boundary 2

Tag: accelerationism

  • Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan — Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

    Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan — Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

    Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    “You know, I hear all these rich guys, for some reason they love space. So they’re rich. I said, ‘let them send the rockets up. What the hell do we have to do it, right?’”

    — US President Donald Trump, Aug 15 2019 campaign rally,
    Manchester NH (quoted in FOXBusiness 2019)

    1. Preppers, the Rapture and on Being “Left Behind”

    At the turn of the millennium, an unexpected success took the mainstream publishing industry completely off-guard. A series of science fiction novels published by a tiny Christian press and depicting the end of the world from a distinctly Christian fundamentalist perspective became a massive, best-selling hit (McAlister 2003). Its themes of survival following a catastrophic global event were not foreign to the universe of science fiction literature; doomsday scenarios resulting in flight from one’s home planet to a celestial otherworld via space travel have served as plot devices in countless books, films and video games. Yet something about the Left Behind series (LaHaye and Jenkins 1995) was distinct.

    That novelty in this case hinged upon the fact that the dystopian doomsday scenario in question was taken directly from an evangelical Christian Biblical interpretation of the Rapture, the New Testament prophecy that says that believers of Christ would be delivered en masse to Heaven while non-believers would be left to fend for themselves in a ravaged, evil-infected world. Despite, or perhaps because of, its overt Christian Evangelical bent, the series was both a massive commercial success and a cultural phenomenon. Drawing on its Evangelical underpinnings, the series located evil at a point of origin true to its theology and politics: as reported by SF Gate at the height of the its popularity, in 2006, “in [the Left Behind series], set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine ‘Sexiest Man Alive’” (Lelchuk and Writer 2006).

    The series went on to spawn a popular, albeit technically flawed, video game (and sequels), in which the conceit is to convert as many non-believers as possible and save them from post-Armageddon eternal terrestrial doom. It also led to the production of several films, the first batch starring former sitcom actor and Evangelical Christian Kirk Cameron, followed by an attempted 2014 reboot featuring Nicolas Cage. Whatever the medium, the heroes of the franchise were no Luddites; indeed, as American Studies scholar Melani McAlister remarked in her expansive essay on the cultural meaning of Left Behind:

    LaHaye and Jenkins establish their characters as more modern than modern. Making the most of the fact that the events they describe must necessarily be the future (though a rather near-term future, in their view), the novels present a world in which our Tribulation Force members are unfailingly knowledgeable about, and outfitted with, an impressive array of the best possible equipment, from guns to high-end SUVs, from Gulfstream jets to the ‘computer without limitations’ ordered by the Tribulation Force from an underground dealer. (McAlister 2003, 783)

    The Rapture is a religious event, key to understanding Evangelical Christian theology and practice. But in the Left Behind series, it is also a secular global disaster, which requires skill, determination, tech and ideological dedication to survive. Those who remain on Earth wait for their own opportunity to be spirited away, newly transformed into fully committed believers, to a Christian heaven.

    Figure 1. Box art for the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game, depicting the Christian Rapture over New York City.
    Figure 1. Box art for the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game, depicting the Christian Rapture over New York City.

    While the Left Behind franchise reflects a profoundly sectarian Evangelical Christian eschatology, preoccupation with the coming of end times, whether Christian or secular versions, has become more commonplace and concomitantly more socially acceptable in 21st century American culture—on the rise, however, since the mid-20th century’s preoccupation with escape from nuclear annihilation by a paradoxical technological arms race. This new social acceptability has been enhanced by worsening economic, environmental and social conditions, and bolstered by technological developments designed to accommodate a dystopian, resource-poor future marked by global war, environmental chaos, famine, and/or the end of sustainable human life.

    What Left Behind did to prepare the Evangelical American psyche for coming horror has been replicated in material form: to prepare for a variety of nightmarish end-times eventualities, people have built bunkers, stockpiled food, hoarded weapons and created structures (many in the form below-ground bunkers, but also silos, geodesic domes and other improbable architectural masterworks) intended to offer the latest technological innovations that can support inhabitants in a variety of post-apocalyptic scenarios.[1] Many are elaborate and spare no innovation or expense to provide for the inhabitants’ creature comforts and well-being as the world above disintegrates into chaos and ruin.

    There is historical precedence for this new end-of-days prepping, grounded in the mid-20th century Cold War nuclear fallout shelters. A recent article in The Atlantic on the new luxury prepping phenomenon begins with this historical observation: “On July 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the American people of a need ‘new to our shores’ for emergency preparedness, including fallout shelters. The bunkers of that era—Brutalist, cement, with foldout beds and stockpiled food—were designed to protect families in the event that the Cold War turned hot” (Rowen 2017). Decades on, these early escape rooms, and the anxieties that had provoked them, had largely melted away, their remnants anachronistic oddities of another time.

    One of this article’s authors recalls childhood afternoons in the 1980s playing in a bomb shelter built off a friend’s basement, which had fallen into disuse, never having been deployed in the context of the man-made disaster scenario of post-nuclear holocaust survival. It was a physically and emotionally uncomfortable reminder from another era, lined in cold concrete cinder blocks and plywood bunks. Nonetheless, its builders had gone to pains to decorate and had painted on the cement walls, cheerily but ominously, a wooded nature landscape scene that, aboveground, would have been all but assuredly vaporized, were its builders actually ensconced inside it for the long haul and using it for its intended purpose.

    Figure 2. A friendly cartoon turtle provides advice to the American public during the Cold War era in a film for school-aged children, “Duck and Cover” (Rizzo 1951)
    Figure 2. A friendly cartoon turtle provides advice to the American public during the Cold War era in a film for school-aged children, “Duck and Cover” (Archer Productions 1951)

    In the post-9/11, economically depressed and socially divided America, disaster preparedness has been experiencing a comeback. A new prepper phenomenon has even become the fodder of media empires: Doomsday Preppers, a reality program, airing on cable’s National Geographic Channel from 2011 through 2014, was a ratings hit (National Geographic Channel 2014), which subsequently spawned a number of lookalikes on other networks (Genzlinger 2012). As depicted on these programs, the preppers of the paranoid post-millennium come in all orientations and political persuasions, but lean toward the right of the political spectrum, with strains of individualism and lack of faith in government the predominating common threads among them. A fondness for weaponry of all kinds—but particularly for guns— and means of self-defense are often at the center of the preparations and infrastructure, so that the prepared may defend themselves not only against an enemy, but also against those who were not so well prepared for calamity and unwisely attempt to seek material support or other assistance from their neighbors.

    Indeed, it is the very preparation involving the arming of one’s self and family in the face of impending disaster that serves as a culture of its own; the gun culture prevalent in the United States is frequently overlaid with prepper culture and, itself, serves as a focal point of strong community formations. The group known as “America’s Largest Right-Wing Militia,” the Georgia III% Security Force, is depicted intimately in VICE’s “Guns in America” series (III% Security Force nd). As explained by VICE, this group “is inspired by the unfounded claim that only three percent of colonists fought against the British in the American Revolution” (VICE 2017). The Georgia Three Percenters fight against what they perceive as attacks on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, protecting the people’s right to bear arms. To prepare for what they believe is an imminent war, they gather monthly to train and discuss strategies. This group, led by White, rural working-class people, was especially active in the months leading up to the 2016 US elections, convinced that Hillary Clinton was “plotting to take them [their guns] away” (Zucchino 2016), a likelihood that had no basis in demonstrable fact.

    Despite its overwhelming association with White culture and people, the group has complicated racial politics, as often eluded to by the militia’s leader Chris Hill in the VICE profile. On camera, Hill explains: “we’re not racist, we’re against racism… we’re against supremacy of all kind—fuck it all—we’re all created equal, but until people can get that fucking message we must be prepared to defend ourselves and each other” (VICE 2017). Who the enemy is remains forever ideological, conceptual, and a perfect opportunity to play with guns to protect a future imaginary of their own making.

    The hoarding of guns and a lust to use them are the organizing principles of Mel Bernstein’s life; he is described in numerous media accounts (and also self-styled) as the “most armed man in America” (Koenigs 2017). Bernstein collects, rents and sells military-style vehicles and weapons from his 260-acre compound (called “Dragonland”) in Colorado Springs. He also runs a paintball park, motocross park, military museum, gun shop and shooting ranges.

    One of the 3 percent of Americans who own half the country’s guns (Ingraham 2016). ABC News recently aired a short profile on Bernstein (Koenigs 2017), focusing on his extreme nostalgia and sense of loneliness: five years ago, his wife was killed by a smoke bomb on their property during the filming of reality-TV pilot for the Discovery Channel. He now lives with four human-sized dolls, all of which he has named (Jennifer, Betty, Jill, and one unnamed in the clip), dressed in feminine attire, and posed in the nostalgic 1950s-style diner that is his kitchen. Bernstein legally owns more than 4000 weapons; his bedroom is lined with M16s and assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns, and handguns—but it is the mannequins that push people to question his sanity.

    Figure 3. Bernstein in his home with one of four doll companions (clip from Koenigs 2017)
    Figure 3. Bernstein in his home with one of four doll companions (clip from Koenigs 2017)

    The appeal of groups and individuals like the III% militia, Bernstein, and reality TV preppers as the subjects of programs—and their shared overlapping interest in and certainty of near-future impending global calamity—is due in part to the ingenuity with which they conceive and execute their survival goals. Enjoyment, however, often comes with that dose of schadenfreude or superiority endemic to reality TV, undergirded by a tacit mocking of its subjects at all times (Papacharissi & Mendelson 2007; Reiss & Wiltz 2004). In aggregate, a great deal of the appeal lies in looking in on crazy zealots, ridiculous obsessives, and eccentrics who spend their families’ life savings and all of their time burrowing in their backyards or hoarding non-perishables. The unresolved issue at the root of the entire enterprise, as the New York Times preppers TV article points out, is the question of who would even want to survive the disasters for which the preppers are prepping (Genzlinger 2012). For many of the preppers, it is the singular focus on prepping itself from which they derive the satisfaction that blurs so easily into religious fervor. The TV preppers’ solutions to anxieties for the future must always be counterbalanced for viewers by a sense of ridicule and unease provoked by the necessary obsessiveness it takes to plan for disasters that may never come—a global electromagnetic pulse, alien invasion, total environmental collapse, or the need to survive until the rapturous wave arrives to call them to the next stage of existence.

    While these eccentric, yet mostly unheralded (prior to their profiles on TV) people are easily made the object of humor or scorn through programs like Ultimate Preppers or ABC’s feature on Bernstein, stories about social and financial elites’ machinations in these directions are offered up without the same sort of skepticism. From Steve Bannon to Elon Musk, or from Biosphere 2 to SpaceX, the elite can afford passion projects of immense scale unavailable to even the most ingenious TV prepper. Rather than resolve issues on earth, they look to the stars and into our cells. Perhaps they know something others do not. Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti offers a diagnosis:

    The new necro-technologies operate in a social climate dominated by a political economy of nostalgia and paranoia on the one hand, and euphoria or exaltation on the other. This manic-depressive condition enacts a number of variations: from the fear of the imminent disaster, the catastrophe just waiting to happen, to hurricane Katrina or the next environmental accident. (Braidotti 2012, 9-10)

    Braidotti draws our attention to the contexts of disaster and how they shape lived experiences in imagined geographies and temporalities—tangible, but made-up; real, but fabricated. For Braidotti, and for philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, ecological crises induce a cold panic that can be harnessed by technologically and economically élite “Guardians” (Stengers 2015, 27) to offer up a series of seemingly viable non-choices as choices and non-solutions as solutions. Technocratic problem-solving continues to adhere foremost to free-market ideology, which endeavors to maintain or deepen status quo power dynamics, unequal global economies, and to allow for social collapse, all due to a pathological resistance to state- or community-imposed regulation and limits. Because American culture equates money and power with morality and leadership, Stengers suggests that the outcome is a no-choice choice ultimately “between barbarism and barbarism” (Wark 2015), with people and planet held hostage to corporations and those who benefit from them.

    Whether Earth’s collapse will come due resource extraction, environmental destruction, or war (or a combination thereof), the technocratic élite are not only both predisposed and poised to start anew somehow and somewhere else well beyond the backyard bunker but may even welcome or initiate it by way of inaction in the face of destruction on Earth. The outcome of any such cataclysmic, Earth-destroying catastrophes would yield a Rapture of its own, with the secular believers delivered to a futuristic beyond, and the rest who did not believe, or could not afford to, left behind.

    2. The Worse the Better: Accelerationism and Nihilism

    Accelerationism (from the right) is a theoretical counter-proposal to resistance (from the left); a destabilizing force for fighting the ills of capitalism. As Benjamin Noys summarizes it in his Malign Velocities (2014):

    Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production [proponents] argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. We haven’t seen anything yet as regards what speed can do. Such a counsel seems to be one of cynicism, suggesting we come to terms with capitalism as a dynamic of increasing value by actively becoming hyper-capitalist subjects. What interests me is a further turn of the screw of this narrative: the only way out of capitalism is to take it further, to follow its lines of flight or deterritorialization to the absolute end, to speed-up beyond the limits of production and so to rupture the limit of capital itself. (Noys 2014, i)

    Accelerationism proposes that we collectively let things unravel to their full extent – socially, politically, economically, environmentally–by stoking, rather than seeking to mitigate–the forces that drive us toward devastation. In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame of the totalizing undoing of capitalism by capitalism.

    Accelerationism locates resistance to capitalism as a byproduct of capitalism itself that by its nature reproduces it, and that such resistance can never fully stand outside of it to fight it, or really even be complete. It also suggests a foregone and nihilist conclusion to the contemporary status of global humanity, which, it asserts, was completely and inextricably captured within the capitalist orbit. It is thus an ideology offering no new ideas or no possibility for meaningful change beyond the total, inevitable collapse of the global system. In its early instantiations, accelerationism was a declaration about capitalism as a kind of alien invader from the future (Mackay 2012). It sees the outcome of late-stage capitalism as pushed by growth and profit to the point of spectacular self-destruction, an outcome that it welcomes.

    Accelerationism as a political philosophy, with its goal of bringing about the end of the status quo (capitalism) by accelerating the world into full-blown crisis, has adherents on the left. Some leftists identify with the anti-capitalist endgame and see accelerationism as a means to implement a radical call for anti-work, full automation, and so on (Terranova 2014).[2] Yet, more significantly, it seems to have been taken up by the right, the outcome of a certain nihilism rooted in a sense of inevitability about the end of the world as we know it—due to environmental failures, natural (man-made) disasters and global warming, and so on—and a science fiction-influenced, technologically-driven fascination with concepts of spaceward expansionism, extraction and conquest. This right-wing strain is most commonly identified with Nick Land, once of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or Ccru, at the University of Warwick (UK).

    As his editor and onetime student Robin Mackay explains in the introduction to a collection of Land’s writings, “Marxists in particular were outraged by Land’s aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ‘ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’—[hence] the acceleration, rather than the critique, of Capitalism’s disintegration of society” (Land 2017, 3).

    Capitalism demands competition, which, in turn, relies on technological deployments, which, in turn, rely on the exploitation of cheap nature and labor, and reliable but unequal global flows (Moore 2014). Humans are not at the center, they merely serve toward the rendering of a technofuture, and then become superfluous. According to Alex Williams, in Nick Land’s envisioning of a post-capitalist future, “the human can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilisations” (Williams 2013, 2). As for Land, he left his university post and has retreated to Shanghai to ruminate and produce paranoid speculative fiction with an accelerationist bent, his erstwhile right-curious politics having fully morphed into open and unabashed fascism.

    In sum, what accelerationism as a political philosophy offers its adherents is a profoundly nihilistic view that suspends any hope in the ability of humans to intercede meaningfully in the world as it is. Instead, it hangs its hopes on an End Times of its own, awaiting a sort of secular Rapture that compels acolytes to not only await, but celebrate, the inevitable unravelling of the social order and collapse of the world as we know it For many, its proponents would claim, the worse things get, the better. Sound familiar?

    When viewed through the dual lens of prepperdom and nihilistic accelerationism—both of which hold out for global disaster with a certain amount of titillation and glee—the large-scale projects for which techno-élites like Musk have become famous can be seen in another light entirely: as dismal, fatalistic projects that have given up any faith (pun intended) in the ability to resolve the human condition or life on Earth, in general, or perhaps, even more specifically, that there would be inherent value in such an effort at all. Indeed, the projects promoted by this technocratic élite do not scope into something favorable for a majority of the world’s inhabitants or life as we now know it; instead, they are so narrowly aimed as to solve very little about the ruinous conditions for vast swaths of the world’s population and, in many cases, quite literally seek to abandon Earth entirely.

    Examples such Musk’s investments in SpaceX, his ruminations that we are all likely living in a computer simulation, or the desire to colonize Mars, all point toward his belief that life on Earth is largely unsalvageable; his billions of dollars of wealth and his unfettered access to resources therefore follow suit. In this regard, a recent musing from him on Twitter takes on an ominous undertone; his idle, passive musing about migrant children placed in cages in detention centers by the Trump Administration proposes no solution, no alternative, no call to act. Perhaps, in accordance with his world view, he sees no reason to. The game has already been lost and those in the know have moved on.

    Figure 4. Elon Musk makes non-committal remarks on the situation of migrant children placed in detention, removed from parents and, in some cases, housed in cages and pens, under Trump Administration policy. In subsequent tweets, he defends his tweet by stating that he is one of the ACLU’s top donors (Musk, 2018)
    Figure 4. Elon Musk makes non-committal remarks on the situation of migrant children placed in detention, removed from parents and, in some cases, housed in cages and pens, under Trump Administration policy. In subsequent tweets, he defends his tweet by stating that he is one of the ACLU’s top donors (Musk, 2018)

    3. Dreaming of Post-Earth

    In the billionaire kingmaker class, Musk is not alone in his post-Earth predilection. Indeed, he is one of several of his echelon looking cynically to science fiction and the après-apocalypse, fantasizing about outlandish ways to spend–and make–profits via projects that deepen long-standing commitments to Western supremacy and colonization, albeit with a futuristic bent. At the 2016 Republican National Convention that heralded the political ascendency of Donald Trump, PayPal billionaire and Gawker/journalism foe Peter Thiel (Thompson 2018) hailed the conquest of Mars as a worthier endeavor than wars in the Middle East. In doing so, Thiel inadvertently showed his ideological hand by invoking both as equivalent games of conquest (Daily Beast 2016). Other projects in this vein include Biosphere 2 (once the province of former Trump advisor and professional propagandist Steve Bannon), HI-SEAS, Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters, and the NSA’s Star Trek-inspired control room, all of which posit various offworld-oriented technological solutions to a dying future. It is a future in which capitalism has already played out the dissolution of democracy and social equalities, favoring a libertarian fend-for-yourself approach for those who remain– and those who remain, according to these projects, are overwhelmingly White, wealthy able-bodied people of the Global North.

    Figure 5. NSA’s Star Trek-inspired “Information Dominance Center” (see Greenwald, 2013)
    Figure 5. NSA’s Star Trek-inspired “Information Dominance Center” (source: Greenwald 2013)

    Biosphere 2 was an architectural and ecology project launched in the early 1990s, privately funded by the Texas oil billionaire “ecopreneur” Edward Bass, who, given his industry, likely had certain expertise and foresight related to impending ecological collapse (Atlas Obscura 2013; “Biosphere 2” 2003). Based on science-fiction and architectural futurist concepts of fully-enclosed and self-sufficient human habitation environments known as “arcologies” (Plunkett 2011), Biosphere 2 was an attempt to create Earth-like living conditions within a container–what some early media reports described as “life in a bottle” (Turner 2011). The underlying conceit was that such living habitats would become necessary on Earth or on other planets, after life on this one could no longer be sustained.

    Figure 6: An array of arcologies for players to build, as depicted in the video game SimCity 2000, released in 1993 by game publisher Maxis. http://simcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arcology
    Figure 6. An array of arcologies for players to build, as depicted in the video game SimCity 2000, released in 1993 by game publisher Maxis (Source: Simcity wiki)

    The project quickly failed on many fronts, at which point future Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Steven Bannon, at the time a former Goldman Sachs investment banker specializing in media and entertainment investments, was asked to come in to financially salvage the project (Jardin 2016). During this period, Biosphere 2 spiraled down from a quasi-legitimate scientific endeavor into a tourist spectacle, sharing more in common with Xanadu Computerized Houses of the Future (Dells Travel 2014) than legitimate empirical scientific research; lawsuits ensued in short order (Murphy 2016).

    While Bannon claimed publicly that the Biosphere 2 experiment had been to study the effects of CO2 emissions and climate change in real-time, rather than merely through computer simulation, the entire project became one of fake science, with its focus repeatedly shifting to any story of innovation that could be packaged for the media.

    Figure 7. One of several foam futuristic dome structures known as “Xanadu House of Tomorrow” located in tourist destinations across the United States from 1980 until the mid-1990s; this one was located in Kissimmee, Florida. Photo credit: Wollewoox, under Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
    Figure 7. One of several foam futuristic dome structures known as “Xanadu House of Tomorrow” located in tourist destinations across the United States from 1980 until the mid-1990s; this one was located in Kissimmee, Florida. (Source: Wikipedia)

    In a similar case of earthbound arcologies meant to imagine a future framed by offworld life, the volunteer crew of the latest NASA Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission remained cloistered for eight months as part of a study to learn how astronauts might interact and problem-solve during long deployments. In HI-SEAS, six volunteers inhabited a fake Mars colony, playing the part of astronauts. Project chronicler Lynn Levy described the project as planning “for the day when the dress rehearsals are over, and we blast off for real” (Gimlet Media, 2018). Here too, however, participants were kept busy with scientific homework: “The HI-SEAS site has Mars-like geology which allows crews to perform high-fidelity geological field work and add to the realism of the mission simulation” (HI-SEAS, n.d.).

    It is worthy of note that the HI-SEAS site was chosen for its environmental similarities to Mars, but seemingly without any acknowledgment of the irony that the make-believe colony is located on the very much contested and already colonized island of Hawai’i, where active protests are now underway to impede the placement of further telescopic equipment used for astronomical observation atop sacred mountains.

    Figure 8. A HI-SEAS "fake Mars" project astronaut. (Source: Hersher 2016)
    Figure 8. A HI-SEAS “fake Mars” project astronaut. (Source: Hersher 2016)

    A nod to offworld architecture and otherworldly craft was resonant too, in the design of both Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters and the NSA’s control room. Both structures were characterized by design demonstrating the desire to have not only control over but also a front row seat to the apocalypse . The new Apple campus, shaped like a flying saucer (or perhaps the ouroboros-like literal form of its longtime “infinite loop” street address) has all the amenities of a city, becoming, much like Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise or a fully-enclosed archology, its own world-within-a-vessel. It operates like a spaceship that has landed on earth rather than one about to take off, and by design uses its surroundings to anchor itself for future generations. The spaceship is surrounded by a thick layer of trees, mostly apricot, maintains a thousand bikes on the site for workers to get around, and has its own energy center that runs mostly off-grid. The spaceship aesthetic and panoptic/open floor work spaces reinstate order and hierarchy through structural and embedded surveillance while suggesting freedom of movement and action. Ample amenities are designed to keep workers on-site and productive, ideally for longer than an eight-hour workday, recalling the company towns of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Not to be outdone, both Google and Facebook have announced employee housing near their expansive campuses (Stangel 2017), in partial response to extraordinary housing costs in Silicon Valley (created by the demand from their own workers).

