the scene of subjection mentioned by Fanon? During that nauseating moment he is assailed by a whole series of cultural associations attached to him by strangers on the street. “I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin”” (112). The lesson that afro-pessimism draws from this scene is that cultural representations of blackness only reflect back the interior of white civil society. The conclusion is that combining social death with a culture of resistance, such as the one embodied by Fanon’s mentor Aimé Césaire, is a trap that leads only back to whiteness. Afro-pessimism thus follows the alternate route of darkness. It casts a line to the outside through an un-becoming that dissolves the identity we are give as a token for the shame of being a survivor.

    Galloway: In a recent interview the filmmaker Haile Gerima spoke about whiteness as “realization.” By this he meant both realization as such–self-realization, the realization of the self, the ability to realize the self–but also the more nefarious version as “realization through the other.” What’s astounding is that one can replace “through” with almost any other preposition–for, against, with, without, etc.–and the dynamic still holds. Whiteness is the thing that turns everything else, including black bodies, into fodder for its own realization. Is this why you turn away from realization toward something like profanation? And is darkness just another kind of whiteness?

    Culp: Perhaps blackness is to the profane as darkness is to the outside. What is black metal if not a project of political-aesthetic profanation? But as other commentators have pointed out, the politics of black metal is ultimately telluric (e.g. Benjamin Noys’s “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal”). The left wing of black metal is anarchist anti-civ and the right is fascist-nativist. Both trace authority back to the earth that they treat as an ultimate judge usurped by false idols.

    The process follows what Badiou calls “the passion for the real,” his diagnosis of the Twentieth Century’s obsession with true identity, false copies, and inauthentic fakes. His critique equally applies to Deleuzian realists. This is why I think it is essential to return to Deleuze’s work on cinema and the powers of the false. One key example is Orson Welles’s F for Fake. Yet my favorite is the noir novel, which he praises in “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” The noir protagonist never follows in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes or other classical detectives’s search for the real, which happens by sniffing out the truth through a scientific attunement of the senses. Rather, the dirty streets lead the detective down enough dead ends that he proceeds by way of a series of errors. What noir reveals is that crime and the police have “nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for truth” (82). The truth is rarely decisive in noir because breakthroughs only come by way of “the great trinity of falsehood”: informant-corruption-torture. The ultimate gift of noir is a new vision of the world whereby honest people are just dupes of the police because society is fueled by falsehood all the way down.

    To specify the descent to darkness, I use darkness to signify the outside. The outside has many names: the contingent, the void, the unexpected, the accidental, the crack-up, the catastrophe. The dominant affects associated with it are anticipation, foreboding, and terror. To give a few examples, H. P. Lovecraft’s scariest monsters are those so alien that characters cannot describe them with any clarity, Maurice Blanchot’s disaster is the Holocaust as well as any other event so terrible that it interrupts thinking, and Don DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event” is an incident so foreign that it can only be described in the most banal terms. Of Deleuze and Guattari’s many different bodies without organs, one of the conservative varieties comes from a Freudian model of the psyche as a shell meant to protect the ego from outside perturbations. We all have these protective barriers made up of habits that help us navigate an uncertain world–that is the purpose of Guattari’s ritornello, that little ditty we whistle to remind us of the familiar even when we travel to strange lands. There are two parts that work together, the refrain and the strange land. The refrains have only grown yet the journeys seem to have ended.

    I’ll end with an example close to my own heart. Deleuze and Guattari are being used to support new anarchist “pre-figurative politics,” which is defined as seeking to build a new society within the constraints of the now. The consequence is that the political horizon of the future gets collapsed into the present. This is frustrating for someone like me, who holds out hope for a revolutionary future that ceases the million tiny humiliations that make up everyday life. I like J. K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of political economy, but community currencies, labor time banks, and worker’s coops are not my image of communism. This is why I have drawn on the gothic for inspiration. A revolution that emerges from the darkness holds the apocalyptic potential of ending the world as we know it.

    Works Cited

    • Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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    • Clastres, Pierre. Society against the State. 1974. Translated by Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New York: Zone Books, 1987.
    • Culp, Andrew. Dark Deleuze. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
    • ———. “Blackness.” New York: Hostis, 2015.
    • Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Translated by Fredy Perlman et al. Detroit: Red and Black, 1977.
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    • ———. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
    • DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking Press, 1985.
    • Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 1985. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
    • ———. “The Philosophy of Crime Novels.” 1966. Translated by Michael Taormina. In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, 80-85. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.
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    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

    Andrew Culp is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman College. He specializes in cultural-communicative theories of power, the politics of emerging media, and gendered responses to urbanization. His work has appeared in Radical Philosophy, Angelaki, Affinities, and other venues. He previously pre-reviewed Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital for The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

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