    Figure 9. Concept drawing of Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. (Source: Techboss24, http://techboss24.blogspot.com/2013/11/apples-new-spaceship-campus-see-unseen.html
    Figure 9. Concept drawing of Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. (Source: Techboss24)

    The unbroken circle design of the building creates an inside vs. outside protected space for Apple employees in much the same way that projects from 1950s fallout shelters to Biosphere 2 have sought to seal off a group of the chosen from the others who must remain outside the walls. Indeed, just as the skies part to allow ascendency to Heaven of God’s anointed on the cover of the Left Behind video game (as seen in figure 1), the artistic rendering of the Apple Spaceship shows a similar break in the clouds and sunlight beaming down on its infinite loop.

    The appeal of science fiction fantasy has been taken up by government agencies, too. In contrast to the Chilean “Synco” or “Project Cybersyn” of the 1970s, which used cybernetic aesthetics to create a work room to respond to economic crises in real time (Medina 2011), the former National Security Agency (NSA) Chief Keith Alexander’s had constructed an “Information Dominance Center” war room (Greenwald 2013). For Chile’s socialist President, Salvador Allende, ‘revolutionary computing’ meant putting workers in control of decisions (Medina 2006, 574–575). This socialist project stands in contrast to the “Information Dominance Center” designed to allow the USA’s NSA virtually one-man control over an increasingly vast network of surreptitious surveillance and data gathering.

    In the case of both Big Tech and governmental surveillance agencies, undergirding a commitment to the inevitable and imminent time after Earth is the appeal of science fiction aesthetics, concepts and projects, all aimed toward the new goal of having new places and opportunities to conquer, colonize and dominate post-Earth. SpaceX’s goal is to land a person on Mars; closer to home are other instantiations of futuristic fantasy, from the NSA’s Star Trek-inspired control room to Apple’s Spaceship. Hermetically-sealed scientists and volunteers roleplay in extreme environments to ready themselves for off-world living. In all of these examples, the playing out of “accelerationism” is both a chronological and technological acceleration, as well as the strategic buying and use of remaining time–to hide, prepare and come up with exit strategies.

    What makes these cases so compelling is that they often inadvertently show the élites’ cynical, hubristic and pessimistic hand, a tell that gives away the fact that their technological propositions cannot salvage life on Earth for the masses, and, even worse, that they are no longer interested in trying. These projects all cater to the right’s accelerationist rationale that it is too late to act, too late to come together for collective decision-making, and too late to care, all while disavowing the powerful agency that has gone into making those beliefs into fact (such as in the case of the fossil fuel magnate who bankrolled Biosphere2). The investment is therefore into a future for the prepared and worthy few, and damnation for the rest.

    Conclusion: Prepping for Pleasure and for Profit

    For this special issue of b2o, we have explored Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In them, we find deep political, ideological and even theological deployments of technology concerned with escape from planet Earth. These projects and structures necessarily downplay and deny their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. The common throughline to these projects is the often unarticulated and disturbing conceit that the viability of Earth to sustain a high quality of life for élites, and, by extension, for the vast majority of the population is no longer assured. In such a scenario, escape to the stars, as best imagined in Cold War-era pulp science fiction, should not only be welcomed but perhaps hastened; a secular Rapture or “Left Behind” for Dawkins-esque technofetishists who pray at the altar of “disruption” and “innovation.”

    Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged or obfuscated ideological origins in accelerationism and nihilism, these endeavors, and their proponents in government and technology sectors, represent the ultimate preppers, ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else: in a self-contained unit like Biosphere 2 or HI-SEAS, on the newly discovered “habitable” planets, or on Mars.

    Nick Land’s accelerationist vision of society is one already lost to any means of human intervention ; as such, we should let the process unfold as society proceeds toward inevitable collapse, in order to start anew. It is a grim End Times vision of Biblical proportions; what it lacks in evangelical Christianity it makes up for in a totalizing world view demanding adherence rising to zealotry.

    For those who are not solely hypercapitalist zealot-purists of a Landian variety and yet are attracted to futurist projects (but a few of which we have catalogued here), acceleration towards cataclysm, as articulated through large-scale prepper projects for an off-World future, has its own draw and proposes its own alluring rewards: the economic incentives of colonization, resource control and a rush to develop, own and extract post-Earth is expected to pay off, financially and figuratively. Woe be unto the rest of us who do not heed the signs and find ourselves left behind.

    _____

    Sarah T. Roberts is assistant professor in the department of information studies at UCLA. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, is out now from Yale University Press.

    Mél Hogan is assistant professor of Environmental Media at the University of Calgary. She is writing a book about genomic media and DNA data storage in the cloud.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] It is worth noting that geodesic domes were the province and product of Buckminster Fuller, whom Stewart Brand, early Silicon Valley champion and counterculture hero, credited as the inspiration behind his Whole Earth Catalog. Fred Turner, in his chronicle of this period and culture, writes “in retrospect, it is easy to understand Fuller’s appeal to cold war American youth…he simultaneously embraced the pleasures and power associated with the products of technocracy and offered his audiences a way to avoid becoming technocratic drones. Moreover, according to Fuller, the proper deployment of information and technology could literally save the human species from annihilation” (Turner 2010, 57)

    [2] See also Shukaitis (2009): “one could argue that through much of leftist politics runs the notion of an apocalyptic moment, of some magical event (usually revolution), followed by the creation of a new and better world” (97).

    _____

    Works Cited

  • Anthony Galluzzo — The Singularity in the I790s: Toward a Prehistory of the Present With William Godwin and Thomas Malthus

    Anthony Galluzzo — The Singularity in the I790s: Toward a Prehistory of the Present With William Godwin and Thomas Malthus

    Anthony Galluzzo

    I

    Victor Frankenstein, the titular character and “Modern Prometheus” of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, drawing on his biochemical studies at the University of Ingolstadt, creates life by reanimating the dead. While the gothic elements of Shelley’s narrative ensure its place, or those of its twentieth-century film adaptations, in the pantheons of popular horror, it is also arguably the first instance of science fiction, used by its young author to interrogate the Prometheanism that animated the intellectual culture of her day.

    Prometheus—the titan who steals fire from the Olympian gods and for humankind, suffering imprisonment and torture at the hands of Zeus as a result —was an emblem for both socio-political emancipation and techno-scientific mastery during the European enlightenment. These two overlapping, yet distinct, models of progress are nonetheless confused, one with the other, then and now, with often disastrous results, as Shelley dramatizes over the course of her novel.

    Frankenstein embarks on his experiment to demonstrate that “life and death” are merely “ideal bounds” that can be surpassed, to conquer death and “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” Frankenstein’s motives are not entirely beneficent, as we can see in the lines that follow:

    A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (Shelley 1818, 80-81)

    The will to Promethean mastery, over nature, merges here with a will to power over other humanoid, if not entirely human, beings. Frankenstein abandons his creation, with disastrous results for the creature, his family, and himself. Over the course of the two centuries since its publication, “The Modern Prometheus” has been read, too simply, as a cautionary tale regarding the pitfalls of techno-scientific hubris, invoked in regard to the atomic bomb or genetic engineering, for example, which it is in part.

    If we survey the history of the twentieth century, this caution is understandable. Even in the twenty-first century, a new Frankensteinism has taken hold among the digital overlords of Silicon Valley. Techno-capitalists from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel to Ray Kurzweil and their transhumanist fellow travelers now literally pursue immortality and divinity, strive to build indestructible bodies or merge with their supercomputers; preferably on their own high-tech floating island, or perhaps off-world, as the earth and its masses burn in a climate catastrophe entirely due to the depredations of industrial capitalism and its growth imperative.

    This last point is significant, as it represents the most recent example of the way progress-as-emancipation—social and political freedom and equality for all, including non-human nature—is distinct from and often at odds with progress as technological development: a distinction that many of today’s techno-utopians embrace under the rubric of a “dark enlightenment,” in a seemingly deliberate echo of Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s great theme is the substantive distinction of these two models of progress and enlightenment, which are intertwined for historical and ideological reasons: a tragic marriage. It is no coincidence that she chose to explore this problem in a tale of tortured familial relationships, which includes the fantasy of male birth alongside immortality. It was both a personal and family matter for her, as the daughter of radical enlightenment intellectuals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. While her mother died a few days after Mary’s birth, she was raised according to strict radical enlightenment principles, by her father, who in his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness argues against the state, private property, and marriage; a text in which Godwin also predicts a future when human beings, perfected through the force of reason, would achieve a sexless, sleepless, god-like immortality, in what is a 1790s-era version of the technological Singularity. Godwin’s daughter drew on this vision in crafting her own Victor Frankenstein.

    While Godwin would later modify these early proto-futurist views—in the wake of his wife’s death and a debate with the Reverend Thomas Malthus—even as he maintained his radical political commitments, his early work demonstrates the extent to which radical enlightenment thinking was entwined, from the very start, with “dark enlightenment” in today’s parlance, ranging from accelerationism to singulatarianism and ecomodernism.[1]  His subsequent revision of his earlier views offers us an early example of how we might separate an emancipatory social and political program from those Promethean dreams of technological mastery used by capitalist and state socialist ideologues to justify development at any cost. In early Godwinism we find one prototype for today’s Promethean techno-utopianism. His subsequent debate with Thomas Malthus and concomitant retreat from his own earlier futurist Prometheanism illuminates how we might combine radical, or even utopian, political commitments with an awareness of biophysical limits in our own moment of ecological collapse.

    Godwin defines the “justice” that animates his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice as that “which benefits the whole, because individuals are parts of the whole. Therefore to do it is just, and to forbear it is unjust. If justice have any meaning, it is just that I should contribute every thing in my power to the benefit of the whole” (Godwin 1793, 52). Godwin illustrates his definition with a hypothetical scenario that provoked accusations of heartlessness among both conservative detractors and radical allies at the time. Godwin asks us to imagine a fire striking the palace of François Fénelon, the progressive archbishop of Cambray, author of an influential attack on absolute monarchy:

    In the same manner the illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred. But there is another ground of preference, beside the private consideration of one of them being farther removed from the state of a mere animal. We are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind. Of consequence that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive to the general good. In saving the life of Fénelon, suppose at the moment when he was conceiving the project of his immortal Telemachus, I should be promoting the benefit of thousands, who have been cured by the perusal of it of some error, vice and consequent unhappiness. Nay, my benefit would extend farther than this, for every individual thus cured has become a better member of society, and has contributed in his turn to the happiness, the information and improvement of others. (Godwin 1793, 55)

    This passage illustrates the consequentialist perfectibilism that distinguished the philosopher’s theories from those of his better-known contemporaries, such as Thomas Paine, with his theory of natural right and social contract, or even utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, to whom Godwin is sometimes compared. In the words of Mark Philp, “only by improving people’s understanding can they become more fully virtuous, and only as they become more fully virtuous will the highest and greatest pleasures be realized in society” (Philp 1986, 84). In other words, the unfortunate chambermaid must be sacrificed if that is what it takes to save the philosophe whose written output will benefit multitudes by sharpening their rational capacities, congruent with the triumph of reason, virtue, and human emancipation.

    Godwin goes on to make this line of reasoning clear:

    Supposing I had been myself the chambermaid, I ought to have chosen to die, rather than that Fénelon should have died. The life of Fénelon was really preferable to that of the chambermaid. But understanding is the faculty that perceives the truth of this and similar propositions; and justice is the principle that regulates my conduct accordingly. It would have been just in the chambermaid to have preferred the archbishop to herself. To have done otherwise would have been a breach of justice. Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fénelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fénelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? (Godwin 1793, 55)

    Godwin amends the puritan rigor of these positions in subsequent editions of his work, as he came to recognize the value of affective bonds and personal attachments. But here in the first edition of Political Justice we see a pristine expression of his rationalist radicalism, for which the good of the whole necessitates the sacrifice of a chambermaid, a mother, and one’s own self to Reason, which Godwin equates with the greatest good.

    The early Godwin here exemplifies a central antinomy of the European enlightenment, as he strives to yoke an inadvertently inhuman plan for human perfection and mastery to an emancipatory vision of egalitarian social relations. Godwin pushes the Enlightenment-era deification of ratiocination to a visionary extreme in presenting very real inequities as so many cases of benighted judgment waiting for a personified, yet curiously disembodied, Reason’s correction in the fullness of time and entirely by way of debate. It was this aspect of Godwin’s project that inspired John Thelwall, the radical writer and public speaker, to declare that while Godwin recommends “the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by a writer in English,” he “reprobate {s} every measure from which even the most moderate reform can be rationally expected” (Thelwall 2008, 122). E.P. Thompson would later echo this verdict in his Poverty of Theory, when he compared the vogue for structuralist—or Althussererian—Marxism among certain segments of the 1970s-era New Left to Godwinism, which he described as another “moment of intellectual extremism, divorced from correlative action or actual social commitment” (Thompson 1978, 244).

    Godwin blends a necessitarian theory of environmental influence, a belief in the perfectibility of the human race, a perfectionist version of the utilitarian calculus, and a quasi-idealist model of objective reason into an incongruous and extravagantly speculative rationalist metaphysics. The Godwinian system, in its first iteration at least, resembles Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism as much as it does the systems of Locke, Hume, and Helvetius, Godwin’s acknowledged sources. So, according to Godwin’s syllogistic precepts, it is only through the exercise of private judgment and a process of rational debate—“the clash of mind with mind”—that Truth will emerge, and with Truth, Political Justice; here is a model of enlightenment that resonates with Kant’s roughly contemporaneous ideal-type of progress and Jürgen Habermas’s twentieth century reconstruction of that ideal in the form of a “liberal-bourgeois public sphere.” It is for this reason, and in spite of his conflicted sympathies with French revolutionaries and British radicals alike, that the philosopher rejects both violent revolution and the kind of mass political action exemplified by Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society, hence Thelwall’s and Thompson’s damning judgments. Rational persuasion is the only feasible way of effecting the wholesale revolutionary transformation of “things as they are” for Godwin.

    But this precise reconstruction of Godwin’s philosophical and political system does not capture the striking novelty of Godwin’s project. In the example above, we find a supplementary argument of sorts running underneath the consequentialist perfectibilism. Although we can certainly read in Godwin’s disparagement and hypothetical sacrifice of both a chambermaid and his own mother a historically typical, if unconscious, example of the class prejudice and misogyny the radical philosopher otherwise attacks at length in this same treatise, I would instead call attention to the implicit metaphor of embodiment and natality that unites maid, mother, and Godwin’s own unperfected self. The chambermaid is one step closer to the “mere animal” from which Fénelon, or his significantly disembodied work, offers an escape. If the chambermaid were rational in the Godwinian sense, she would easily offer herself as sacrifice to Fénelon and the Reason that finds a fitting emblem in the flames that consume our hypothetical building. While Godwin underlines the disinterested character of this choice in next substituting himself for the chambermaid, his willingness to hypothetically sacrifice his mother points to his rigid rejection of personal attachments and emotional ties. Godwin would substantially modify this viewpoint a few years later in the wake of his relationship with first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

    The figure of the mother—whose embodied life Godwin would consign to the fire for the sake of Fénelon’s future intellectual output and its refining effects on humanity—is an overdetermined symbol that unites affective ties with the irrational fact of our bodily and sexual life: all of which must and will be mastered through a Promethean process of ratiocination indistinguishable from justice and reason. If one function of metaphor, according to Hans Blumenberg, is to provide the seedbed for conceptual thought, Godwin translates these subtexts into an explicit vision of a totally rational and rationalized future in the final, speculative, chapter of Political Justice.[2] It is in this chapter, as we shall see below, that Godwin responds to those critics who argued that population growth and material scarcity made perfectibilism impossible with a vision of humans made superhuman through reason.

    Here is the characteristically Godwinian combination of “striking insight” and “complete wackiness,” which emerges from the “science fictional quality of his imagination” in the words of Jenny Davidson.[3] Godwin moves from a prescient critique of oppressive human institutional arrangements, motivated by the radical desire for a substantively just and free form of social organization under which all human beings can realize their capacities, to a rationalist metaphysics that enshrines Reason as a theological entity that realizes itself through a teleological human history. Reason reaches its apotheosis at that point when human beings become superhuman, transcending contingent and creaturely qualities, such as sexual desire, physical reproduction, and death, eviscerated like so many animal bodies thrown into a great fire.

    We can see in Godwin’s early rationalist radicalism a significant antinomy. Godwin oscillates between a radical enlightenment critique that uses ratiocination to expose unjust institutional arrangements—from marriage to private property and the state—and a positive, even theological, version of Reason, for which creaturely limitations and human needs are not only secondary considerations, but primary obstacles to be surpassed on the way to a rationalist super-humanity that resembles nothing so much as a supercomputer, avant la lettre.

    Many critics of the European Enlightenment—from an older Godwin and his younger romantic contemporaries through twentieth-century feminist, post-colonial, and ecological critics—have underlined the connection between these Promethean metaphysics, ostensibly in the service of human liberation, and various projects of domination. Western Marxists, like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947) overlap with later feminist critics of the scientific revolution, such as Carolyn Merchant (1980), in naming instrumental rationality as the problem. As opposed to an ends-oriented version of reason—the ends being emancipation or human flourishing— rationalism as technical means for dominating the natural world, or managing populations, or disciplining labor, became the dominant model of rationality during and after the European enlightenment in keeping with the ideological requirements of a nascent capitalism and colonialism. But in the case of the early Godwin and other Prometheans, we can see a substantive version of reason, reified as an end-in-itself, which overlaps with the critical philosophy of Hegel, the philosophical foundation of Marxism and the Frankfurt School variant on display in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer.[4] The problem with Prometheanism is that its proponents’ ideal-type of technological rationality is not instrumental enough: rather than a reason or technology subordinate to human flourishing and collective human agency, the proponents of Prometheus subordinate collective human (and creaturely) ends to a vision of reason indistinguishable from a fantasy of an autonomous technology with its own imperatives.

    Langdon Winner, in analyzing autonomous technology as idea and ideology in twentieth-century industrial capitalist (and state socialist) societies, underlines this reversal of means and ends or what he calls “reverse adaptation”: “The adjustment of human ends to match the character of available means. We have already seen arguments to the effect that persons adapt themselves to the order, discipline, and pace of the organizations in which they work. But even more significant is the state of affairs in which people come to accept the norms and standards of technical processes as central to their lives as a whole” (Winner 1977, 229). Winner’s critique of “rationality in technological thinking” is made even more striking when we consider that the early Godwin’s Promethean force of reason, as evinced in by the final chapter of the 1793 Political Justice—in contradistinction to the ethical and political rationalism that is also present in the text—anticipates twentieth and twenty-first century techno-utopianism. For Winner, “if one takes rationality to mean the accommodation of means to ends, then surely reverse-adapted systems represent the most flagrant violation of rationality” (Winner 1977, 229).

    This version of rationality, still inchoate in the eighteenth-century speculations of Godwin, takes mega-technological systems as models, rather than tools, for human beings, as Günther Anders argues—against those who depict anti-Prometheans as bio-conservative defenders of things as they are just because they are that way. The problem with Prometheanism does not reside in its adherents’ endorsement of technological possibilities as such so much as their embrace of the “machine as measure” of individual and collective human development (Anders 2016). Anders converges with Adorno and Horkheimer, his Marxist contemporaries, for whom this “machine” is a mystified metonym for irrational capitalist imperatives.

    Rationalist humanism becomes technological inhumanism under the sign of Prometheus, which, according to present day “accelerationism” enthusiast Ray Brassier, must recognize “the disturbing consequences of our technological ingenuity” and extol “the fact that progress is savage and violent” (Brassier 2013). Brassier, operating from a radically different, avowedly nihilist, set of presuppositions than William Godwin, nonetheless recalls the 1793 Political Justice in once again defining rationalism as a reinvigorated Promethean “project of re-engineering ourselves and our world on a more rational basis.” Accelerationists strive to revive both rationalist radicalism—with the omniscient algorithm standing in for the perfectibilists’ reason—and the Promethean imperative to reengineer society and the natural world, because or in spite of the ongoing global climate change catastrophe. Rather than the great driver of an ecologically catastrophic growth,  self-described “left” accelerationists Nick Williams and Alex Srnicek argue that capitalism must be dismantled because it “cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration,” or #accelerate (Williams and Srnicek 2013, 486-7): a shorthand for their attempt to reboot a version of progress that arguably finds its first apotheosis in the 1790s. Brassier’s defense of Prometheanism takes the form of an extended reply to various critics, whose emphasis on limits and equilibrium, the given and the made, he rejects as in thrall to religious, and specifically Christian, notions. Brassier, who outlines his rationalism as systematic method or technique without presupposition or limits—along the lines of “God is dead, anything is possible”—seems unaware of actual material limitations and the theological, specifically Gnostic, origins of a very old human deification fantasy, the Enlightenment-era secularization of which was arguably first recognized by Godwin’s daughter in her Frankenstein (Shelley 1818).

    The Godwin of 1793 in this way also and more dramatically looks forward to our own transhumanist devotees of the coming technological singularity, who claim that human beings will soon merge with immensely powerful and intelligent supercomputers, becoming something else entirely in the process, hence “transhumanism.” According to prominent Silicon Valley “singulatarian” Ray Kurzweil, “The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever)” (Kurzweil 2006, 25).

    Kurzweil explicitly frames this transformation as the inevitable culmination of a mechanically teleological movement; and, like many futurists and their eighteenth-century perfectibilist forerunners, human perfection necessitates the supersession of the human. Kurzweil illustrates the paradoxical character of a Promethean futurism that, in seeking both human perfection and mastery, seeks to dispense with the human altogether: “The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations” (25).

    Even more than the accelerationists, Kurzweil’s Singulatarianism illustrates the “hubristic humility” that defines twentieth- and twenty-first century Prometheanism, according to Anders. Writing in the wake of the atomic bomb, the cybernetic revolution, and the mass-produced affluence exemplified by the post-war United States, Anders recognized how certain self-described rationalist techno-utopians combined a hubristic faith in technological achievement with a “Promethean shame” before these same technological creations. This shame arises from the perceived gap between human beings and their technological products; how, unlike our machines, we are “pre-given,” saddled with contingent bodies we neither choose nor design, bodies that are fragile, needy, and mortal. The mechanical reproducibility of the technological system or industrial artifact represents a virtual immortality that necessarily eludes unique and perishable human beings, according to Anders. Here Anders seemingly develops the earlier work of Walter Benjamin, his cousin, on aura and mechanical reproduction—but in a very different direction, as Anders writes: “in contrast to the light bulb or the vinyl record, none of us has the opportunity to outlive himself or herself in a new copy. In short: we must continue to live our lifetimes in obsolete singularity and uniqueness. For those who recognize the machine-world as exemplary, this is a flaw and as such a reason for shame.”[5]

    Although we can situate the work of Godwin at the intersection of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses, including perfectibilist rationalism, civic republicanism, and Sandemanian Calvinism, on the one hand, or anarchism and romanticism, on the other, I will argue here that in juxtaposing Godwinism with present-days analogs like the transhumanism or accelerationism briefly described above, we can see the extent to which older—late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century—utopian forms are returning, lending some credence to Alain Badiou’s claim that

    We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century. In the dialectical division of history we have, sometimes, to move ahead of time. Just like maybe around 1840, we are now confronted with an absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. (Badiou 2008)

    We can also see in recent conflicts between accelerationists and certain partisans of radical ecology the return of another seeming antinomy—one which pits cornucopian futurists against Malthusians, or at least those who emphasize the material limits to growth and how human beings might reconcile ourselves to those limits— that has its origin point in the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s anonymously published An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798). Malthus’s demographic response to Godwinism led in turn to a long running debate and the rise of an ostensibly empirical political economy that took material scarcity as its starting point. Yet, if we examine Malthus’s initial response, alongside the Political Justice of 1793, we can observe several shared assumptions and lines of continuity that unite these seemingly opposed perspectives, as each of these thinkers delineates a recognizably bio-political project, for human improvement and population management, in left and right variants. Each of these variants obscures the social determinants of revolutionary movements and technological progress. Finally, it was as much Godwin’s debate with Malthus as the philosopher’s tumultuous and tragic relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft that precipitated a shift in his perspective regarding the value of emotional bonds, personal connections, and material limits: seemingly disparate concerns linked in Godwin’s imagination through the sign of the body. The body also functions as metonym for that same natural world, the limits of which Malthus brandished in order to discredit the utopian aspirations that drove the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s; Godwin later sought to reconcile his utopianism with these limits.[6] This intellectual reconciliation—which was very much in line with the English romantics’ own version of a more benign natural world threatened by incipient industrialism, as opposed to Malthus’s brutally utilitarian nature—was a response to Malthus and the early Godwin’s own early Prometheanism, best exemplified in the final section of 1793 Political Justice, to which we will turn below.

    Two generations of Romantics—from Wordsworth and Coleridge through De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Shelley—sought to counter Malthus’s version of the natural world as resource stock and constraint with a holistic and dynamic model of nature, under which natural limits and possibilities are not inconsistent with human aspirations and utopian hopes. Malthus offered the Romantics “a malign muse,” in the words of his biographer Robert Mayhew, who writes of two exemplary Romantic figures from this period: “ if nature is made of antipathies, Blake and Hegel in their different ways suggest that such binaries can be productive of a dialectic advance in our reasoning” as “we look for ways to respect nature and to use it with a population of 7 billion” (Mayhew 2014, 86).

    One irony of intellectual and political history is how often our new Prometheans—transhumanists, singulatarians, accelerationists, and others—lump both narrowly Malthusian and more expansive “Romantic” ecologies under the rubric of Malthusianism, which is nowadays more slur than accurate description of Malthus’s project. Malthus wielded the threat of natural scarcity or “the Principle of Population” as an ideological tool against reform, revolution, or “the Future Improvement of Society,” as evinced in the very title of his long essay. In the words of Kerryn Higgs, to follow Malthus involves “several key elements” above a concern with overpopulation, such as “a resistance to notions of social improvement and social welfare, punitive policies for the poor, a tendency to blame the poor for their own plight, and recourse to speculative theorizing in the service of an essentially politically argument” (Higgs 2014, 43). It is among eugenicists, social Darwinists, but also today’s cornucopian detractors of Malthusianism, that we find Malthus’s heirs, if we attend to his and now their instrumental view of the natural world as factor in capitalist economic calculation—as exemplified by the rhetoric of “ecosystem services” and “decoupling”—in addition to a shared faith in material growth, to which Malthus was not opposed. While self-declared Malthusians, like Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in their misplaced focus on overpopulation, often in the developing world, conveniently avoid any discussion of consumption in the developed world, let alone the unsustainable growth imperative built into capitalism itself. In fact, for Malthus and his epigones, necessity—growth outstripping available resources—functions as spur for technological innovation, mirroring, in negative form, the teleological trajectory of the early Godwin—a telling convergence I will explore at length in the latter part of this essay.

    “Malthusianism” is a shorthand used by orthodox economists and apologists for capitalist growth to dismiss ecological concerns. Marxists and other radicals—heirs to Godwin’s project, in ways good and bad, despite their protestations of materialism—too often share this investment in growth and techno-science as an end in itself. While John Bellamy Foster and others have made a persuasive case for Marx’s ecology—to be found in his work on nineteenth-century soil exhaustion, inspired by Liebig, and the town/country rift under capitalism—we can also find a broadly Promethean rejection of anything resembling a discourse of natural limits within various orthodox Marxisms, beginning in the later nineteenth century. Yet to recognize both the possibilities and limits of our situation—which must include the biophysical conditions of possibility for capitalist accumulation and any program that aims to supplant it— is, for me, the foundation for any radical and materialist approach to the world and politics, against Malthus and the young, futurist Godwin, to whom we now move.

    II

    Godwin translates this metaphorical substrate of his Fénelon thought experiment into an explicitly conceptual and argumentative form.  He pushes the logic of eighteenth-century perfectibilism to a spectacular, speculative, and science-fictional extreme in Chapter 12 of Political Justice’s final volume on “property.” It is in this chapter that the philosopher outlines a future utopia on the far side of rational perfection. Beginning with the remark, attributed to Benjamin Franklin by Richard Price, that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter,” Godwin offers us a series of methodical speculations as to how this might literally come to pass. He begins with the individual mind’s power to either exacerbate or alleviate illness or the effects of age, in order to illustrate his central contention: that we can overcome apparently hard and fast physical limits and subject ostensibly involuntary physiological processes to the dictates of our rational will.  It is on this basis that Godwin concludes: “if we have in any respect a little power now, and if mind be essentially progressive…that power may…and inevitably will, extend beyond any bounds we are able to ascribe to it” (Godwin 1793, 455).

    Godwin marries magical voluntarism on the ontogenetic level to the teleological arc of Reason on the phylogenetic level, all of which culminates in perhaps the first—Godwinian—articulation of the singularity: “The men who therefore exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government” (Godwin 1793, 458).

    James Preu (1959) long ago established Godwin’s peculiar intellectual debt to Jonathan Swift, and we can discern some resemblance between Godwin’s future race of hyper-rational, sexless immortals and the Houyhnhnms; as with Godwin’s other misprisions of Swift, the differences are as telling as are the similarities. Godwin transforms Swift’s ambiguous, arguably dystopian and misanthropic, depiction of equine ultra-rationalists, and their animalistic Yahoo humanoid stock, into an unequivocally utopian sketch of future possibility. For Godwin, it is our Yahoo-like “animal nature” that must be subdued or even exterminated, as Gulliver’s Houynnhnm master at one point suggests in a coolly calculating way that begs comparison to Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” even as both texts look forward to the utilitarian discourse of population control that finds its apotheosis in Malthus’s 1798 response to Godwin. Godwin would later embrace some version of heritable characteristics, or at least innate human inclinations, but despite his revisions of his views through subsequent editions of Political Justice and beyond, he is very still much the Helvetian environmentalist in the 1793 disquisition. He was therefore free of, or even at odds with, a proto-eugenic eighteenth-century discourse of breeding—after Jenny Davidson’s (2008) formulation—that overlapped with other variants of perfectibilism.

    But as Davidson and others note, Godwin shares with his antagonist Malthus a Swiftian aversion to sex, which we can also see in the Godwinian critique of marriage and the family. This critique begins with a still-radical indictment of marriage as a proprietary relationship under which men exercise “the most odious of monopolies over women” (Godwin 1793, 447). Godwin predicts that marriage, and the patriarchal family it safeguards, will be abolished alongside other modes of unequal property. But, rather than inaugurating a regime of free love and license, as conservative critics of Godwinism contended at the time, the philosopher predicts that this “state of equal property would destroy the relish for luxury, would decrease our inordinate appetites of every kind, and lead us universally to prefer the pleasures of intelligence to the pleasures of the sense” (Godwin 1793, 447). Rather than simply ascribing this sentiment to a residual Calvinism on Godwin’s part, this programmatic elimination of sexual desire is of a piece with “killing the Yahoo,” consigning the maid-servant’s, his mother’s, his own body to the fires for Fénelon and a perfectly rational future state, i.e., the biopolitical rationalization of human bodies for Promethean reason and Promethean shame. The early Godwin here again suggests our own transhumanist devotees who, on the one hand, embrace the sexual possibilities supposedly afforded by AI while they manifest a “complete disgust with actual human bodies,” exemplifying Anders’s Promethean shame according to Michael Hauskeller (2014). From the messy body to virtual bodies, from the uncertainties and coercions of cooperation to self-sex, finally from sex to orgasmic cognition, transhumanists—in an echo of the young Godwin, who predicted sexual intercourse would give way to rational intercourse with the triumph of Reason—want to “make the pleasures of mind as intense and orgiastic as … certain bodily pleasures as they hope for a new and improved rational intercourse with a new and improved, virtual body, in the future” (Hauskeller, 2014).

    In this speculative, coda to his visionary political treatise, Godwin’s predictive sketch of human rationalization as transformation, from Yahoo to Houyhnhnm and/or post-human, represents a disciplinary program in Michel Foucault’s sense: “a technique” that “centers on the body, produces individualizing effects, and manipulates the body as a source of forces that have to be rendered both useful and docile” (Foucault 2003, 249).[7]  We can trace the intersection between perfectibilist, even transhumanist, dreams and disciplinary program in Godwin’s comments regarding the elimination of sleep, an apparent prerequisite for overcoming death, which he describes as “one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the human frame, specifically “because it is…not a suspension of thought, but an irregular and distempered state of the faculty” (456).

    Dreams, or the unregulated and irrational affective processes they embody, provoke a panicked response on the part of Godwin at this point in the text. Godwin’s response accords with the consistent rejection of sensibility and sentimental attachments of all kinds—seen throughout the 1793 PJ—from romantic love to familial bonds. We can find in Godwin’s account of sleep and his plan for its elimination through an exertion of rational will and attention—something like an internal monitor in the mold of a Benthamite watchman presiding over a 24/7 panoptic mind—the exertion of an internalized disciplinary power indistinguishable from our new, wholly rational and rationalized, subject’s private judgment operating in a system without external authority, government, or disciplinary power. And it is no coincidence that Godwin’s proposed subjugation of sleep immediately follows a curiously contemporary passage: “If we can have three hundred and twenty successive ideas in a second of time, why should it be supposed that we should not hereafter arrive at the skill of carrying on a great number of contemporaneous processes without disorder” (456).

    It should be noted again here that Godwin’s futurist idyll, which includes sexless immortals engaged in purely rational intercourse, specifically responds to earlier eighteenth-century arguments regarding human population and the resource constraints that limit population growth and, by extension, the wide abundance promised in various perfectibilist plans for the future. This new focus on demography and the management of populations during the latter half of the eighteenth century in the Euro-American world is a second technology of power, for Foucault, that “centers not upon the body but upon life: a technology that brings together the mass effects  characteristic of a population,” in order to “to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (Foucault 2003, 249). This is the biopolitical mode of governance—the regulation of the masses’ bio-social processes—that characterizes the modern epoch for Foucault and his followers.

    Yet, while Foucault admits that both technologies—disciplinary and biopolitical—are “technologies of the body,” he nonetheless counterpoises the “individualizing” to the demographic technique. But, as we can see in the 1793 PJ, in which Godwin proffers a largely disciplinary program as solution to the original bio-political problem—a solution that would inspire Thomas Malthus’s classic formulation of the population problem a few years later, as we shall explore below—these two technologies were intertwined from the start. The subsequent history of futurism in the west marries various disciplinary programs, powered by Promethean shame and its fantasies of becoming “man-machine,” to narrowly bio-political campaigns. These campaigns range from the exterminationist eugenicism of the twentieth century interwar period to more recent techno-survivalist responses to the ecological crisis on the part of Silicon Valley’s Singulatarian elites, some of whom look forward to immortality on Mars while the Earth and its masses burn.[8]

    Godwin further highlights these futurist hopes in the second revision of Political Justice (1798), in which he underlines the central role of mechanical invention—in keeping with the general principle enshrined at the first volume of the treatise under the title, “Human Inventions Capable of Perpetual Improvement—making the technological prostheses implicit in these early speculations explicit. In predicting an ever-accelerating multiplication of cognitive processes—assuming these processes are delinked from disorder, human or Yahoo—Godwin anticipates both the discourse of cybernetics and its more recent accelerationist successors, for whom the dream of perfectibility—and Godwin’s sexless, sleepless rationalist immortals—can only be achieved through AI and the machinic supersession of the human Yahoo.

    In fact, our new futurists frequently invoke the methodologically dubious Moore’s Law in defense of their claims for acceleration and its inevitability. Moore’s Law—named after Intel founder Gordon Moore, who, in 1965, predicted that the number of transistors, with their processing power, in an integrated circuit increases exponentially every two years or so—revives Godwin’s prophecy in a cybernetic register. It also suggests Thomas Malthus’s “iron” law of population. Malthus argued that “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio,” while “subsistence”—by which he denotes agricultural yield—increases only in arithmetical ratio. Malthus rendered this dubious “law” as a mathematical formula, thereby making it indisputable, although he makes his motivations clear when he writes, explicitly in response to Godwin’s speculations in the last chapter of the 1793 Political Justice, that his law “is decisive against the possible existence of a society, all of the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families” (Malthus 1798, 16-17; see also Engels 1845).

    Godwinism was for Malthus a synecdoche for both 1790s radicalism and radical egalitarianism generally, while the first Essay on Population is arguably the late, “proto-scientific,” entry in the paper war between English radicals and counterrevolutionary antijacobins—initiated by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and to which Godwin’s treatise was one among many responses—that defined literary and political debate in the wake of the French Revolution. Rather than simply arguing for biophysical limits, Malthus reveals his ideological hand in his discussion of the poor and the Poor Laws—the parish-based system of charity established in late medieval England to alleviate extreme distress among the poorest classes—against which he railed in the several editions of the Essay.  Whereas in the past, population was maintained through “positive” checks, such as pestilence, famine, or warfare, for Malthus, the growth of civilization introduced “preventive” checks, including chastity, restraint within marriage, or even the conscious decision to delay or forego marriage and reproduction due to the “foresight of  the difficulties attending the rearing of a family,” often prompted by “the actual distresses of some of the lower classes, by which they are disabled from giving the proper food and attention to their children” (35).

    Parson Malthus largely ascribes this decidedly Christian and specifically protestant capacity for “rational” self-restraint, to his own industrious middle class; and, insofar as the peasantry possessed this preventive urge, alongside a “spirit of independence,” it was undermined by the eighteenth-century British Poor Laws. Malthus provides the template for what are now standard issue conservative attacks on social provision in his successful attacks on the Poor Laws, which in providing a safety net eradicated restraint among the poor, leading them to marry, reproduce, and “increase reproduction without increasing the food for its support.” Malthus invokes the same absolute limit in his naturalistic rejection of Godwin’s (and others’) egalitarian radicalism, foreclosing any examination of the production distribution of surplus and scarcity in a class society.  Even more than this, Malthus uses his natural laws to rationalize all of those institutional arrangements under threat during the French Revolutionary Period, from the existing division of property to traditional marriage arrangements, but in an ostensibly objective manner that distinguished his approach from Burke’s earlier encomia to a dying age of chivalry.  It is arguably for this reason that the idea of natural limits, in general, is a suspect one among subsequent left-wing formations, for good and ill.

    III

    Malthus, who anonymously published his Essay on Population in 1798, proclaims at the outset that his “argument is “conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind” (Malthus 1798, 95). And if there were any doubt as to the identity of Malthus’s target we need only look to the work’s subtitle, of which Malthus explains in the book’s first sentence that “the following essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend on the subject of Mr. Godwin’s essay on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer.” The friend was Thomas’s father, Daniel Malthus, an admiring acquaintance of Godwin’s who nonetheless encouraged (and subsidized) his son’s writing on this topic. The parson dedicates six chapters (chapters 10-15) to a refutation of Godwinism, often larded with mockery of Godwin, against whose speculative rationalism Malthus counterpoises his own supposedly empirical method; the same method that allowed him to discover that “lower classes of people” should never be “sufficiently free from want and labour, to attain any high degree of intellectual improvement” (95). And although Malthus explicitly names The Enquirer—the 1797 collection of essays in which Godwin admits to changing his mind on a variety of positions, as Malthus acknowledges at one point—as the impetus for his Essay, the work primarily responds to the earlier Political Justice and its final chapter in particular, because Godwin’s futurist speculations (and their more ominous biopolitical subtexts) respond to an “Objection to This System From the Principle of Population,” in the words of the chapter subheading. Godwin replies to this hypothetical objection several years prior to Malthus’s critique, the originality of which was said at the time to consist in his break with eighteenth-century doxa regarding population. Despite their differences, Montesquieu, Hume, Franklin, and Price all agreed that a growing population is the indisputable marker of progress, and the primary sign of a successful nation, since “the more men in the state, the more it flourishes.” And while Johann Süssmilch, an early pioneer of statistical demography, argued for a fixed limit to the planetary carrying capacity in regard to human population, he also inferred that the planet could hold up to six times as many people than the total global population offered by Süssmilch at the time.

    Only Robert Wallace, in his 1761 Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence—which Marx and Engels would accuse Malthus of plagiarizing—argued that excessive population is an obstacle to human improvement. Wallace offers a prototype for the Godwin/Malthus debate in constructing an elaborate argument for a proto-communist utopian social arrangement, only to undermine his own argument via recourse to the limits of population growth. Godwin invokes Wallace by name, before adverting to Süssmilch and a far-flung future when human beings will have transcended the limits of finitude. Immortals won’t have to reproduce, a point Godwin makes even clearer in both the final edition of Political Justice (1798) and in his first response to the Essay on The Population—in an 1801 pamphlet entitled Thoughts Occasioned By The Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon—in which he opts for a minimal population of perfected human beings living in a utopian society, rather than an ever- expanding human population.

    While contemporary scholars still read the Godwin/Malthus Debate as a simple conflict between progressive optimism and conservative pessimism, we can still discern some peculiar commonalities between the early Godwin of the 1793 Political Justice and Malthus. Godwin’s speculations on human perfectibility represent a bio-perfectionist solution to the problems of population, sex, and embodiment generally—a Promethean program for overcoming Promethean shame—as I sketch above. Malthus rejects perfectibility along with the feasibility of physical immortality and pure rationality, adverting to humanity’s “compound nature,” a variation on original sin. In this vein, he also rejects Godwin’s prediction regarding “the extinction of the passion between the sexes,” which has not “taken place in the five or six thousand years that world has existed” (92).  Yet Malthus—in proffering disciplinary self-restraint in the service of a biopolitical equilibrium between population and food supply—offers another such solution, motivated by antithetical political principles, while operating from a common set of  Enlightenment-era assumptions regarding the need to regulate bodies and populations (Foucault 2003). The overlap between these ostensible antagonists should not surprise us, since, as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson notes in his critical genealogy of cornucopianism, “cornucopianism and environmental anxieties have been closely intertwined in theory and practice from the eighteenth century onward” (2014). Albritton Jonsson connects the alternation between cornucopian fantasy and environmental anxiety to the booms and busts of environmental appropriation and capitalist accumulation, while he locates the roots of cornucopia “in the realm of alchemy and natural theology. To overcome the effects of the Fall, Francis Bacon hoped to remake the natural order into a second, artificial world. Such theological and alchemical aspirations were intertwined with imperial ideology” (Albritton Jonsson 2014, 167). This strange convergence is most evident in Malthus’s own vision of progress and growth—driven exactly by the population pressure and scarcity that serve as analogue for the early Godwin’s reason—which Malthus, a pioneering apologist for industrial capitalism, did not reject, despite later misrepresentations.

    IV

    Both Marx and Engels would later discern in Malthus’s ostensibly scientific outline of nature’s positive checks on the poor—aimed at both eighteenth century British poor laws and various enlightenment era visions of social improvement—the primacy of surplus population and a reserve army of the unemployed for a nascent industrial capitalism, as Engels notably “summarizes” Malthus’s argument in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):

    If, then, the problem is not to make the ‘surplus population’ useful, … but merely to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way, … this, of course, is simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation. There is, however, in spite of the strenuous exertions of the humane bourgeoisie, no immediate prospect of its succeeding in bringing about such a disposition among the workers. The workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population.

    Despite the transparently political impetus behind Malthus’s Essay, his work was taken up by a certain segment of the environmental movement in the twentieth century. These same environmentalists often read and reject both Marx’s and Engels’s critiques of Malthusian political economy, with the disastrous environmental record of orthodox communist and specifically Soviet Prometheanism in mind. John Bellamy Foster notes that many “ecological socialists,” have gone so far as to argue that Marx and Engels were guilty of “a Utopian overreaction to Malthusian epistemic conservatism” which led them to downplay (or deny) “any ultimate natural limits to population” and indeed natural limits in general. Faced with Malthusian natural limits, we are told, Marx and Engels responded with “‘Prometheanism’—a blind faith in the capacity of technology to overcome all ecological barriers” (Foster 1998).

    While Marx rejected a fixed and universal law of population growth or food production, stressing instead how population increases and agricultural yields vary from one socio-material context to another, he accepted ecological limits—to soil fertility, for example—in his theory of metabolic rift, as both Foster (2000) and Kohei Saito (2017) demonstrate in their respective projects on Marx’s ecology.

    This perspective was arguably anticipated by the later Godwin himself, in the long and now forgotten Enquiry Concerning Population (1820), written at the urging of his son-in-law Percy Shelley, in order to salvage his reputation from Malthus’s attacks; Malthus was awarded the first chair in political economy at the East India Company College in Hertfordshire, while Godwin’s utopian philosophy was fading from the public consciousness, when it was not an  explicit object of ridicule. Godwin returned to the absurdity of Malthus’s theological fixation on the human inability to resist the sexual urge, with a special emphasis on the poor, which we can see in first response to Malthus’s Essay in the 1790s, although in a more openly vitriolic fashion, perhaps at the urging of Shelley, for whom the Malthusian emphasis on abstinence and chastity among the poor was “seeking to deny them even the comfort of sexual love” in addition to “keeping them ignorant, miserable, and subservient” (St. Clair 1989, 464). Shelley, unlike the young Godwin of the 1793 Political Justice that influenced the poet’s radical political development, saw in unrestrained sexual intercourse a vehicle of communion with nature.

    The older Godwin offers, in his Of Population, 600 pages of historical accounts and reports regarding population and agriculture—an empiricist overcorrection to Malthus’s accusations of visionary rationalism—in order to show us the variability of different social metabolisms, the efficacy of birth control, and, most importantly, how utopian social organization can and must be built with biophysical limits in mind against “the occult and mystical state of population” in Malthus’s thinking (Godwin 1820, 476). More than a response to Malthus, this later work also represents a rejoinder to the young proto-accelerationist Godwin and that nevertheless retains most of his radical social and political commitments. Of Population troubles the earlier Malthusian-Godwinian binary that arguably still underwrites our present-day Anthropocene narrative and the standard historiography of the English Industrial Revolution.

    In 1798, Malthus argued in favor of population and resource constraints, for largely ideological reasons, at the exact moment that the steam engine and the widespread adoption of fossil energy, in the form of coal, enabled what seemed like self-sustaining growth, seemingly rendering that paradigm obsolete. But Malthus also argues, toward the end of the Essay, that as just the “first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body,” so necessity is “the mother of invention” (Malthus 1793, 95) and progress Malthus’s myth of capitalist modernity, the negative image of perfectibilism, underwrites the political economy of industrialization. Malthus stressed the power of natural necessity—scarcity and struggle—to compel human accomplishment, against the universal luxury proffered by the perfectibilists.

    Like the good bourgeois moralist he was, Malthus saw in the individual and collective struggle against scarcity—laws of population that function as secularized analogues for original sin—the drivers of technological development and material growth. This is a familiar story of progress and one that, no less than the perfectibilists’ teleological arc of history, elides conflict and contingency in rendering the rise of industrial capitalism and Euro-American capitalism as both natural and inevitable. For example, E. A. Wrigley argues, in a substantively Malthusian vein, that it was overpopulation, land exhaustion, and food scarcity in eighteenth-century England that necessitated the use of coal as an engine for growth, the invention of the steam engine in 1784, and widespread adoption of fossil power over the next century. Prometheans left and right nonetheless use the term “Malthusian” as synonym for (equally imprecise) “primitivist” or Luddite. But, as Andreas Malm persuasively contends, our dominant narratives of technological progress proceed from assumptions inherited from Malthus (and his disciple Ricardo): “Coal resolved a crisis of overpopulation. Like all innovations that composed the Industrial Revolution, the outcome was a valiant struggle of ‘a society with its back to ecological wall’” (Malm 2016, 23).

    Malthus’s force of necessity is here indistinguishable from Godwinian Progress, spurring on the inevitable march of innovation, without any mention of the extent to which technological development, in England and the capitalist west, was and is shaped by capitalist imperatives, such as the quest for profit or labor discipline. We can see this same dynamic at play in much present-day Anthropocene discourse, some of whose exponents trace a direct line from the discovery of fire to the human transformation of the biosphere. These “Anthropocenesters” oscillate between a Godwinian-accelerationist pole—best exemplified by would-be accelerationists and ecomodernists like Mark Lynas (2011), who wholeheartedly embraces the role of Godwin avatar Victor Frankenstein in arguing how we must assume our position as the God species and completely reengineer the planet we have remade in our own image—and a Malthusian-pessimist pole, according to which all we can do now is learn how to die with the planet we have undone, to paraphrase the title of Roy Scranton’s popular Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene (2015).[9]

    Rather than the enforced austerity conjured up by cornucopians and neo-Prometheans across the ideological spectrum when confronted with the biophysical limits now made palpable by our global ecological catastrophe, we must pursue a radical social and political project under these limits and conditions. Indeed, a decelerationist socialism might be the only way to salvage human civilization and creaturely life while repairing the biosphere of which both are parts: utopia among the ruins. While all the grand radical programs of the modern era, including Godwin’s own early perfectibilism, have been oriented toward the future, this project must contend with the very real burden of the past, as Malm notes: “every conjuncture now combines relics and arrows, loops and postponements that stretch from the deepest past to the most distant future, via a now that is non-contemporaneous with itself” (Malm 2016, 8).

    The warming effects of coal or oil burnt in the past misshape our collective present and future, due to the cumulative effects of CO2 in the atmosphere, even if—for example—all carbon emissions were to stop tomorrow. Global warming in this way represents the weight of those dead generations and a specific tradition—fossil capitalism and its self-sustaining growth— as literal gothic nightmare; one that will shape any viable post-carbon and post-capitalist future.

    Perhaps the post-accelerationist Godwin of the later 1790s and afterward is instructive in this regard. Although chastened by the death of his wife, the collapse of the French Revolution, and the campaign of vilification aimed at him and fellow radicals—in addition to the debate with Malthus outlined here—Godwin nonetheless retained the most important of his emancipatory commitments, as outlined in the 1793 Political Justice, even as he recognized physical constraints, the value of the past, and the primacy of affective bonds in building communal life. In a long piece, published in 1809, entitled Essay On Sepulchres, Or, A Proposal For Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot , for example, Godwin reveals his new intellectual orientation in arguing for the physical commemoration of the dead; against a purely rationalist or moral remembrance of the deceased’s accomplishments and qualities, and against the younger Godwin’s horror of the body and its imperfections, the older man underlines the importance of our physical remains and our the visceral attachments they engender: “It is impossible therefore that I should not follow by sense the last remains of my friend; and finding him no where above the surface of the earth, should not feel an attachment to the spot where his body has been deposited in the earth” (Godwin 1809, 4).

    These ruminations follow a preface in which Godwin reaffirms his commitment to the utopian anarchism of Political Justice, with the caveat that any radical future must recognize both the past and remember the dead. He draws a tacitly anti-Promethean line between our embodied mortality and utopian political aspiration, severing the two often antithetical modes of progress that constitute a dialectic of European enlightenment. While first-generation Romantics, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, abandoned the futurist Godwinism of their youth, alongside their “Jacobin” political sympathies, for an ambivalent conservatism, the second generation of Romantics, including the extended Godwin-Shelley circle, combine the emancipatory social and political commitments of Political Justice with an appreciation of the natural world and its limits. One need look no further than Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound—the Shelleys’ revisionist interrogations of the Prometheus myth and modern Prometheanism, which should be read together—to see how this radical romantic constellation represents a bridge between 1790s-era utopianism and later radicalisms, including Marxism and ecosocialism.[10] And if we group the later Godwin with these second-generation Romantics,  then Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s reading of radical Romanticism as critical supplement to enlightenment makes perfect sense (see Löwy and Sayre 2001).

    Instead of the science fictional fantasies of total automation and decoupling, largely derived from the pre-Marxist socialist utopianisms that drive today’s various accelerationisms, this Romanticism provides one historical  resource for thinking through a decelerationist radicalism that dispenses with the grand progressive narrative: the linear, self-sustaining, and teleological model of improvement, understood in the quantitative terms of more, shared by capitalist and state socialist models of development. Against Prometheanism both old and new, let us reject the false binaries and shared assumptions inaugurated by the Godwin/Malthus debate, and instead join hands with the Walter Benjamin of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) in order to better pull the emergency brake on a runaway capitalist modernity rushing headlong into the precipice.

    _____

    Anthony Galluzzo earned his PhD in English Literature at UCLA. He specializes in radical transatlantic English-language literary cultures of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colby College, and NYU.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] The “Dark Enlightenment” is a term coined by accelerationist and “neo-reactionary” Nick Land, to describe his own orientation as well as that of authoritarian futurist, Curtis Yarvin. The term is often used to describe a range of technofuturist discourses that blend libertarian, authoritarian, and post-Marxist elements, in the case of “left” accelerationist, with a belief in technological transcendence. For a good overview, see Haider (2017).

    [2] This is a simplification of Blumenberg’s point in his Paradigms for a Metaphorology:

    Metaphors can first of all be leftover elements, rudiments on the path from mythos to logos; as such, they indicate the Cartesian provisionality of the historical situation in which philosophy finds itself at any given time, measured against the regulative ideality of the pure logos. Metaphorology would here be a critical reflection charged with unmasking and counteracting the inauthenticity of figurative speech. But metaphors can also—hypothetically, for the time being—be foundational elements of philosophical language, ‘translations’ that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality. If it could be shown that such translations, which would have to be called ‘absolute metaphors’, exist, then one of the essential tasks of conceptual history (in the thus expanded sense) would be to ascertain and analyze their conceptually irredeemable expressive function. Furthermore, the evidence of absolute metaphors would make the rudimentary metaphors mentioned above appear in a different light, since the Cartesian teleology of logicization in the context of which they were identified as ‘leftover elements’ in the first place would already have foundered on the existence of absolute translations. Here the presumed equivalence of figurative and ‘inauthentic’ speech proves questionable; Vico had already declared metaphorical language to be no less ‘proper’ than the language commonly held to be such,4 only lapsing into the Cartesian schema in reserving the language of fantasy for an earlier historical epoch. Evidence of absolute metaphors would force us to reconsider the relationship between logos and the imagination. The realm of the imagination could no longer be regarded solely as the substrate for transformations into conceptuality—on the assumption that each element could be processed and converted in turn, so to speak, until the supply of images was used up—but as a catalytic sphere from which the universe of concepts continually renews itself, without thereby converting and exhausting this founding reserve. (Blumenberg 2010, 3-4)

    [3] Davidson situates Godwin, and his ensuing debate with Thomas Malthus on the limits to human population growth and improvement, within a longer eighteenth-century argument regarding perfectibility, the nature of human nature, and the extent to which we are constrained by our biological inheritance. Preceding Darwin and Mendel by more than a century, Davidson contends later models of eugenics and recognizably modern schemes for human enhancement or perfection emerge in the eighteenth, rather than the nineteenth, century. See Davidson (2009), 165.

    [4] Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), with its critique of enlightenment as domination and instrumental rationality, is the classic text here.

    [5] Benjamin famously argues for the emancipatory potential of mechanical reproducibility—of the image—in new visual media, such as film, against the unique “aura” of the original artwork. Benjamin sees in artistic aura a secularized version of the sacred object at the center of religious ritual. I am, of course, simplifying a complex argument that Benjamin himself would later qualify, especially as regards modern industrial technology, new media, and revolution. Anders—Benjamin’s husband and first husband of Hannah Arendt, who introduced Benjamin’s work to the English-speaking world—pushes this line of argument in a radically different direction, as human beings in the developed world increasingly feel “obsolete” on account of their perishable irreplaceability—a variation and inversion of artistic and religious aura, since “singularity” here is bound up with transience and imperfection—as compared to the assembly line proliferation of copies, all of which embody an immaterial model in the service of “industrial-Platonism” in Anders’s coinage. See Anders (2016), 53. See also Benjamin, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1939).

    [6] This shift, which includes a critique of what I am calling the Promethean or proto-futurist dimension of the early Godwin, is best exemplified in Godwin’s St. Leon, his second novel, which recounts the story of an alchemist who sacrifices his family and his sanity for the sake of immortality and supernatural power: a model for his daughter’s Frankenstein (Shelley 1818).

    [7] I use Foucault’s descriptive models here with the caveat that, unlike Foucault, these techniques—of the sovereign, disciplinary, or biopolitical sort—should be anchored in specific socio-economic modes of organization as opposed to his diffuse “power.” Nor is this list of techniques exhaustive.

    [8] One recent example of this is the vogue for a reanimated Russian Cosmism among Silicon Valley technologists and the accelerationists of the art and para-academic worlds alike.  The original cosmists of the early Soviet period managed to recreate heterodox Christian and Gnostic theologies in secular and ostensibly materialist and/or Marxist-Leninist forms, i.e., God doesn’t exist, but we will become Him; with our liberated forces of production, we will make the universal resurrection of the dead a reality. The latter is now an obsession of various tech entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, who have invested money in “parabiosis” start-ups, for instance. One contribution to recent e-flux collection on  (neo)cosmism and resurrection admits that cosmism is “biopolitics because it is concerned with the administration of life, rejuvenation, and even resurrection. Furthermore, it is radicalized biopolitics because its goals are ahead of the current normative expectations and extend even to the deceased” (Steyerl and Vidokle 2018, 33). Frankensteinism is real apparently. But Frankensteinism in the service of what? For a good overview of the newest futurism and its relationship to social and ecological catastrophe, see Pein (2015).

    [9] Lynas and Scranton arguably exemplify these antithetical poles, although the latter has recently expressed some sympathy for something like revolutionary pessimism, very much in line with the decelerationist perspective that animates this essay. In a 2018 New York Times editorial called “Raising My Child in a Doomed World,” he writes: “there is some narrow hope that revolutionary socio-economic transformation today might save billions of human lives and preserve global civilization as we know it in more or less recognizable form, or at least stave off human extinction” (Scranton 2018). Also see Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) and Lynas (2011).

    The eco-modernists, who include Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Stewart Brand, are affiliated with the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental think tank. They are, according to their mission statement, “progressives who believe in the potential of human development, technology, and evolution to improve human lives and create a beautiful world.” The development of this potential is, in turn, predicated on “new ways of thinking about energy and the environment.” Luckily, these ecomoderns have published their own manifesto in which we learn that these new ways include embracing “the Anthropocene” as a good thing.

    This “good Anthropocene” provides human beings a unique opportunity to improve human welfare, and protect the natural world in the bargain, through a further “decoupling” from nature, at least according to the ecomodernist manifesto. The ecomodenists extol the “role that technology plays” in making humans “less reliant upon the many ecosystems that once provided their only sustenance, even as those same ecosystems have been deeply damaged.” The ecomodernists reject natural limits of any sort. They recommend our complete divorce from the natural world, like soul from body, although, as they constantly reiterate, this time it is for nature’s own good. How can human beings completely “decouple” from a natural world that is, in the words of Marx, our “inorganic body” outside of species-wide self-extinction, which is current policy? The eco-modernists’ policy proposals run the gamut from a completely nuclear energy economy and more intensified industrial agriculture to insufficient or purely theoretical (non-existent) solutions to our environmental catastrophe, such as geoengineering or cold fusion reactors (terraforming Mars, I hope, will appear in the sequel). This rebooted Promethean vision is still ideologically useful, while the absence of any analysis of modernization as a specifically capitalist process is telling. In the words of Chris Smaje (2015),

    Ecomodernists offer no solutions to contemporary problems other than technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralized state power in favour of the wealthy, in the vain if undoubtedly often sincere belief that this will somehow help alleviate global poverty. They profess to love humanity, and perhaps they do, but the love seems to curdle towards those who don’t fit with its narratives of economic, technological and urban progress. And, more than humanity, what they seem to love most of all is certain favoured technologies, such as nuclear power.

    [10] Terrence Hoagwood (1988), for example, argues for Shelley’s philosophical significance as bridge between 1790s radicalism and dialectical materialism.

    __

    Works Cited

    • Anders, Günther. 2016. Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture, and Human Obsolescence, ed. Christopher John Müller. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
    • Badiou, Alain. 2008. “Is the Word Communism Forever Doomed?Lacanian Ink lecture (Nov).
    • Benjamin, Walter. (1939) 1969. “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. New York:  Shocken Books. 217-241.
    • Benjamin, Walter. (1940) 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. New York:  Shocken Books. 253-265.
    • Blumenberg, Hans. 2010. Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
    • Brassier, Ray. 2014. “Prometheanism and Its Critics.” In Mackay and Avanessian (2014). 467-488.
    • Davidson, Jenny. 2008. Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia UP.
    • Engels, Friedrich. (1845) 2009. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Ed. David McLellan. New York: Penguin.
    • Foster, John Bellamy. 1998. “Malthus’ Essay on Population at Age 200.” Monthly Review (Dec 1).
    • Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
    • Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures At The College de France 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.
    • Haider, Shuja. 2017. “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction.” Viewpoint (Mar 28).
    • Hauskeller, Michael. 2014. Sex and the Posthuman Condition. Hampshire: Palgrave.
    • Higgs, Kerryn. 2014. Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
    • Hoagwood, Terrence Allan. 1988. Skepticism and Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context From Bacon to Marx. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
    • Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. (1947) 2007. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
    • Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton. 2014. “The Origins of Cornucopianism: A Preliminary Genealogy.” Critical Historical Studies (Spring).
    • Kurzweil, Ray. 2006. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Books.
    • Löwy Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Lynas, Mark. 2011. The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans. Washington DC: National Geographic Press.
    • Mackay, Robin and Armen Avanessian, eds. 2014. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic.
    • Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital. London: Verso.
    • Malthus, Thomas. (1798) 2015. An Essay on the Principle of Population. In An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings, ed. Robert Mayhew. New York: Penguin.
    • Mayhew, Robert. 2014. Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Reprint edition, New York: HarperOne, 1990.
    • Pein, Corey. 2015. “Cyborg Soothsayers of the High-Tech Hogwash Emporia: In Amsterdam with the Singularity.” The Baffler 28 (July).
    • Philp, Mark. 1986. Godwin’s Political Justice. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
    • Preu, James. 1959. The Dean and the Anarchist. Tallahassee: Florida State University.
    • Saito, Kohei. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
    • Scranton, Roy. 2018. “Raising My Child in a Doomed World.” The New York Times (Jul 16).
    • Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Lights.
    • Shelley, Mary. (1818) 2012. Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Edition, eds. D.l. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview Press.
    • Smaje, Chris. 2015. “Ecomodernism: A Response to My Critics.” Resilience (Sep 10).
    • St. Clair, William. 1989. The Godwins and The Shelleys: A Biography of a Family. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP.
    • Steyerl, Hito and Anton Vidokle. 2018. “Cosmic Catwalk and the Production of Time.” In Art Without Death: Conversations on Cosmism. New York: Sternberg Press/e-Flux.
    • Thelwall John. 2008. Selected Political Writings of John Thelwall, Volume Two. London: Pickering & Chatto.
    • Thompson, E. P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory: or An Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin Press.
    • Williams, Nick and Alex Srnicek, 2013. “#Accelerate: A Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics.” Also in Mackay and Avanessian (2014). 347-362.
    • Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    works by William Godwin

    • Godwin, William. (1793) 2013. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp. Oxford: Oxford UP.
    • Godwin, William. (1797) 1971. The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature. New York: Garland Publishers.
    • Godwin, William. 1798. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Third edition. London: G.G and J. Robinson.
    • Godwin, William. 1801. Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April I5, 1800: being a Reply to the Attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the Author of an Essay on Population, and Others, London: G. G. & J. Robinson.
    • Godwin, William. 1809. Essay On Sepulchres, Or, A Proposal For Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot Where Their Remains Have Been Interred. London: W. Miller.
    • Godwin, William. 1820. Of Population. An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on that Subject. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Ornie & Brown.

    For a more complete bibliography see the William Godwin entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

     

  • Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    a review of Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press Forerunners Series, 2016)

    by Michael Miller

    ~

    All existence is Beta, basically. A ceaseless codependent improvement unto death, but then death is not even the end. Nothing will be finalized. There is no end, no closure. The search will outlive us forever

    — Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

    Being a (in)human is to be a beta tester

    — Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Too many people have access to your state of mind

    — Renata Adler, Speedboat

    Whenever I read through Vilém Flusser’s vast body of work and encounter, in print no less, one of the core concepts of his thought—which is that “human communication is unnatural” (2002, 5)––I find it nearly impossible to shake the feeling that the late Czech-Brazilian thinker must have derived some kind of preternatural pleasure from insisting on the ironic gesture’s repetition. Flusser’s rather grim view that “there is no possible form of communication that can communicate concrete experience to others” (2016, 23) leads him to declare that the intersubjective dimension of communication implies inevitably the existence of a society which is, in his eyes, itself an unnatural institution. One can find all over in Flusser’s work traces of his life-long attempt to think through the full philosophical implications of European nihilism, and evidence of this intellectual engagement can be readily found in his theories of communication.

    One of Flusser’s key ideas that draws me in is his notion that human communication affords us the ability to “forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of ‘nature’” (2002, 4). In order to help stave off the inexorable tide of nature’s muted nothingness, Flusser suggests that humans communicate by storing memories, externalized thoughts whose eventual transmission binds two or more people into a system of meaning. Only when an intersubjective system of communication like writing or speech is established between people does the purpose of our enduring commitment to communication become clear: we communicate in order “to become immortal within others (2016, 31). Flusser’s playful positing of the ironic paradox inherent in the improbability of communication—that communication is unnatural to the human but it is also “so incredibly rich despite its limitations” (26)––enacts its own impossibility. In a representatively ironic sense, Flusser’s point is that all we are able to fully understand is our inability to understand fully.

    As Flusser’s theory of communication can be viewed as his response to the twentieth-century’s shifting technical-medial milieu, his ideas about communication and technics eventually led him to conclude that “the original intention of producing the apparatus, namely, to serve the interests of freedom, has turned on itself…In a way, the terms human and apparatus are reversed, and human beings operate as a function of the apparatus. A man gives an apparatus instructions that the apparatus has instructed him to give” (2011,73).[1] Flusser’s skeptical perspective toward the alleged affordances of human mastery over technology is most assuredly not the view that Apple or Google would prefer you harbor (not-so-secretly). Any cursory glance at Wired or the technology blog at Insider Higher Ed, to pick two long-hanging examples, would yield a radically different perspective than the one Flusser puts forth in his work. In fact, Flusser writes, “objects meant to be media may obstruct communication” (2016, 45). If media objects like the technical apparatuses of today actually obstruct communication, then why are we so often led to believe that they facilitate it? And to shift registers just slightly, if everything is said to be an object of some kind—even technical apparatuses––then cannot one be permitted to claim daily communion with all kinds of objects? What happens when an object—and an object as obsolete as a book, no less—speaks to us? Will we still heed its call?

    ***

    Speaking in its expanded capacity as neither narrator nor focalized character, the book as literary object addresses us in a direct and antagonistic fashion in the opening line to Joshua Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands” (5), the book-object warns. As Cohen’s narrative tells the story of a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen (whose backstory corresponds mostly to the historical-biographical author Joshua Cohen) who is contracted to ghostwrite the memoir of another Joshua Cohen (who is the CEO of a massive Google-type company named Tetration), the novel’s middle section provides an “unedited” transcript of the conversation between the two Cohens in which the CEO recounts his upbringing and tremendous business success in and around the Bay Area from the late 1970s up to 2013 of the narrative’s present. The novel’s Silicon Valley setting, nominal and characterological doubling, and structural narrative coupling of the two Cohens’ lives makes it all but impossible to distinguish the personal histories of Cohen-the-CEO and Cohen-the-narrator from the cultural history of the development of personal computing and networked information technologies. The history of one Joshua Cohen––or all Joshua Cohens––is indistinguishable from the history of intrusive computational/digital media. “I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics,” Cohen-the-narrator laments. In other words, as Cohen-the-narrator ghostwrites another Cohen’s memoir within the context of the broad history of personal computing and the emergence of algorithmic governance and surveillance, the novel invites us to consider how the history of an individual––or every individual, it does not really matter––is also nothing more or anything less than the surveilled history of its data usage, which is always written by someone or something else, the ever-present Not-Me (who just might have the same name as me). The Self is nothing but a networked repository of information to be mined in the future.

    While the novel’s opening line addresses its hypothetical reader directly, its relatively benign warning fixes reader and text in a relation of rancor. The object speaks![2] And yet tech-savvy twenty-first century readers are not the only ones who seem to be fed up with books; books too are fed up with us, and perhaps rightly so. In an age when objects are said to speak vibrantly and withdraw infinitely; processes like human cognition are considered to be operative in complex technical-computational systems; and when the only excuse to preserve the category of “subjective experience” we are able to muster is that it affords us the ability “to grasp how networks technically distribute and disperse agency,” it would seem at first glance that the second-person addressee of the novel’s opening line would intuitively have to be a reading, thinking subject.[3] Yet this is the very same reading subject who has been urged by Cohen’s novel to politely “fuck off” if he or she has chosen to read the text on a screen. And though the text does not completely dismiss its readers who still prefer “paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth” (5), a slight change of preposition in its title points exactly to what the book fears most of all: Book as Numbers. The book-object speaks, but only to offer an ominous admonition: neither the book nor its readers ought to be reducible to computable numbers.

    The transduction of literary language into digital bits eliminates the need for a phenomenological, reading subject, and it suggests too that literature––or even just language in a general sense––and humans in particular are ontologically reducible to data objects that can be “read” and subsequently “interpreted” by computational algorithms. As Cohen’s novel collapses the distinction between author, narrator, character, and medium, its narrator observes that “the only record of my one life would be this record of another’s” (9). But in this instance, the record of one’s (or another’s) life is merely the history of how personal computational technologies have effaced the phenomenological subject. How have we arrived at the theoretically permissible premise that “People matter, but they don’t occupy a privileged subject position distinct from everything else in the world” (Huehls 20)? How might the “turn toward ontology” in theory/philosophy be viewed as contributing to our present condition?

    * **

    Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (2016) provides a brief, yet stylistically ironic and incisive interrogation into how recent iterations of post- or inhumanist theory have found a strange bedfellow in the rhetorical boosterism that accompanies the alleged affordances of digital technologies and big data. Despite the differences between these two seemingly unrelated discourses, they both share a particularly critical or diminished conception of the anthro- in “anthropocentrism” that borrows liberally from the postulates of the “ontological turn” in theory/philosophy (Rosenberg n.p.). While the parallels between these discourses are not made explicit in Jarzombek’s book, Digital Stockholm Syndrome asks us to consider how a shared commitment to an ontologically diminished view of “the human” that galvanizes both technological determinism’s anti-humanism and post- or inhumanist theory has found its common expression in recent philosophies of ontology. In other words, the problem Digital Stockholm Syndrome takes up is this: what kind of theory of ontology, Being, and to a lesser extent, subjectivity, appeals equally to contemporary philosophers and Silicon Valley tech-gurus? Jarzombek gestures toward such an inquiry early on: “What is this new ontology?” he asks, and “What were the historical situations that produced it? And how do we adjust to the realities of the new Self?” (x).

    A curious set of related philosophical commitments united by their efforts to “de-center” and occasionally even eject “anthropocentrism” from the critical conversation constitute some of the realities swirling around Jarzombek’s “new Self.”[4] Digital Stockholm Syndrome provocatively locates the conceptual legibility of these philosophical realities squarely within an explicitly algorithmic-computational historical milieu. By inviting such a comparison, Jarzombek’s book encourages us to contemplate how contemporary ontological thought might mediate our understanding of the historical and philosophical parallels that bind the tradition of in humanist philosophical thinking and the rhetoric of twenty-first century digital media.[5]

    In much the same way that Alexander Galloway has argued for a conceptual confluence that exceeds the contingencies of coincidence between “the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism” (347), Digital Stockholm Syndrome argues similarly that today’s world is “designed from the micro/molecular level to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological” (italics in original, x).[6] We now understand Being as the informatic/algorithmic byproduct of what ubiquitous computational technologies have gathered and subsequently fed back to us. Our personal histories––or simply the records of our data use (and its subsequent use of us)––comprise what Jarzombek calls our “ontic exhaust…or what data experts call our data exhaust…[which] is meticulously scrutinized, packaged, formatted, processed, sold, and resold to come back to us in the form of entertainment, social media, apps, health insurance, clickbait, data contracts, and the like” (x).

    The empty second-person pronoun is placed on equal ontological footing with, and perhaps even defined by, its credit score, medical records, 4G data usage, Facebook likes, and threefold of its Tweets. “The purpose of these ‘devices,’” Jarzombek writes, “is to produce, magnify, and expose our ontic exhaust” (25). We give our ontic exhaust away for free every time we log into Facebook because it, in return, feeds back to us the only sense of “self” we are able to identify as “me.”[7] If “who we are cannot be traced from the human side of the equation, much less than the analytic side.‘I’ am untraceable” (31), then why do techno-determinists and contemporary oracles of ontology operate otherwise? What accounts for their shared commitment to formalizing ontology? Why must the Self be tracked and accounted for like a map or a ledger?

    As this “new Self,” which Jarzombek calls the “Being-Global” (2), travels around the world and checks its bank statement in Paris or tags a photo of a Facebook friend in Berlin while sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, it leaks ontic exhaust everywhere it goes. While the hoovering up of ontic exhaust by GPS and commercial satellites “make[s] us global,” it also inadvertently redefines Being as a question of “positioning/depositioning” (1). For Jarzombek, the question of today’s ontology is not so much a matter of asking “what exists?” but of asking “where is it and how can it be found?” Instead of the human who attempts to locate and understand Being, now Being finds us, but only as long as we allow ourselves to be located.

    Today’s ontological thinking, Jarzombek points out, is not really interested in asking questions about Being––it is too “anthropocentric.”[8] Ontology in the twenty-first century attempts to locate Being by gathering data, keeping track, tracking changes, taking inventory, making lists, listing litanies, crunching the numbers, and searching the database. “Can I search for it on Google?” is now the most important question for ontological thought in the twenty-first century.

    Ontological thinking––which today means ontological accounting, or finding ways to account for the ontologically actuarial––is today’s philosophical equivalent to a best practices for data management, except there is no difference between one’s data and one’s Self. Nonetheless, any ontological difference that might have once stubbornly separated you from data about you no longer applies. Digital Stockholm Syndrome identifies this shift with the formulation: “From ontology to trackology” (71).[9] The philosophical shift that has allowed data about the Self to become the ontological equivalent to the Self emerges out of what Jarzombek calls an “animated ontology.”

    In this “animated ontology,” subject position and object position are indistinguishable…The entire system of humanity is microprocessed through the grid of sequestered empiricism” (31, 29). Jarzombek is careful to distinguish his “animated ontology” from the recently rebooted romanticisms which merely turn their objects into vibrant subjects. He notes that “the irony is that whereas the subject (the ‘I’) remains relatively stable in its ability to self-affirm (the lingering by-product of the psychologizing of the modern Self), objectivity (as in the social sciences) collapses into the illusions produced by the global cyclone of the informatic industry” (28).”[10] By devising tricky new ways to flatten ontology (all of which are made via po-faced linguistic fiat), “the human and its (dis/re-)embodied computational signifiers are on equal footing”(32). I do not define my data, but my data define me.

    ***

    Digital Stockholm Syndrome asserts that what exists in today’s ontological systems––systems both philosophical and computational––is what can be tracked and stored as data. Jarzombek sums up our situation with another pithy formulation: “algorithmic modeling + global positioning + human scaling +computational speed=data geopolitics” (12). While the universalization of tracking technologies defines the “global” in Jarzombek’s Being-Global, it also provides us with another way to understand the humanities’ enthusiasm for GIS and other digital mapping platforms as institutional-disciplinary expressions of a “bio-chemo-techno-spiritual-corporate environment that feeds the Human its sense-of-Self” (5).

    Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    One wonders if the incessant cultural and political reminders regarding the humanities’ waning relevance have moved humanists to reconsider the very basic intellectual terms of their broad disciplinary pursuits. How come it is humanities scholars who are in some cases most visibly leading the charge to overturn many decades of humanist thought? Has the internalization of this depleted conception of the human reshaped the basic premises of humanities scholarship, Digital Stockholm Syndrome wonders? What would it even mean to pursue a “humanities” purged of “the human?” And is it fair to wonder if this impoverished image of humanity has trickled down into the formation of new (sub)disciplines?”[11]

    In a late chapter titled “Onto-Paranoia,” Jarzombek finally arrives at a working definition of Digital Stockholm Syndrome: data visualization. For Jarzombek, data-visualization “has been devised by the architects of the digital world” to ease the existential torture—or “onto-torture”—that is produced by Security Threats (59). Security threats are threatening because they remind us that “security is there to obscure the fact that whole purpose is to produce insecurity” (59). When a system fails, or when a problem occurs, we need to be conscious of the fact that the system has not really failed; “it means that the system is working” (61).[12] The Social, the Other, the Not-Me—these are all variations of the same security threat, which is just another way of defining “indeterminacy” (66). So if everything is working the way it should, we rarely consider the full implications of indeterminacy—both technical and philosophical—because to do so might make us paranoid, or worse: we would have to recognize ourselves as (in)human subjects.

    Data-visualizations, however, provide a soothing salve which we can (self-)apply in order to ease the pain of our “onto-torture.” Visualizing data and creating maps of our data use provide us with a useful and also pleasurable tool with which we locate ourselves in the era of “post-ontology.”[13] “We experiment with and develop data visualization and collection tools that allow us to highlight urban phenomena. Our methods borrow from the traditions of science and design by using spatial analytics to expose patterns and communicating those results, through design, to new audiences,” we are told by one data-visualization project (http://civicdatadesignlab.org/).  As we affirm our existence every time we travel around the globe and self-map our location, we silently make our geo-data available for those who care to sift through it and turn it into art or profit.

    “It is a paradox that our self-aestheticizing performance as subjects…feeds into our ever more precise (self-)identification as knowable and predictable (in)human-digital objects,” Jarzombek writes. Yet we ought not to spend too much time contemplating the historical and philosophical complexities that have helped create this paradoxical situation. Perhaps it is best we do not reach the conclusion that mapping the Self as an object on digital platforms increases the creeping unease that arises from the realization that we are mappable, hackable, predictable, digital objects––that our data are us. We could, instead, celebrate how our data (which we are and which is us) is helping to change the world. “’Big data’ will not change the world unless it is collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit,” the same data visualization project announces on its website’s homepage.

    While it is true that I may be a little paranoid, I have finally rested easy after having read Digital Stockholm Syndrome because I now know that my data/I are going to good use.[14] Like me, maybe you find comfort in knowing that your existence is nothing more than a few pixels in someone else’s data visualization.

    _____

    Michael Miller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rice University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in symplokē and the Journal of Film and Video.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] I am reminded of a similar argument advanced by Tung-Hui Hu in his A Prehistory of the Cloud (2016). Encapsulating Flusser’s spirit of healthy skepticism toward technical apparatuses, the situation that both Flusser and Hu fear is one in which “the technology has produced the means of its own interpretation” (xixx).

    [2] It is not my aim to wade explicitly into discussions regarding “object-oriented ontology” or other related philosophical developments. For the purposes of this essay, however, Andrew Cole’s critique of OOO as a “new occasionalism” will be useful. “’New occasionalism,’” Cole writes, “is the idea that when we speak of things, we put them into contact with one another and ourselves” (112). In other words, the speaking of objects makes them objectively real, though this is only possible when everything is considered to be an object. The question, though, is not about what is or is not an object, but is rather what it means to be. For related arguments regarding the relation between OOO/speculative realism/new materialism and mysticism, see Sheldon (2016), Altieri (2016), Wolfendale (2014), O’Gorman (2013), and to a lesser extent Colebrook (2013).

    [3] For the full set of references here, see Bennett (2010), Hayles (2014 and 2016), and Hansen (2015).

    [4] While I cede that no thinker of “post-humanism” worth her philosophical salt would admit the possibility or even desirability of purging the sins of “correlationism” from critical thought all together, I cannot help but view such occasional posturing with a skeptical eye. For example, I find convincing Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s recent essay “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Negotiations, Collisions,” in which she compares the drive in contemporary critical theory to displace “the human” from humanistic inquiry to the impossible and equally incomprehensible task of overcoming the “‘astro’-centrism of astronomy or the biocentrism of biology” (359).

    [5] In “Modest Proposal for the Inhuman,” Julian Murphet identifies four interrelated strands of post- or inhumanist thought that combine a kind of metaphysical speculation with a full-blown demolition of traditional ontology’s conceptual foundations. They are: “(1) cosmic nihilism, (2) molecular bio-plasticity, (3) technical accelerationism, and (4) animality. These sometimes overlapping trends are severally engaged in the mortification of humankind’s stubborn pretensions to mastery over the domain of the intelligible and the knowable in an era of sentient machines, routine genetic modification, looming ecological disaster, and irrefutable evidence that we share 99 percent of our biological information with chimpanzees” (653).

    [6] The full quotation from Galloway’s essay reads: “Why, within the current renaissance of research in continental philosophy, is there a coincidence between the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism? [….] Why, in short, is there a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business?” (347). Digital Stockholm Syndrome begins by accepting Galloway’s provocations as descriptive instead of speculative. We do not necessarily wonder in 2017 if “there is a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business”; we now wonder instead how such a confluence came to be.

    [7] Wendy Hui Kyun Chun makes a similar point in her 2016 monograph Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. She writes, “If users now ‘curate’ their lives, it is because their bodies have become archives” (x-xi). While there is not ample space here to discuss the  full theoretical implications of her book, Chun’s discussion of the inherently gendered dimension to confession, self-curation as self-exposition, and online privacy as something that only the unexposed deserve (hence the need for preemptive confession and self-exposition on the internet) in digital/social media networks is tremendously relevant to Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, as both texts consider the Self as a set of mutable and “marketable/governable/hackable categories” (Jarzombek 26) that are collected without our knowledge and subsequently fed back to the data/media user in the form of its own packaged and unique identity. For recent similar variations of this argument, see Simanowski (2017) and McNeill (2012).

    I also think Chun’s book offers a helpful tool for thinking through recent confessional memoirs or instances of “auto-theory” (fictionalized or not) like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010), Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013), and perhaps to a lesser degree Tao Lin’s Richard Yates (2010), Taipei (2013), Natasha Stagg’s Surveys, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). The extent to which these texts’ varied formal-aesthetic techniques can be said to be motivated by political aims is very much up for debate, but nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that many of them revel in the reveal. That is to say, via confession or self-exposition, many of these novels enact the allegedly performative subversion of political power by documenting their protagonists’ and/or narrators’ certain social/political acts of transgression. Chun notes, however, that this strategy of self-revealing performs “resistance as a form of showing off and scandalizing, which thrives off moral outrage. This resistance also mimics power by out-spying, monitoring, watching, and bringing to light, that is, doxing” (151). The term “autotheory,” which was has been applied to Nelson’s The Argonauts in particular, takes on a very different meaning in this context. “Autotheory” can be considered as a theory of the self, or a self-theorization, or perhaps even the idea that personal experience is itself a kind of theory might apply here, too. I wonder, though, how its meaning would change if the prefix “auto” was understood within a media-theoretical framework not as “self” but as “automation.” “Autotheory” becomes, then, an automatization of theory or theoretical thinking, but also a theoretical automatization; or more to the point: what if “autotheory” describes instead a theorization of the Self or experience wherein “the self” is only legible as the product of automated computational-algorithmic processes?

    [8] Echoing the critiques of “correlationism” or “anthropocentrism” or what have you, Jarzombek declares that “The age of anthrocentrism is over” (32).

    [9] Whatever notion of (self)identity the Self might find to be most palatable today, Jarzombek argues, is inevitably mediated via global satellites. “The intermediaries are the satellites hovering above the planet. They are what make us global–what make me global” (1), and as such, they represent the “civilianization” of military technologies (4). What I am trying to suggest is that the concepts and categories of self-identity we work with today are derived from the informatic feedback we receive from long-standing military technologies.

    [10] Here Jarzombek seems to be suggesting that the “object” in the “objectivity” of “the social sciences” has been carelessly conflated with the “object” in “object-oriented” philosophy. The prioritization of all things “objective” in both philosophy and science has inadvertently produced this semantic and conceptual slippage. Data objects about the Self exist, and thus by existing, they determine what is objective about the Self. In this new formulation, what is objective about the Self or subject, in other words, is what can be verified as information about the self. In Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (2014), Ronald Day argues that these global tracking technologies supplant traditional ontology’s “ideas or concepts of our human manner of being” and have in the process “subsume[d] and subvert[ed] the former roles of personal judgment and critique in personal and social beings and politics” (1). While such technologies might be said to obliterate “traditional” notions of subjectivity, judgment, and critique, Day demonstrates how this simultaneous feeding-forward and feeding back of data-about-the-Self represents the return of autoaffection, though in his formulation self-presence is defined as information or data-about-the-self whose authenticity is produced when it is fact-checked against a biographical database (3)—self-presence is a presencing of data-about-the-Self. This is all to say that the Self’s informational “aboutness”–its representation in and as data–comes to stand in for the Self’s identity, which can only be comprehended as “authentic” in its limited metaphysical capacity as a general informatic or documented “aboutness.”

    [11] Flusser is again instructive on this point, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way­­. Drawing attention to the strange unnatural plurality in the term “humanities,” he writes, “The American term humanities appropriately describes the essence of these disciplines. It underscores that the human being is an unnatural animal” (2002, 3). The plurality of “humanities,” as opposed to the singular “humanity,” constitutes for Flusser a disciplinary admission that not only the category of “the human” is unnatural, but that the study of such an unnatural thing is itself unnatural, as well. I think it is also worth pointing out that in the context of Flusser’s observation, we might begin to situate the rise of “the supplemental humanities” as an attempt to redefine the value of a humanities education. The spatial humanities, the energy humanities, medical humanities, the digital humanities, etc.—it is not difficult to see how these disciplinary off-shoots consider themselves as supplements to whatever it is they think “the humanities” are up to; regardless, their institutional injection into traditional humanistic discourse will undoubtedly improve both(sub)disciplines, with the tacit acknowledgment being that the latter has just a little more to gain from the former in terms of skills, technical know-how, and data management. Many thanks to Aaron Jaffe for bringing this point to my attention.

    [12] In his essay “Algorithmic Catastrophe—The Revenge of Contingency,” Yuk Hui notes that “the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle” (125). Drawing from the work of Bernard Stiegler, Hui shows how the pharmacological dimension of “technics, which aims to overcome contingency, also generates accidents” (127). And so “as the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle…it no longer plays the role it did with the laws of nature” (132). Simply put, by placing algorithmic catastrophe on par with a failure of reason qua the operations of mathematics, Hui demonstrates how “algorithms are open to contingency” only insofar as “contingency is equivalent to a causality, which can be logically and technically deduced” (136). To take Jarzombek’s example of the failing computer or what have you, while the blue screen of death might be understood to represent the faithful execution of its programmed commands, we should also keep in mind that the obverse of Jarzombek’s scenario would force us to come to grips with how the philosophical implications of the “shit happens” logic that underpins contingency-as-(absent) causality “accompanies and normalizes speculative aesthetics” (139).

    [13] I am reminded here of one of the six theses from the manifesto “What would a floating sheep map?,” jointly written by the Floating Sheep Collective, which is a cohort of geography professors. The fifth thesis reads: “Map or be mapped. But not everything can (or should) be mapped.” The Floating Sheep Collective raises in this section crucially important questions regarding ownership of data with regard to marginalized communities. Because it is not always clear when to map and when not to map, they decide that “with mapping squarely at the center of power struggles, perhaps it’s better that not everything be mapped.” If mapping technologies operate as ontological radars–the Self’s data points help point the Self towards its own ontological location in and as data—then it is fair to say that such operations are only philosophically coherent when they are understood to be framed within the parameters outlined by recent iterations of ontological thinking and its concomitant theoretical deflation of the rich conceptual make-up that constitutes the “the human.” You can map the human’s data points, but only insofar as you buy into the idea that points of data map the human. See http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.

    [14]Mind/paranoia: they are the same word!”(Jarzombek 71).

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Adler, Renata. Speedboat. New York Review of Books Press, 1976.
    • Altieri, Charles. “Are We Being Materialist Yet?” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016):241-57.
    • Calloway, Marie. what purpose did i serve in your life. Tyrant Books, 2013.
    • Chun, Wendy Hui Kyun. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. The MIT Press, 2016.
    • Cohen, Joshua. Book of Numbers. Random House, 2015.
    • Cole, Andrew. “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies.” minnesota review 80 (2013): 106-118.
    • Colebrook, Claire. “Hypo-Hyper-Hapto-Neuro-Mysticism.” Parrhesia 18 (2013).
    • Day, Ronald. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. The MIT Press, 2014.
    • Floating Sheep Collective. “What would a floating sheep map?” http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.
    • Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
    • –––. The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication. 1975. Metaflux, 2016.
    • –––. Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl. Translated by Erik Eisel. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
    • Galloway, Alexander R. “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” Critical Inquiry 39.2 (2013): 347-366.
    • Hansen, Mark B.N. Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Duke University Press, 2015.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014):199-220.
    • –––. “The Cognitive Nonconscious: Enlarging the Mind of the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 42 (Summer 2016): 783-808.
    • Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara. “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Collisions, Negotiations.” Common Knowledge  22.3 (2016):353-72.
    • Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? Picador, 2010.
    • Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. The MIT Press, 2016.
    • Huehls, Mitchum. After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age. Oxford University Press, 2016.
    • Hui, Yuk. “Algorithmic Catastrophe–The Revenge of Contingency.” Parrhesia 23(2015): 122-43.
    • Jarzombek, Mark. Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
    • Lin, Tao. Richard Yates. Melville House, 2010.
    • –––. Taipei. Vintage, 2013.
    • McNeill, Laurie. “There Is No ‘I’ in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82.
    • Murphet, Julian. “A Modest Proposal for the Inhuman.” Modernism/Modernity 23.3(2016): 651-70.
    • Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf P, 2015.
    • O’Gorman, Marcel. “Speculative Realism in Chains: A Love Story.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18.1 (2013): 31-43.
    • Rosenberg, Jordana. “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” Theory and Event 17.2 (2014):  n.p.
    • Sheldon, Rebekah. “Dark Correlationism: Mysticism, Magic, and the New Realisms.” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016): 137-53.
    • Simanowski, Roberto. “Instant Selves: Algorithmic Autobiographies on Social Network Sites.” New German Critique 44.1 (2017): 205-216.
    • Stagg, Natasha. Surveys. Semiotext(e), 2016.
    • Wolfendale, Peter. Object Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes. Urbanomic, 2014.
  • Alexander R. Galloway — Brometheanism

    Alexander R. Galloway — Brometheanism

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    In recent months I’ve remained quiet about the speculative turn, mostly because I’m reticent to rekindle the “Internet war” that broke out a couple of years ago mostly on blogs but also in various published papers. And while I’ve taught accelerationism in my recent graduate seminars, I opted for radio silence when accelerationism first appeared on the scene through the Accelerationist Manifesto, followed later by the book Inventing the Future. Truth is I have mixed feelings about accelerationism. Part of me wants to send “comradely greetings” to a team of well-meaning fellow Marxists and leave it at that. Lord knows the left needs to stick together. Likewise there’s little I can add that people like Steven Shaviro and McKenzie Wark haven’t already written, and articulated much better than I could. But at the same time a number of difficulties remain that are increasingly hard to overlook. To begin I might simply echo Wark’s original assessment of the Accelerationist Manifesto: two cheers for accelerationism, but only two!

    What’s good about accelerationism? And what’s bad? I love the ambition and scope. Certainly the accelerationists’ willingness to challenge leftist orthodoxies is refreshing. I also like how the accelerationists demand that we take technology and science seriously. And I also agree that there are important tactical uses of accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic interventions (Eugene Thacker and I have referred to them as exploits). Still I see accelerationism essentially as a tactic mistaken for a strategy. At the same time this kind of accelerationism is precisely what dot-com entrepreneurs want to see from the left. Further, and ultimately most important, accelerationism is paternalistic and thus suffers from the problems of elitism and ultimately reactionary politics.

    Let me explain. I’ll talk first about Srnicek and Williams’ 2015 book Inventing the Future, and then address one of the central themes fueling the accelerationist juggernaut, Prometheanism. Well written, easy to read, and exhaustively footnoted, Inventing the Future is ostensibly a follow up to the Accelerationist Manifesto, although the themes of the two texts are different and they almost never mention accelerationism in the book. (Srnicek in particular is nothing if not shrewd and agile: present at the christening of #A, we also find him on the masthead of the speculative realist reader, and today nosing in on “platform studies.” Wherever he alights next will doubtless portend future significance.) The book is vaguely similar to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Declaration from 2012 in that it tries to assess the current condition of the left while also providing a set of specific steps to be taken for the future. And while the accelerationists have garnered significantly more attention of late, mostly because it feels so fresh and new, Hardt and Negri’s is the better book (and interestingly Srnicek and Williams never cite them).

    Inventing the Future

    Inventing the Future has essentially two themes. The first consists in a series of denunciations of what they call “folk politics” defined in terms of Occupy, the Zapatistas, Tiqqun, localism, and direct democracy, ostensibly in favor of a new “hegemony” of planetary social democracy (also known as Leninism). The second theme concerns an anti-work polemic focused on the universal basic income (UBI) and shortening the work week. Indeed even as these two authors collaborate and mix their thoughts, there seem to be two books mixed together into one. This produces an interesting irony: while the first half of the book unabashedly denigrates anarchism in favor of Leninism, the second half of the book focuses on that very theme (anti-work) that has defined anarchist theory since the split in the First International, if not since time immemorial.

    What’s so wrong with “folk politics”? There are a few ways to answer this question. First the accelerationists are clearly frustrated by the failures of the left, and rightly so, a left debilitated by “apathy, melancholy and defeat” (5). There’s a demographic explanation as well. This is the cri de coeur of a younger generation seeking to move beyond what are seen as the sclerotic failures of postmodern theory with all of its “culturalist” baggage (which too often is a codeword for punks, queers, women, and people of color — more on that in a moment).

    Folk politics includes “the fetishization of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds” (3); it privileges the “small-scale, the authentic, the traditional and the natural” (10). The following virtues help fill out the definition:

    immediacy…tactics…inherently fleeting…the past…the voluntarist and spontaneous…the small…withdrawal or exit…the everyday…feeling…the particular…the ethical…the suffering of the particular and the authenticity of the local (10-11)

    Wow, that’s a lot of good stuff to get rid of. Still, they don’t quit there, targeting horizontalism of various kinds. Radical democracy is in the crosshairs too. Anti-representational politics is out as well. All the “from below” movements, from the undercommons to the black bloc, anything that smacks of “anarchism, council communism, libertarian communism and autonomism” (26) — it’s all under indictment. This unceasing polemic culminates in the book’s most potent sentence, if not also its most ridiculous, where the authors dismiss all of the following movements in one fell swoop:

    Occupy, Spain’s 15M, student occupations, left communist insurrectionists like Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, most forms of horizontalism, the Zapatistas…localism…slow-food (11-12)

    That scoops up a lot of people. And the reader is left to quibble over whatever principal of decision might group all these disparate factions together. But the larger point is clear: for Srnicek and Williams folk politics emerged because of an outdated Left (i.e. the abject failures of social democracy and communism) (16-), and an outmaneuvered Left (i.e. the rampant successes of neoliberalism) (19-). Thus their goal is to update the left with a new ideology, and overhaul its infrastructure allowing it to modernize and scale up to the level of the planet.

    In the second half of the book, particularly in chapters 5 and 6, Srnicek and Williams elaborate their vision for anti-work and post-work. This hinges on the concept of full automation, and they provocatively assert that “the tendencies towards automation and the replacement of human labor should be enthusiastically accelerated” (109). Yet the details are scant. What kind of tech are we talking about? We get some vague references at the outset to “Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing” (1), then again later to “data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data)” and so on (110). But one thing this book does not provide is an examination of the technology of modern capitalism. (Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism is an improvement thematically but not substantively: he provides an analysis of political economy, but no tech audit.) Thus Inventing the Future has a sort of Wizard of Oz problem at its core. It’s not clear what clever devices are behind the curtain, we’re just supposed to assume that they will be sufficiently communistical if we all believe hard enough.

    At the same time the authors come across as rather tone deaf on the question of labor, bemoaning above all “the misery of not being exploited,” as if exploitation is some grand prize awarded to the subaltern. Further, they fail to address adequately the two key challenges of automation, both of which have been widely discussed in political and economic theory: first that automation eliminates jobs for people who very much want and need them, leading to surplus populations, unemployment, migration, and intrenched poverty; and second that automation transforms the organic composition of labor through deskilling and proletarianization, the offshoring of menial labor, and the introduction of technical and specialist labor required to design, build, operate, and repair those seemingly “automagical” machines. In other words, under automation some people work less, but everyone works differently. Automation reduces work for some, but changes (and in fact often increases) work for others. Marx’s analysis of machines in Capital is useful here, where he addresses all of these various tendencies, from the elimination of labor and the increase in labor, to the transformation of the organic composition of labor — the last point being the most significant. (And while machines might help lubricate and increase the productive forces — not a bad thing — it’s clear that machines are absolutely not revolutionary actors for Marx. Optimistic interpretations gleaned from the Grundrisse notwithstanding, Marx defines machines essentially as large batteries for value. I have yet to find any evidence that today’s machines are any different.)

    So the devil is in the details: what kind of technology are we talking about? But perhaps more importantly, if you get rid of the “folk,” aren’t you also getting rid of the people? Srnicek and Williams try to address this in chapter 8, although I’m more convinced by Hardt and Negri’s “multitude,” Harney and Moten’s “undercommons,” or even formulations like “the part of no part” or the “inoperative community” found scattered across a variety of other texts. By the end Srnicek and Williams out themselves as reticular pessimists: let’s not specify “the proper form of organization” (162), let’s just let it happen naturally in an “ecology of organizations” (163). The irony being that we’re back to square one, and these anti-folk evangelists are hippy ecologists after all. (The reference to function over form [169] appears as a weak afterthought to help rationalize their decision, but it re-introduces the problem of techno-fetishism, this time a fetishism of the function.)

    To summarize, accelerationism presents a rich spectrum of problems. The first stems from the notion that technology/automation will save us, replete with vague references to “the latest technological developments” unencumbered by any real details. Second is the question of capitalism itself. Despite the authors’ Marxist tendencies, it’s not at all clear that accelerationism is anti-capitalist. In fact accelerationism would be better described as a form of post-capitalism, what Zizek likes to mock as “capitalism with a friendly face.” What is post-capitalism exactly? More capitalism? A modified form of capitalism? For this reason it becomes difficult to untangle accelerationism from the most visionary dreams of the business elite. Isn’t this exactly what dot-com entrepreneurs are calling for? Isn’t the avant-garde of acceleration taking place right now in Silicon Valley? This leads to a third point: accelerationism is a tactic mistaken for a strategy. Certainly accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic methods are useful in a provisional, local, which is to say tactical way. But accelerationism is, in my view, naïve about how capitalism works at a strategic level. Capitalism wants nothing more than to accelerate. Adding to the acceleration will help capitalism not hinder it. Capitalism is this accelerating force, from primitive accumulation on up to today. (Accelerationists don’t dispute this; they just simply disagree on the moral status of capitalism.) Fourth and finally is the most important problem revealed by accelerationism, the problem of elitism and reactionary politics. Given unequal technological development, those who accelerate will necessarily do so on the backs of others who are forced to proletarianize. Thus accelerationists are faced with a kind of “internal colonialism” problem, meaning there must be a distinction made between those who accelerate and those who facilitate acceleration through their very bodies. We already know who suffers most under unequal technological acceleration, and it’s not young white male academics living in England. Thus their skepticism toward the “folk” is all too often a paternalistic skepticism toward the wants and needs of the generic population. Hence the need for accelerationists to talk glowingly about things like “engineering consent.” It’s hard to see where this actually leads. Or more to the point who leads: if not Leninists then who, technocrats? Philosopher kings?

    *

    Accelerationism gains much inspiration from the philosophy of Prometheanism. If accelerationism provides a theory of political economy, Prometheanism supplies a theory of the subject. Yet it’s not always clear what people mean by this term. In a recent lecture titled “Prometheanism and Rationalism” Peter Wolfendale defines Prometheanism in such general terms that it becomes a synonym for any number of things: history and historical change; being against fatalism and messianism; being against the aristocracy; being against Fukuyama; being for feminism; the UBI and post-capitalism; the Enlightenment and secularism; deductive logic; overcoming (perceived) natural limits; technology; “automation” (which as I’ve just indicated is the most problematic concept of them all). Even very modest and narrow definitions of Prometheanism — technology for humans to overcome natural limit — present their own problems and wind up largely deflating the sloganeering of it all. “Okay so both the hydrogen bomb and the contraceptive pill are equally Promethean? So then who adjudicates their potential uses?” And we’re left with Prometheanism as the latest YAM philosophy (Yet Another Morality).

    Still, Prometheanism has a particular vision for itself and it’s worth describing the high points. I can think of six specific qualities. (1) Prometheanism defines itself as posthuman or otherwise antihuman. (2) Prometheanism is an attempt to transcend the bounds of physical limitation. (3) Prometheanism promotes freedom, as in for instance the freedom to change the body through hormone therapy. (4) Prometheanism sees itself as politically progressive. (5) Prometheanism sees itself as being technologically savvy. (6) Prometheanism proposes to offer technical solutions to real problems.

    But is any of this true? Interestingly Bernard Stiegler provided an answer to some of these questions already in 1994, and it’s worth returning to his book from that year Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus to fill out a conversation that has, thus far, been mostly one-sided. Stiegler’s book is long and complicated, and touches on many different things including technology and the increased rationalization of life, by way of some of Stiegler’s key influences including Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Bertrand Gille. Let me focus however on the second part of the book, where Stiegler examines the two brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus.

    A myth about powers and qualities, the fable of Epimetheus and Prometheus is recounted by the sophist Protagoras starting at line 320c in Plato’s dialogue of that name. In Stiegler’s retelling of the story, we begin with Epimetheus, who, via a “principle of compensation” governed by notions of difference and equilibrium, hands out powers and qualities to all the animals of the Earth. For instance extra speed might be endowed to the gazelle, but only by way of balanced compensation given to another animal, say a boost in strength bestowed upon the lion. Seemingly diligent in his duties, Epimetheus nevertheless tires before the job is complete, shirking his duties before arriving at humankind, who is left relatively naked without a special power or quality of its own. To compensate humankind, Prometheus absconds with “the gift of skill in the arts and fire” — “τὴν ἔντεχνον σοφίαν σὺν πυρί” — captured from Athena and Hephaestus, respectively, conferring these two gifts to humanity (Plato, “Protagoras,” 321d).

    In this way humans are defined first not via technical supplement but through an elemental fault — this is Stiegler’s lingering poststructuralism — the fault of Epimetheus. Epimetheus forgets about us, leaving us until the end, and hence “Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing” (188). But it’s more than that: a fault followed by a theft, and hence a twin fault. Humanity is the “fruit of a double fault–an act of forgetting [by Epimetheus], then of theft [by Prometheus]” (188). Humans are thus a forgotten afterthought, remedied afterward by a lucky forethought.

    “Afterthought” and “forethought” — Stiegler means these terms quite literally. Who is Epimetheus? And who is Prometheus? Greek names often have etymological if not allegorical significance, as is the case here. Both names share the root “-metheus,” cognate with manthánō [μανθάνω], which means learning, study, or cultivation of knowledge. Hence a mathitís [μαθητής] is a learner or a student. (And in fact in a very literal sense “mathematics” simply refers to the things that one learns, not to arithmetic or geometry per se.) The two brothers are thus both varieties of learners, both varieties of thinkers. The key is which variety. The key is the Epi– and the Pro-.

    Epi carries the character of the accidentally and artificial factuality of something happening, arriving, a primordial ‘passibility,’” Stiegler explains. “Epimetheia means heritage. Heritage is always epimathesis. Epimetheia would also mean then tradition-originating in a fault that is always already there and that is nothing but technicity” (206-207). Hence Epimetheus means something like “learning on the basis of,” “thinking after,” or, more simply, or “afterthought” or “hindsight.” This is why Epimetheus forgets, why he is at fault, why he acts foolishly, because these are all the things that generate hindsight.

    Prometheus on the other hand is “foresight” or “fore-thought.” If Epimetheus means “thinking and learning on the basis of,” Prometheus means something more like “thinking and learning in anticipation of.” In this way, Prometheus comes to stand in for cleverness (but also theft), ingenuity, and thus technics as a whole.

    But is that all? Is the lesson simply to restore Epimetheus to his position next to Prometheus? To remember the Epimethean omission along with the Promethean endowment? In fact the old Greek myth isn’t quite finished, and, after initially overlooking the ending, Stiegler eventually broaches the closing section on Hermes. For even after benefiting from its Promethean supplement, humanity remains incomplete. Specifically, the gods notice that Man has a tendency toward war and political strife. Thus Hermes is tasked to implant a kind of socio-political virtue, supplementing humanity with “the qualities of respect for others [αἰδώ] and a sense of justice [δίκη]” (Plato 322c). In other words, a second supplement is necessary, only this time a supplement not rooted in the identitarian logic of heterogeneous qualities. “Another tekhnē is required,” writes Stiegler, “a tekhnē that is no longer paradoxically…the privilege of specialists” (201). This point about specialists is key — all you Leninists take note — because on Zeus’s command Hermes delivers respect and justice generically and equally across all persons, not via the “principle of compensation” based on difference and equilibrium used previously by Epimetheus to divvy up the powers and qualities of the animals. Thus while some people may have a talent for the piano, and others might be gifted in some other way, justice and respect are bestowed equally to all.

    This is why politics is always a question of the “hermeneutic community,” that is, the ad hoc translation and interpretation of real political dynamics; it comes from Hermes (201). At the same time politics also means “the community of those who have no community” because there is no adjudication of heterogenous qualities, no truth or law stipulated in advance, except for the very “conditions” of the political (those “hermeneutic conditions,” namely αἰδώ and δίκη, respect and justice).

    To summarize, the Promethean story has three moments, not one, and all three ought to be given full voice:

    1. Default of origin (being forgotten about by Epimetheus/Hindsight)
    2. Gaining technicity (fire and skills from Prometheus/Foresight)
    3. Revealing the generic (“respect for others and a sense of justice” from Hermes)

    This strikes me as a much better way to think about Prometheanism overall, better than the narrow definition of “using technology to overcome natural limits.” Recognizing all three moments, Prometheanism (if we can still call it that) entails not just technological advancement, but also insufficiency and failure, along with a political consciousness rooted in generic humanity.

    And now would be a good time to pass the baton over to the Xenofeminists, who make much better use of accelerationism than its original authors do. The Xenofeminist manifesto provides a more holistic picture of what might simply be called a “universalism from below” — yes, that very folk politics that Srnicek and Williams seek to suppress — doing justice not only to Prometheus, but to Epimetheus and Hermes as well:

    Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects — the abolition of class, gender, and race — hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up — or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars — namely Eurocentric universalism — whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even — especially — when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’ campaign against trans women is proof enough of this). (0x0F)


    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer 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. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay

  • 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.
    • Artaud, Antonin. To Have Done With The Judgment of God. 1947. Live play, Boston: Exploding Envelope, c1985. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHtrY1UtwNs.
    • Badiou, Alain. The Century. 2005. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007.
    • Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
    • Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” 1933. In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovin, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., 167-81. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
    • Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. Boston: Ticknor & co., 1888.
    • Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. 1980. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
    • Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.
    • Burnett, Graham. “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155 (2016): 19-20.
    • Butler, Samuel. Erewhon: or, Over the Range. 1872. London: A.C. Fifield, 1910. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1906/1906-h/1906-h.htm.
    • Chen, Mel Y. “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155 (2016): 21-22.
    • 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.
    • DeLanda, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 2000.
    • ———. 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.
    • ———. Difference and Repetition. 1968. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
    • ———. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. 1953. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
    • ———. Foucault. 1986. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
    • Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. 1972. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
    • ———. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
    • ———. What Is Philosophy? 1991. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
    • Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Translated by David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007; second edition.
    • Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.
    • Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
    • Flaxman, Gregory. Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
    • Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. 1971. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
    • ———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” 1971. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 113-38. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.
    • ———. The Order of Things. 1966. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.
    • Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. Translated by James Strachley. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
    • ———. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes.” 1915. Translated by James Strachley. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14, 111-140. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
    • Gerima, Haile. “Love Visual: A Conversation with Haile Gerima.” Interview by Sarah Lewis and Dagmawi Woubshet. Aperture, Feb 23, 2016. http://aperture.org/blog/love-visual-haile-gerima/.
    • Gibson-Graham, J.K. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Hoboken: Blackwell, 1996.
    • ———. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
    • Guattari, Félix. “Machine and Structure.” 1968. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. In Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, 111-119. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984.
    • Halperin, David, and Valerie Traub. “Beyond Gay Pride.” In Gay Shame, 3-40. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
    • Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
    • Klossowski, Pierre. “Circulus Vitiosus.” Translated by Joseph Kuzma. The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal 2, no. 1 (2009): 31-47.
    • ———. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. 1969. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
    • Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines. 2010. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014.
    • Marcuse, Herbert. “Repressive Tolerance.” In A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 81-117. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.
    • Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. 1950. Translated by W. D. Hallis. New York: Routledge, 1990.
    • Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
    • Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Human Development. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967.
    • Noys, Benjamin. “‘Remain True to the Earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal.” In: Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1 (2010): 105-128.
    • Preciado, Paul. Testo-Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Phamacopornographic Era. 2008. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press, 2013.
    • Ruddick, Susan. “The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the Work of Negri and Deleuze.” Theory, Culture, Society 27, no. 4 (2010): 21-45.
    • Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
    • Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” In Rhizomes 29 (2016). http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/sexton.html.
    • ———. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts.” In Lateral 1 (2012). http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue1/content/sexton.html.
    • ———. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” In Intensions 5 (2011). http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php.
    • Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.
    • ———. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. 1994. Translated by George Collins and Richard Beardsworth. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
    • Tiqqun. “How Is It to Be Done?” 2001. In Introduction to Civil War. 2001. Translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2010.
    • Toynbee, Arnold. A Study of History. Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell. London, Oxford University Press, 1946.
    • Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
    • Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-structural Anthropology. 2009. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2014.
    • Villani, Arnaud. La guêpe et l’orchidée. Essai sur Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Éditions de Belin, 1999.
    • Welles, Orson, dir. F for Fake. 1974. New York: Criterion Collection, 2005.
    • Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948; second revised edition.
    • Williams, Alex, and Nick Srincek. “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.” Critical Legal Thinking. 2013. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/.

    _____

    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.”

    Back to the essay

  • The Social Construction of Acceleration

    The Social Construction of Acceleration

    Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time (Chicago, 2014)a review of Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago, 2014)
    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    Patience seems anachronistic in an age of high speed downloads, same day deliveries, and on-demand assistants who can be summoned by tapping a button. Though some waiting may still occur the amount of time spent in anticipation seems to be constantly diminishing, and every day a new bevy of upgrades and devices promise that tomorrow things will be even faster. Such speed is comforting for those who feel that they do not have a moment to waste. Patience becomes a luxury for which we do not have time, even as the technologies that claimed they would free us wind up weighing us down.

    Yet it is far too simplistic to heap the blame for this situation on technology, as such. True, contemporary technologies may be prominent characters in the drama in which we are embroiled, but as Judy Wajcman argues in her book Pressed for Time, we should not approach technology as though it exists separately from the social, economic, and political factors that shape contemporary society. Indeed, to understand technology today it is necessary to recognize that “temporal demands are not inherent to technology. They are built into our devices by all-too-human schemes and desires” (3). In Wajcman’s view, technology is not the true culprit, nor is it an out-of-control menace. It is instead a convenient distraction from the real forces that make it seem as though there is never enough time.

    Wajcman sets a course that refuses to uncritically celebrate technology, whilst simultaneously disavowing the damning of modern machines. She prefers to draw upon “a social shaping approach to technology” (4) which emphasizes that the shape technology takes in a society is influenced by many factors. If current technologies leave us feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and unsatisfied it is to our society we must look for causes and solutions – not to the machine.

    The vast array of Internet-connected devices give rise to a sense that everything is happening faster, that things are accelerating, and that compared to previous epochs things are changing faster. This is the kind of seemingly uncontroversial belief that Wajcman seeks to counter. While there is a present predilection for speed, the ideas of speed and acceleration remain murky, which may not be purely accidental when one considers “the extent to which the agenda for discussing the future of technology is set by the promoters of new technological products” (14). Rapid technological and societal shifts may herald the emergence of a “acceleration society” wherein speed increases even as individuals experience a decrease of available time. Though some would describe today’s world (at least in affluent nations) as being a synecdoche of the “acceleration society,” it would be a mistake to believe this to be a wholly new invention.

    Nevertheless the instantaneous potential of information technologies may seem to signal a break with the past – as the sort of “timeless time” which “emerged in financial markets…is spreading to every realm” (19). Some may revel in this speed even as others put out somber calls for a slow-down, but either approach risks being reductionist. Wajcman pushes back against the technological determinism lurking in the thoughts of those who revel and those who rebel, noting “that all technologies are inherently social in that they are designed, produced, used and governed by people” (27).

    Both today and yesterday “we live our lives surrounded by things, but we tend to think about only some of them as being technologies” (29). The impacts of given technologies depend upon the ways in which they are actually used, and Wajcman emphasizes that people often have a great deal of freedom in altering “the meanings and deployment of technologies” (33).

    Over time certain technologies recede into the background, but the history of technology is of a litany of devices that made profound impacts in determining experiences of time and speed. After all, the clock is itself a piece of technology, and thus we assess our very lack of time by looking to a device designed to measure its passage. The measurement of time was a technique used to standardize – and often exploit – labor, and the ability to carefully keep track of time gave rise to an ideology in which time came to be interchangeable with money. As a result speed came to be associated with profit even as slowness became associated with sloth. The speed of change became tied up in notions of improvement and progress, and thus “the speed of change becomes a self-evident good” (44). The speed promised by inventions are therefore seen as part of the march of progress, though a certain irony emerges as widespread speed leads to new forms of slowness – the mass diffusion of cars leading to traffic jams, And what was fast yesterday is often deemed slow today. As Wajcman shows, the experience of time compression that occurs tied to “our valorization of a busy lifestyle, as well as our profound ambivalence toward it” (58), has roots that go far back.

    Time takes on an odd quality – to have it is a luxury, even as constant busyness becomes a sign of status. A certain dissonance emerges wherein individuals feel that they have less time even as studies show that people are not necessarily working more hours. For Wajcman much of the explanation is related to “real increases in the combined work commitments of family members as it is about changes in the working time of individuals” with such “time poverty” being experienced particularly acutely “among working mothers, who juggle work, family, and leisure” (66). To understand time pressure it is essential to consider the degree to which people are free to use their time as they see fit.

    Societal pressures on the time of men and women differ, and though the hours spent doing paid labor may not have shifted dramatically, the hours parents (particularly mothers) spend performing unpaid labor remains high. Furthermore, “despite dramatic improvements in domestic technology, the amount of time spent on household tasks has not actually shown any corresponding dramatic decline” (68). Though household responsibilities can be shared equitably between partners, much of the onus still falls on women. As a busy event-filled life becomes a marker of status for adults so too may they attempt to bestow such busyness on the whole family, but busy parents needing to chaperone and supervise busy children only creates a further crunch on time. As Wajcman notes “perhaps we should be giving as much attention to the intensification of parenting as to the intensification of work” (82).

    Yet the story of domestic, unpaid and unrecognized, labor is a particularly strong example of a space wherein the promises of time-saving technological fixes have fallen short. Instead, “devices allegedly designed to save labor time fail to do so, and in some cases actually increase the time needed for the task” (111). The variety of technologies marketed for the household are often advertised as time savers, yet altering household work is not the same as eliminating it – even as certain tasks continually demand a significant investment of real time.

    Many of the technologies that have become mainstays of modern households – such as the microwave – were not originally marketed as such, and thus the household represents an important example of the way in which technologies “are both socially constructed and society shaping” (122). Of further significance is the way in which changing labor relations have also lead to shifts in the sphere of domestic work, wherein those who can afford it are able to buy themselves time through purchasing food from restaurants or by employing others for tasks such as child care and cleaning. Though the image of “the home of the future,” courtesy of the Internet of Things, may promise an automated abode, Wajcman highlights that those making and selling such technologies replicate society’s dominant blind spot for the true tasks of domestic labor. Indeed, the Internet of Things tends to “celebrate technology and its transformative power at the expense of home as a lived practice.” (130) Thus, domestic technologies present an important example of the way in which those designing and marketing technologies instill their own biases into the devices they build.

    Beyond the household, information communications technologies (ICTs) allow people to carry their office in their pocket as e-mails and messages ping them long after the official work day has ended. However, the idea “of the technologically tethered worker with no control over their own time…fails to convey the complex entanglement of contemporary work practices, working time, and the materiality of technical artifacts” (88). Thus, the problem is not that an individual can receive e-mail when they are off the clock, the problem is the employer’s expectation that this worker should be responding to work related e-mails while off the clock – the issue is not technological, it is societal. Furthermore, Wajcman argues, communications technologies permit workers to better judge whether or not something is particularly time sensitive. Though technology has often been used by employers to control employees, approaching communications technologies from an STS position “casts doubt on the determinist view that ICTs, per se, are driving the intensification of work” (107). Indeed some workers may turn to such devices to help manage this intensification.

    Technologies offer many more potentialities than those that are presented in advertisements. Though the ubiquity of communications devices may “mean that more and more of our social relationships are machine-mediated” (138), the focus should be as much on the word “social” as on the word “machine.” Much has been written about the way that individuals use modern technologies and the ways in which they can give rise to families wherein parents and children alike are permanently staring at a screen, but Wajcman argues that these technologies should “be regarded as another node in the flows of affect that create and bind intimacy” (150). It is not that these devices are truly stealing people’s time, but that they are changing the ways in which people spend the time they have – allowing harried individuals to create new forms of being together which “needs to be understood as adding a dimension to temporal experience” (158) which blurs boundaries between work and leisure.

    The notion that the pace of life has been accelerated by technological change is a belief that often goes unchallenged; however, Wajcman emphasizes that “major shifts in the nature of work, the composition of families, ideas about parenting, and patterns of consumption have all contributed to our sense that the world is moving faster than hitherto” (164). The experience of acceleration can be intoxicating, and the belief in a culture of improvement wrought by technological change may be a rare glimmer of positivity amidst gloomy news reports. However, “rapid technological change can actually be conservative, maintaining or solidifying existing social arrangements” (180). At moments when so much emphasis is placed upon the speed of technologically sired change the first step may not be to slow-down but to insist that people consider the ways in which these machines have been socially constructed, how they have shaped society – and if we fear that we are speeding towards a catastrophe than it becomes necessary to consider how they can be socially constructed to avoid such a collision.

    * * *

    It is common, amongst current books assessing the societal impacts of technology, for authors to present themselves as critical while simultaneously wanting to hold to an unshakable faith in technology. This often leaves such texts in an odd position: they want to advance a radical critique but their argument remains loyal to a conservative ideology. With Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman, has demonstrated how to successfully achieve the balance between technological optimism and pessimism. It is a great feat, and Pressed for Time executes this task skillfully. When Wajcman writes, towards the end of the book, that she wants “to embrace the emancipatory potential of technoscience to create new meanings and new worlds while at the same time being its chief critic” (164) she is not writing of a goal but is affirming what she has achieved with Pressed for Time (a similar success can be attributed to Wajcman’s earlier books TechnoFeminism (Polity, 2004) and the essential Feminism Confronts Technology (Penn State, 1991).

    By holding to the framework of the social shaping of technology, Pressed for Time provides an investigation of time and speed that is grounded in a nuanced understanding of technology. It would have been easy for Wajcman to focus strictly on contemporary ICTs, but what her argument makes clear is that to do so would have been to ignore the facts that make contemporary technology understandable. A great success of Pressed for Time is the way in which Wajcman shows that the current sensation of being pressed for time is not a modern invention. Instead, the emphasis on speed as being a hallmark of progress and improvement is a belief that has been at work for decades. Wajcman avoids the stumbling block of technological determinism and carefully points out that falling for such beliefs leads to critiques being directed incorrectly. Written in a thoroughly engaging style, Pressed for Time is an academic book that can serve as an excellent introduction to the terminology and style of STS scholarship.

    Throughout Pressed for Time, Wajcman repeatedly notes the ways in which the meanings of technologies transcend what a device may have been narrowly intended to do. For Wajcman people’s agency is paramount as people have the ability to construct meaning for technology even as such devices wind up shaping society. Yet an area in which one could push back against Wajcman’s views would be to ask if communications technologies have shaped society to such an extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to construct new meanings for them. Perhaps the “slow movement,” which Wajcman describes as unrealistic for “we cannot in fact choose between fast and slow, technology and nature” (176), is best perceived as a manifestation of the sense that much of technology’s “emancipatory potential” has gone awry – that some technologies offer little in the way of liberating potential. After all, the constantly connected individual may always feel rushed – but they may also feel as though they are under constant surveillance, that their every online move is carefully tracked, and that through the rise of wearable technology and the Internet of Things that all of their actions will soon be easily tracked. Wajcman makes an excellent and important point by noting that humans have always lived surrounded by technologies – but the technologies that surrounded an individual in 1952 were not sending every bit of minutiae to large corporations (and governments). Hanging in the background of the discussion of speed are also the questions of planned obsolescence and the mountains of toxic technological trash that wind up flowing from affluent nations to developing ones. The technological speed experienced in one country is the “slow violence” experienced in another. Though to make these critiques is to in no way to seriously diminish Wajcman’s argument, especially as many of these concerns simply speak to the economic and political forces that have shaped today’s technology.

    Pressed for Time is a Rosetta stone for decoding life in high speed, high tech societies. Wajcman deftly demonstrates that the problems facing technologically-addled individuals today are not as new as they appear, and that the solutions on offer are similarly not as wildly inventive as they may seem. Through analyzing studies and history, Wajcman shows the impacts of technologies, while making clear why it is still imperative to approach technology with a consideration of class and gender in mind. With Pressed for Time, Wajcman champions the position that the social shaping of technology framework still provides a robust way of understanding technology. As Wajcman makes clear the way technologies “are interpreted and used depends on the tapestry of social relations woven by age, gender, race, class, and other axes of inequality” (183).

    It is an extremely timely argument.
    _____

    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.

    Back to the essay

  • Towards a Bright Mountain: Laudato Si' as Critique of Technology

    Towards a Bright Mountain: Laudato Si' as Critique of Technology

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    “We hate the people who make us form the connections we do not want to form.” – Simone Weil

    1. Repairing Our Common Home

    When confronted with the unsettling reality of the world it is easy to feel overwhelmed and insignificant. This feeling of powerlessness may give rise to a temptation to retreat – or to simply shrug – and though people may suspect that they bear some responsibility for the state of affairs in which they are embroiled the scale of the problems makes individuals doubtful that they can make a difference. In this context, the refrain “well, it could always be worse” becomes a sort of inured coping strategy, though this dark prophecy has a tendency to prove itself true week after week and year after year. Just saying that things could be worse than they presently are does nothing to prevent things from deteriorating further. It can be rather liberating to decide that one is powerless, to conclude that one’s actions do not truly matter, to imagine that one will be long dead by the time the bill comes due – for taking such positions enables one to avoid doing something difficult: changing.

    A change is coming. Indeed, the change is already here. The question is whether people are willing to consciously change to meet this challenge or if they will only change when they truly have no other option.

    The matter of change is at the core of Pope Francis’s recent encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Praise be to You”). Much of the discussion around Laudato Si’ has characterized the document as being narrowly focused on climate change and the environment. Though Laudato Si’ has much to say about the environment, and the threat climate change poses, it is rather reductive to cast Laudato Si’ as “the Pope’s encyclical about the environment.” Granted, that many are describing the encyclical in such terms is understandable as framing it in that manner makes it appear quaint – and may lead to many concluding that they do not need to spend the time reading through the encyclical’s 245 sections (roughly 200 pages). True, Pope Francis is interested in climate change, but in the encyclical he proves far more interested in the shifts in the social, economic, and political climate that have allowed climate change to advance. The importance of Laudato Si’ is precisely that it is less about climate change than it is about the need for humanity to change, as Pope Francis writes:

    “we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation.” (Francis, no. 48)

    And though the encyclical is filled with numerous pithy aphorisms it is a text that is worth engaging in its entirety.

    Lest there be any doubt, Laudato Si’ is a difficult text to read. Not because it is written in archaic prose, or because it assumes the reader is learned in theology, but because it is discomforting. Laudato Si’ does not tell the reader that they are responsible for the world, instead it reminds them that they have always been responsible for the world, and then points to some of the reasons why this obligation may have been forgotten. The encyclical calls on those with their heads in the clouds (or head in “the cloud”) to see they are trampling the poor and the planet underfoot. Pope Francis has the audacity to suggest, despite what the magazine covers and advertisements tell us, that there is no easy solution, and that if we are honest with ourselves we are not fulfilled by consumerism. What Laudato Si’ represents is an unabashed ethical assault on high-tech/high-consumption life in affluent nations. Yet it is not an angry diatribe. Insofar as the encyclical represents a hammer it is not as a blunt instrument with which one bludgeons foes into submission, but is instead a useful tool one might take up to pull out the rusted old nails in order to build again, as Pope Francis writes:

    “Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home.” (Francis, no. 13)

    Laudato Si’ is a work of intense, even radical, social criticism in the fine raiment of a papal encyclical. The text contains an impassioned critique of technology, an ethically rooted castigation of capitalism, a defense of the environment that emphasizes that humans are part of that same environment, and a demand that people accept responsibility. There is much in Laudato Si’ that those well versed in activism, organizing, environmentalism, critical theory, the critique of technology, radical political economy (and so forth) will find familiar – and it is a document that those bearing an interest in the aforementioned areas would do well to consider. While the encyclical (it was written by the Pope, after all) contains numerous references to Jesus, God, the Church, and the saints – it is clear that Pope Francis intends the document for a wide (not exclusively Catholic, or even Christian) readership. Indeed, those versed in other religious traditions will likely find much in the encyclical that echoes their own beliefs – and the same can likely be said of those interested in ethics with our without the presence of God. While many sections of Laudato Si’ speak to the religious obligation of believers, Pope Francis makes a point of being inclusive to those of different faiths (and no faith) – an inclusion which speaks to his recognition that the problems facing humanity can only be solved by all of humanity. After all:

    “we need only take a frank look at the facts to see that our common home is falling into serious disrepair.” (Francis, no. 61)

    The term “common home” refers to the planet and all those – regardless of their faith – who dwell there.

    Nevertheless, there are several sections in Laudato Si’ that will serve to remind the reader that Pope Francis is the male head of a patriarchal organization. Pope Francis stands firm in his commitment to the poor, and makes numerous comments about the rights of indigenous communities – but he does not have particularly much to say about women. While women certainly number amongst the poor and indigenous, Laudato Si’ does not devote attention to the ways in which the theologies and ideologies of dominance that have wreaked havoc on the planet have also oppressed women. It is perhaps unsurprising that the only woman Laudato Si’ focuses on at any length is Mary, and that throughout the encyclical Pope Francis continually feminizes nature whilst referring to God with terms such as “Father.” The importance of equality is a theme which is revisited numerous times in Laudato Si’ and though Pope Francis addresses his readers as “sisters and brothers” it is worth wondering whether or not this entails true equality between all people – regardless of gender. It is vital to recognize this shortcoming of Laudato Si’ – as it is a flaw that undermines much of the ethical heft of the argument.

    In the encyclical Pope Francis laments the lack of concern being shown to those – who are largely poor – already struggling against the rising tide of climate change, noting:

    “Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility to our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.” (Francis, no. 25)

    Yet it is worth pushing on this “sense of responsibility to our fellow men and women” – and doing so involves a recognition that too often throughout history (and still today) “civil society” has been founded on an emphasis on “fellow men” and not necessarily upon women. In considering responsibilities towards other people Simone Weil wrote:

    “The object of any obligation, in the realm of human affairs, is always the human being as such. There exists an obligation towards every human being for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition requiring to be fulfilled, and even without any recognition of such obligation on the part of the individual concerned.” (Weil, 5 – The Need for Roots)

    To recognize that the obligation is due to “the human being as such” – which seems to be something Pope Francis is claiming – necessitates acknowledging that “the human being” is still often defined as male. And this is a bias that can easily be replicated, even in encyclicals that tout the importance of equality.

    There are aspects of Laudato Si’ that will give readers cause to furrow their brows; however, it would be unfortunate if the shortcomings of the encyclical led people to dismiss it completely. After all, Laudato Si’ is not a document that one reads, it is a text with which one wrestles. And, as befits a piece written by a former nightclub bouncer, Laudato Si’ proves to be a challenging and scrappy combatant. Granted, the easiest way to emerge victorious from a bout is to refuse to engage in it in the first place – which is the tactic that many seem to be taking towards Laudato Si’. Yet it should be noted that those whose responses are variations of “the Pope should stick to religion” are largely revealing that they have not seriously engaged with the encyclical. Laudato Si’ does not claim to be a scientific document, but instead recognizes – in understated terms – that:

    “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climate system.” (Francis, no. 23)

    And that,

    “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in the coming decades.” (Francis, no. 25)

    However, when those who make a habit of paying no heed to scientists themselves make derisive comments that the Pope is not a scientist they are primarily delivering a television-news-bite-ready-quip which ignores that the climate Pope Francis is mainly concerned with today’s social, economic and political climate.

    As has been previously noted, Laudato Si’ is as much a work of stinging social criticism as it is a theological document. It is a text which benefits from the particular analysis of people – be they workers, theologians, activists, scholars, and the list could go on – with knowledge in the particular fields the encyclical touches upon. And yet, one of the most striking aspects of the encyclical – that which poses a particular challenge to the status quo – is way in which the document engages with technology.

    For, it may well be that Laudato Si’ will change the tone of current discussions around technology and its role in our lives.

    At least one might hope that it will do so.

    caption
    Image source: Photo of Pope Francis, Christoph Wagener via Wikipedia, with further modifications by the author of this piece.

    2. Meet the New Gods, Not the Same as the Old God

    Perhaps being a person of faith makes it easier to recognize the faith of others. Or, put another way, perhaps belief in God makes one attuned to the appearance of new gods. While some studies have shown that in recent years the number of individuals who do not adhere to a particular religious doctrine has risen, Laudadto Si’ suggests – though not specifically in these terms – that people may have simply turned to new religions. In the book To Be and To Have, Erich Fromm uses the term “religion” not to:

    “refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” (Fromm, 135 – italics in original)

    Though the author of Laudato Si’, obviously, ascribes to a belief system that has a heck-of-a-lot to do “with a concept of God” – the main position of the encyclical is staked out in opposition to the rise of a “group-shared system of thought” which has come to offer many people both “a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” Pope Francis warns his readers against giving fealty and adoration to false gods – gods which are as appealing to atheists as they are to old-time-believers. And while Laudato Si’ is not a document that seeks (not significantly, at least) to draw people into the Catholic church, it is a document that warns people against the religion of technology. After all, we cannot return to the Garden of Eden by biting into an Apple product.

    It is worth recognizing, that there are many reasons why the religion of technology so easily wins converts. The world is a mess and the news reports are filled with a steady flow of horrors – the dangers of environmental degradation seem to grow starker by the day, as scientists issue increasingly dire predictions that we may have already passed the point at which we needed to act. Yet, one of the few areas that continually operates as a site of unbounded optimism is the missives fired off by the technology sector and its boosters. Wearable technology, self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, delivery drones, artificial intelligence, virtual reality – technology provides a vision of the future that is not fixated on rising sea levels and extinction. Indeed, against the backdrop of extinction some even predict that through the power of techno-science humans may not be far off from being able to bring back species that had previously gone extinct.

    Technology has become a site of millions of minor miracles that have drawn legions of adherents to the technological god and its sainted corporations – and while technology has been a force present with humans for nearly as long as there have been humans, technology today seems increasingly to be presented in a way that encourages people to bask in its uncanny glow. Contemporary technology – especially of the Internet connected variety – promises individuals that they will never be alone, that they will never be bored, that they will never get lost, and that they will never have a question for which they cannot execute a web search and find an answer. If older religions spoke of a god who was always watching, and always with the believer, than the smart phone replicates and reifies these beliefs – for it is always watching, and it is always with the believer. To return to Fromm’s description of religion it should be fairly apparent that technology today provides people with “a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” It is thus not simply that technology comes to be presented as a solution to present problems, but that technology comes to be presented as a form of salvation from all problems. Why pray if “there’s an app for that”?

    In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis warns against this new religion by observing:

    “Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principle key to the meaning of existence.” (Francis, no. 110)

    Granted, the question should be asked as to what is “the meaning of existence” supplied by contemporary technology? The various denominations of the religion of technology are skilled at offering appealing answers to this question filled with carefully tested slogans about making the world “more open and connected.” What the religion of technology continually offers is not so much a way of being in the world as a way of escaping from the world. Without mincing words, the world described in Laudato Si’ is rather distressing: it is a world of vast economic inequality, rising sea levels, misery, existential uncertainty, mountains of filth discarded by affluent nations (including e-waste), and the prospects are grim. By comparison the religion of technology provides a shiny vision of the future, with the promise of escape from earthly concerns through virtual reality, delivery on demand, and the truly transcendent dream of becoming one with machines. The religion of technology is not concerned with the next life, or with the lives of future generations, it is about constructing a new Eden in the now, for those who can afford the right toys. Even if constructing this heaven consigns much of the world’s population to hell. People may not be bending their necks in prayer, but they’re certainly bending their necks to glance at their smart phones. As David Noble wrote:

    “A thousand years in the making, the religion of technology has become the common enchantment, not only of the designers of technology but also of those caught up in, and undone by, their godly designs. The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by millenarian yearnings for new beginnings. This popular faith, subliminally indulged and intensified by corporate, government, and media pitchmen, inspires an awed deference to the practitioners and their promises of deliverance while diverting attention from more urgent concerns.” (Noble, 207)

    Against this religious embrace of technology, and the elevation of its evangels, Laudato Si’ puts forth a reminder that one can, and should, appreciate the tools which have been invented – but one should not worship them. To return to Erich Fromm:

    “The question is not one of religion or not? but of which kind of religion? – whether it is one that furthers human development, the unfolding of specifically human powers, or one that paralyzes human growth…our religious character may be considered an aspect of our character structure, for we are what we are devoted to, and what we are devoted to is what motivates our conduct. Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their ‘official’ beliefs for their real, though secret religion.” (Fromm, 135-136)

    It is evident that Pope Francis considers the worship of technology to be a significant barrier to further “human development” as it “paralyzes human growth.” Technology is not the only false religion against which the encyclical warns – the cult of self worship, unbridled capitalism, the glorification of violence, and the revival tent of consumerism are all considered as false faiths. They draw adherents in by proffering salvation and prescribing a simple course of action – but instead of allowing their faithful true transcendence they instead warp their followers into sycophants.

    Yet the particularly nefarious aspect of the religion of technology, in line with the quotation from Fromm, is the way in which it is a faith to which many subscribe without their necessarily being aware of it. This is particularly significant in the way that it links to the encyclical’s larger concern with the environment and with the poor. Those in affluent nations who enjoy the pleasures of high-tech lifestyles – the faithful in the religion of technology – are largely spared the serious downsides of high-technology. Sure, individuals may complain of aching necks, sore thumbs, difficulty sleeping, and a creeping sense of dissatisfaction – but such issues do not tell of the true cost of technology. What often goes unseen by those enjoying their smart phones are the exploitative regimes of mineral extraction, the harsh labor conditions where devices are assembled, and the toxic wreckage of e-waste dumps. Furthermore, insofar as high-tech devices (and the cloud) require large amounts of energy it is worth considering the degree to which high-tech lifestyles contribute to the voracious energy consumption that helps drive climate change. Granted, those who suffer from these technological downsides are generally not the people enjoying the technological devices.

    And though Laudato Si’ may have a particular view of salvation – one need not subscribe to that religion to recognize that the religion of technology is not the faith of the solution.

    But the faith of the problem.

    3. Laudato Si’ as Critique of Technology

    Relatively early in the encyclical, Pope Francis decries how, against the background of “media and the digital world”:

    “the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload.” (Frances, no. 47)

    Reading through Laudato Si’ it becomes fairly apparent who Pope Francis considers many of these “great sages” to be. For the most part Pope Francis cites the encyclicals of his predecessors, declarations from Bishops’ conferences, the bible, and theologians who are safely ensconced in the Church’s wheelhouse. While such citations certainly help to establish that the ideas being put forth in Laudato Si’ have been circulating in the Catholic Church for some time – Pope Francis’s invocation of “great sages of the past…going unheard” raises a larger question. How much of the encyclical is truly new and how much is a reiteration of older ideas that have gone “unheard?” In fairness, the social critique being advanced by Laudato Si’ may strike many people as novel – particularly in terms of its ethically combative willingness to take on technology – but it may be that the significant thing about Laudato Si’ is not that the message is new, but that the messenger is new. Without wanting to decry or denigrate Laudato Si’ it is worth noting that much of the argument being presented in the document could previously be found in works by thinkers associated with the critique of technology, notably Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul. Indeed, the following statement, from Lewis Mumford’s Art and Technics, could have appeared in Laudato Si’ without seeming out of place:

    “We overvalue the technical instrument: the machine has become our main source of magic, and it has given us a false sense of possessing godlike powers. An age that has devaluated all its symbols has turned the machine itself into a universal symbol: a god to be worshiped.” (Mumford, 138 – Art and Technics)

    The critique of technology does not represent a cohesive school of thought – rather it is a tendency within several fields (history and philosophy of technology, STS, media ecology, critical theory) that places particular emphasis on the negative impacts of technology. What many of these thinkers emphasized was the way in which the choices of certain technologies over others winds up having profound impacts upon the shape of a society. Thus, within the critique of technology, it is not a matter of anything so ridiculously reductive as “technology is bad” but of considering what alternative forms technology could take: “democratic technics” (Mumford), “convivial tools” (Illich), “appropriate technology” (Schumacher), “liberatory technology” (Bookchin), and so forth. Yet what is particularly important is the fact that the serious critique of technology was directly tied to a critique of the broader society. And thus, Mumford also wrote extensively about urban planning, architecture and cities – while Ellul wrote as much (perhaps more) about theological issues (Ellul was a devout individual who described himself as a Christian anarchist).

    With the rise of ever more powerful and potentially catastrophic technological systems, many thinkers associated with the critique of technology began issuing dire warnings about the techno-science wrought danger in which humanity had placed itself. With the appearance of the atomic bomb, humanity had invented the way to potentially bring an end to the whole of the human project. Galled by the way in which technology seemed to be drawing ever more power to itself, Ellul warned of the ascendance of “technique” while Mumford cautioned of the emergence of “the megamachine” with such terms being used to denote not simply technology and machinery but the fusion of techno-science with social, economic and political power – though Pope Francis seems to prefer to use the term “technological paradigm” or “technocratic paradigm” instead of “megamachine.” When Pope Francis writes:

    “The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic.” (Francis, no. 108)

    Or:

    “the new power structures based on the techno-economic paradigm may overwhelm not only our politics but also freedom and justice.” (Francis, no. 53)

    Or:

    “The alliance between the economy and technology ends up sidelining anything unrelated to its immediate interests.” (Francis, no. 54)

    These are comments that are squarely in line with Ellul’s comment that:

    Technical civilization means that our civilization is constructed by technique (makes a part of civilization only that which belongs to technique), for technique (in that everything in this civilization must serve a technical end), and is exclusively technique (in that it excludes whatever is not technique or reduces it to technical forms).” (Ellul, 128 – italics in original)

    A particular sign of the growing dominance of technology, and the techno-utopian thinking that everywhere evangelizes for technology, is the belief that to every problem there is a technological solution. Such wishful thinking about technology as the universal panacea was a tendency highly criticized by thinkers like Mumford and Ellul. Pope Francis chastises the prevalence of this belief at several points, writing:

    “Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions.” (Francis, no. 14)

    And the encyclical returns to this, decrying:

    “Technology, which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems,” (Francis, no. 20)

    There is more than a passing similarity between the above two quotations from Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical and the following quotation from Lewis Mumford’s book Technics and Civilization (first published in 1934):

    “But the belief that the social dilemmas created by the machine can be solved merely by inventing more machines is today a sign of half-baked thinking which verges close to quackery.” (Mumford, 367)

    At the very least this juxtaposition should help establish that there is nothing new about those in power proclaiming that technology will solve everything, but just the same there is nothing particularly new about forcefully criticizing this unblinking faith in technological solutions. If one wanted to do so it would not be an overly difficult task to comb through Laudato Si’ – particularly “Chapter Three: The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis” – and find a couple of paragraphs by Mumford, Ellul or another prominent critic of technology in which precisely the same thing is being said. After all, if one were to try to capture the essence of the critique of technology in two sentences, one could do significantly worse than the following lines from Laudato Si’:

    “We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.” (Francis, no. 107)

    Granted, the line “technological products are not neutral” may have come as something of a disquieting statement to some readers of Laudato Si’ even if it has long been understood by historians of technology. Nevertheless, it is the emphasis placed on the matter of “the kind of society we want to build” that is of particular importance. For the encyclical does not simply lament the state of the technological world, it advances an alternative vision of technology – one which recognizes the tremendous potential of technological advances but sees how this potential goes unfulfilled. Laudato Si’ is a document which is skeptical of the belief that smart phones have made people happier, and it is a text which shows a clear unwillingness to believe that large tech companies are driven by much other than their own interests. The encyclical bears the mark of a writer who believes in a powerful God and that deity’s prophets, but has little time for would-be all powerful corporations and their lust for profits. One of the themes that ran continuously throughout Lewis Mumford’s work was his belief that the “good life” had been overshadowed by the pursuit of the “goods life” – and a similar theme runs through Laudato Si’ wherein the analysis of climate change, the environment, and what is owed to the poor, is couched in a call to reinvigorate the “good life” while recognizing that the “goods life” is a farce. Despite the power of the “technological paradigm,” Pope Francis remains hopeful regarding the power of people, writing:

    “We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting methods of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering.” (Francis, no. 112)

    In the above quotation, what Pope Francis is arguing for is the need for, to use Mumford’s terminology, “democratic technics” to replace “authoritarian technics.” Or, to use Ivan Illich’s terms (and Illich was himself a Catholic priest) the emergence of a “convivial society” centered around “convivial tools.” Granted, as is perhaps not particularly surprising for a call to action, Pope Francis tends to be rather optimistic about the prospects individuals have for limiting and directing technology. For, one of the great fears shared amongst numerous critics of technology was the belief that the concentration of power in “technique” or “the megamachine” or the “technological paradigm” gradually eliminated the freedom to limit or direct it. That potential alternatives emerged was clear, but such paths were quickly incorporated back into the “technological paradigm.” As Ellul observed:

    “To be in technical equilibrium, man cannot live by any but the technical reality, and he cannot escape from the social aspect of things which technique designs for him. And the more his needs are accounted for, the more he is integrated into the technical matrix.” (Ellul, 224)

    In other words, “technique” gradually eliminates the alternatives to itself. To live in a society shaped by such forces requires an individual to submit to those forces as well. What Laudato Si’ almost desperately seeks to claim, to the contrary, is that it is not too late, that people still have the ability “to limit and direct technology” provided they tear themselves away from their high-tech hallucinations. And this earnest belief is the hopeful core of the encyclical.

    Ethically impassioned books and articles decrying what a high consumption lifestyle wreaks upon the planet and which exhort people to think of those who do not share in the thrill of technological decadence are not difficult to come by. And thus, the aspect of Laudato Si’ which may be the most radical and the most striking are the sections devoted to technology. For what the encyclical does so impressively is that it expressly links environmental destruction and the neglect of the poor with the religious allegiance to high-tech devices. Numerous books and articles appear on a regular basis lamenting the current state of the technological world – and yet too often the authors of such texts seem terrified of being labeled “anti-technology.” Therefore, the authors tie themselves in knots trying to stake out a position that is not evangelizing for technology but at the same time they refuse to become heretics to the religion of technology – and as a result they easily become the permitted voices of dissent who only seem to empower the evangels as they conduct the debate on the terms of technological society. They try to reform the religion of technology instead of recognizing that it is a faith premised upon worshiping a false god. After all, one is permitted to say that Google is getting too big, that the Apple Watch is unnecessary, and that Internet should be called “the surveillance mall” – but to say:

    “There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” (Francis, no. 113)

    Well…one rarely hears such arguments today, precisely because the dominant ideology of our day places ample faith in equating “scientific and technological progress” with progress, as such. Granted, that was the type of argument being made by the likes of Mumford and Ellul – though the present predicament makes it woefully evident that too few heeded their warnings. Indeed a leitmotif that can be detected amongst the works of many critics of technology is a desire to be proved wrong, as Mumford wrote:

    “I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, ‘This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!’ Yes: then I could die happy.” (Mumford, 528 – My Works and Days)

    Yet to read over Mumford’s predictions in the present day is to understand why those words are not carved into his tombstone – for Mumford was not an “absolute fool,” he was acutely prescient. Though, alas, the likes of Mumford and Ellul too easily number amongst the ranks of “the great sages of the past” who, in Pope Francis’s words, “run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload.”

    Despite the issues that various individuals will certainly have with Laudato Si’ – ranging from its stance towards women to its religious tonality – the element that is likely to disquiet the largest group is its serious critique of technology. Thus, it is somewhat amusing to consider the number of articles that have been penned about the encyclical which focus on the warnings about climate change but say little about Pope Francis’s comments about the danger of the “technological paradigm.” For the encyclical commits a profound act of heresy against the contemporary religion of technology – it dares to suggest that we have fallen for the PR spin about the devices in our pockets, it asks us to consider if these devices are truly filling an existential void or if they are simply distracting us from having to think about this absence, and the encyclical reminds us that we need not be passive consumers of technology. These arguments about technology are not new, and it is not new to make them in ethically rich or religiously loaded language; however, these are arguments which are verboten in contemporary discourse about technology. Alas, those who make such claims are regularly derided as “Luddites” or “NIMBYs” and banished to the fringes. And yet the historic Luddites were simply workers who felt they had the freedom “to limit and direct technology,” and as anybody who knows about e-waste can attest when people in affluent nations say “Not In My Back Yard” the toxic refuse simply winds up in somebody else’s back yard. Pope Francis writes that today:

    “It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same.” (Francis, no. 108)

    And yet, what Laudato Si’ may represent is an important turning point in discussions around technology, and a vital opportunity for a serious critique of technology to reemerge. For what Laudato Si’ does is advocate for a new cultural paradigm based upon harnessing technology as a tool instead of as an absolute. Furthermore, the inclusion of such a serious critique of technology in a widely discussed (and hopefully widely read) encyclical represents a point at which rigorously critiquing technology may be able to become less “countercultural.” Laudato Si’ is a profoundly pro-culture document insofar as it seeks to preserve human culture from being destroyed by the greed that is ruining the planet. It is a rare text that has the audacity to state: “you do not need that, and your desire for it is bad for you and bad for the planet.”

    Laudato Si’ is a piece of fierce social criticism, and like numerous works from the critique of technology, it is a text that recognizes that one cannot truly claim to critique a society without being willing to turn an equally critical gaze towards the way that society creates and uses technology. The critique of technology is not new, but it has been sorely underrepresented in contemporary thinking around technology. It has been cast as the province of outdated doom mongers, but as Pope Francis demonstrates, the critique of technology remains as vital and timely as ever.

    Too often of late discussions about technology are conducted through rose colored glasses, or worse virtual reality headsets – Laudato Si’ dares to actually look at technology.

    And to demand that others do the same.

    4. The Bright Mountain

    The end of the world is easy.

    All it requires of us is that we do nothing, and what can be simpler than doing nothing? Besides, popular culture has made us quite comfortable with the imagery of dystopian states and collapsing cities. And yet the question to ask of every piece of dystopian fiction is “what did the world that paved the way for this terrible one look like?” To which the follow up question should be: “did it look just like ours?” And to this, yet another follow up question needs to be asked: “why didn’t people do something?” In a book bearing the uplifting title The Collapse of Western Civilization Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway analyze present inaction as if from the future, and write:

    “the people of Western civilization knew what was happening to them but were unable to stop it. Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew.” (Oreskes and Conway, 1-2)

    This speaks to the fatalistic belief that despite what we know, things are not going to change, or that if change comes it will already be too late. One of the most interesting texts to emerge in recent years in the context of continually ignored environmental warnings is a slim volume titled Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. It is the foundational text of a group of writers, artists, activists, and others that dares to take seriously the notion that we are not going to change in time. As the manifesto’s authors write:

    “Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.” (Hine and Kingsnorth, 9)

    But the point is that change is coming – whether we believe it or not, and whether we want it or not. But what is one to do? The desire to retreat from the cacophony of modern society is nothing new and can easily sow the fields in which reactionary ideologies can grow. Particularly problematic is that the rejection of the modern world often entails a sleight of hand whereby those in affluent nations are able to shirk their responsibility to the world’s poor even as they walk somberly, flagellating themselves into the foothills. Apocalyptic romanticism, whether it be of the accelerationist or primitivist variety, paints an evocative image of the world of today collapsing so that a new world can emerge – but what Laudato Si’ counters with is a morally impassioned cry to think of the billions of people who will suffer and die. Think of those for whom fleeing to the foothills is not an option. We do not need to take up residence in the woods like latter day hermetic acolytes of Francis of Assisi, rather we need to take that spirit and live it wherever we find ourselves.

    True, the easy retort to the claim “secretly, we all think we are doomed” is to retort “I do not think we are doomed, secretly or openly” – but to read climatologists predictions and then to watch politicians grouse, whilst mining companies seek to extract even more fossil fuels is to hear that “secret” voice grow louder. People have always been predicting the end of the world, and here we still are, which leads many to simply shrug off dire concerns. Furthermore, many worry that putting too much emphasis on woebegone premonitions overwhelms people and leaves them unable and unwilling to act. Perhaps this is why Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth concludes not by telling people they must be willing to fundamentally alter their high-tech/high-consumption lifestyles but instead simply tells them to recycle. In Laudato Si’ Pope Francis writes:

    “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.” (Francis, no. 161)

    Those lines, particularly the first of the two, should be the twenty-first century replacement for “Keep Calm and Carry On.” For what Laudato Si’ makes clear is that now is not the time to “Keep Calm” but to get very busy, and it is a text that knows that if we “Carry On” than we are skipping aimlessly towards the cliff’s edge. And yet one of the elements of the encyclical that needs to be highlighted is that it is a document that does not look hopefully towards a coming apocalypse. In the encyclical, environmental collapse is not seen as evidence that biblical preconditions for Armageddon are being fulfilled. The sorry state of the planet is not the result of God’s plan but is instead the result of humanity’s inability to plan. The problem is not evil, for as Simone Weil wrote:

    “It is not good which evil violates, for good is inviolate: only a degraded good can be violated.” (Weil, 70 – Gravity and Grace)

    It is that the good of which people are capable is rarely the good which people achieve. Even as possible tools for building the good life – such as technology – are degraded and mistaken for the good life. And thus the good is wasted, though it has not been destroyed.

    Throughout Laudato Si’, Pope Francis praises the merits of an ascetic life. And though the encyclical features numerous references to Saint Francis of Assisi, the argument is not that we must all abandon our homes to seek out new sanctuary in nature, instead the need is to learn from the sense of love and wonder with which Saint Francis approached nature. Complete withdrawal is not an option, to do so would be to shirk our responsibility – we live in this world and we bear responsibility for it and for other people. In the encyclical’s estimation, those living in affluent nations cannot seek to quietly slip from the scene, nor can they claim they are doing enough by bringing their own bags to the grocery store. Rather, responsibility entails recognizing that the lifestyles of affluent nations have helped sow misery in many parts of the world – it is unethical for us to try to save our own cities without realizing the part we have played in ruining the cities of others.

    Pope Francis writes – and here an entire section shall be quoted:

    “Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change. We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new conviction, attitudes and forms of life. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.” (Francis, no. 202)

    Laudato Si’ does not suggest that we can escape from our problems, that we can withdraw, or that we can “keep calm and carry on.” And though the encyclical is not a manifesto, if it were one it could possibly be called “The Bright Mountain Manifesto.” For what Laudato Si’ reminds its readers time and time again is that even though we face great challenges it remains within our power to address them, though we must act soon and decisively if we are to effect a change. We do not need to wander towards a mystery shrouded mountain in the distance, but work to make the peaks near us glisten – it is not a matter of retreating from the world but of rebuilding it in a way that provides for all. Nobody needs to go hungry, our cities can be beautiful, our lifestyles can be fulfilling, our tools can be made to serve us as opposed to our being made to serve tools, people can recognize the immense debt they owe to each other – and working together we can make this a better world.

    Doing so will be difficult. It will require significant changes.

    But Laudato Si’ is a document that believes people can still accomplish this.

    In the end Laudato Si’ is less about having faith in god, than it is about having faith in people.

    _____

    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, on which an earlier version of this post first appeared. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay
    _____

    Works Cited

    Pope Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care For Our Common Home. Vatican Press, 2015. [Note – the numbers ins all citations from this document refer to the section number, not the page number]

    Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Vintage Books, 1964.

    Fromm, Erich. To Be and To Have. Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976.

    Hine, Dougald and Kingsnorth, Paul. Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. The Dark Mountain Project, 2013.

    Mumford, Lewis. My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979.

    Mumford, Lewis. Art and Technics. Columbia University Press, 2000.

    Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

    Noble, David. The Religion of Technology. Penguin, 1999.

    Oreskes, Naomi and Conway, Erik M. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Columbia University Press, 2014.

    Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. Routledge Classics, 2002.

    Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Routledge Classics, 2002. (the quote at the beginning of this piece is found on page 139 of this book)

  • Cultivating Reform and Revolution

    Cultivating Reform and Revolution

    The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke University Press, 2013)a review of William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke University Press, 2013)
    by Zachary Loeb
    ~

    Mountains and rivers, skyscrapers and dams – the world is filled with objects and structures that appear sturdy. Glancing upwards at a skyscraper, or mountain, a person may know that these obelisks will not remain eternally unchanged, but in the moment of the glance we maintain a certain casual confidence that they are not about to crumble suddenly. Yet skyscrapers collapse, mountains erode, rivers run dry or change course, and dams crack under the pressure of the waters they hold. Even equipped with this knowledge it is still tempting to view such structures as enduringly solid. Perhaps the residents of Lisbon, in November of 1755, had a similar faith in the sturdiness of the city they had built, a faith that was shattered in an earthquake – and aftershocks – that demonstrated all too terribly the fragility at the core of all physical things.

    The Lisbon earthquake, along with its cultural reverberations, provides the point of entry for William E. Connolly’s discussion of neoliberalism, ecology, activism, and the deceptive solidness of the world in his book The Fragility of Things. Beyond its relevance as an example of the natural tremors that can reduce the built world into rubble, the Lisbon earthquake provides Connolly (the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University), a vantage point from which to mark out and critique a Panglossian worldview he sees as prominent in contemporary society. No doubt, were Voltaire’s Pangloss alive today, he could find ready employment as an apologist for neoliberalism (perhaps as one of Silicon Valley’s evangelists). Like Panglossian philosophy, neoliberalism “acknowledges many evils and treats them as necessary effects” (6).

    Though the world has changed significantly since the mid-18th century during which Voltaire wrote, humanity remains assaulted by events that demonstrate the world’s fragility. Connolly councils against the withdrawal to which the protagonists of Candide finally consign themselves while taking up the famous trope Voltaire develops for that withdrawal; today we “cultivate our gardens” in a world in which the future of all gardens is uncertain. Under the specter of climate catastrophe, “to cultivate our gardens today means to engage the multiform relations late capitalism bears to the entire planet” (6). Connolly argues for an “ethic of cultivation” that can show “both how fragile the ethical life is and how important it is to cultivate it” (17). “Cultivation,” as developed in The Fragility of Things, stands in opposition to withdrawal. Instead it entails serious, ethically guided, activist engagement with the world – for us to recognize the fragility of natural, and human-made, systems (Connolly uses the term “force-fields”) and to act to protect this “fragility” instead of celebrating neoliberal risks that render the already precarious all the more tenuous.

    Connolly argues that when natural disasters strike, and often in their wake set off rippling cascades of additional catastrophes, they exemplify the “spontaneous order” so beloved by neoliberal economics. Under neoliberalism, the market is treated as though it embodies a uniquely omniscient, self-organizing and self-guiding principle. Yet the economic system is not the only one that can be described this way: “open systems periodically interact in ways that support, amplify, or destabilize one another” (25). Even in the so-called Anthropocene era the ecosystem, much to humanity’s chagrin, can still demonstrate creative and unpredictable potentialities. Nevertheless, the ideological core of neoliberalism relies upon celebrating the market’s self-organizing capabilities whilst ignoring the similar capabilities of governments, the public sphere, or the natural world. The ascendancy of neoliberalism runs parallel with an increase in fragility as economic inequality widens and as neoliberalism treats the ecosystem as just another profit source. Fragility is everywhere today, and though the cracks are becoming increasingly visible, it is still given – in Connolly’s estimation – less attention than is its due, even in “radical theory.” On this issue Connolly wonders if perhaps “radical theorists,” and conceivably radical activists, “fear that coming to terms with fragility would undercut the political militancy needed to respond to it?” (32). Yet Connolly sees no choice but to “respond,” envisioning a revitalized Left that can take action with a mixture of advocacy for immediate reforms while simultaneously building towards systemic solutions.

    Critically engaging with the thought of core neoliberal thinker and “spontaneous order” advocate Friedrich Hayek, Connolly demonstrates the way in which neoliberal ideology has been inculcated throughout society, even and especially amongst those whose lives have been made more fragile by neoliberalism: “a neoliberal economy cannot sustain itself unless it is supported by a self-conscious ideology internalized by most participants that celebrates the virtues of market individualism, market autonomy and a minimal state” (58). An army of Panglossian commentators must be deployed to remind the wary watchers that everything is for the best. That a high level of state intervention may be required to bolster and disseminate this ideology, and prop up neoliberalism, is wholly justified in a system that recognizes only neoliberalism as a source for creative self-organizing processes, indeed “sometimes you get the impression that ‘entrepreneurs’ are the sole paradigms of creativity in the Hayekian world” (66). Resisting neoliberalism, for Connolly, requires remembering the sources of creativity that occur outside of a market context and seeing how these other systems demonstrate self-organizing capacities.

    Within neoliberalism the market is treated as the ethical good, but Connolly works to counter this with “an ethic of cultivation” which works not only against neoliberalism but against certain elements of Kant’s philosophy. In Connolly’s estimation Kantian ethics provide some of the ideological shoring up for neoliberalism, as at times “Kant both prefigures some existential demands unconsciously folded into contemporary neoliberalism and reveals how precarious they in fact are. For he makes them postulates” (117). Connolly sees a certain similarity between the social conditioning that Kant saw as necessary for preparing the young to “obey moral law” and the ideological conditioning that trains people for life under neoliberalism – what is shared is a process by which a self-organizing system must counter people’s own self-organizing potential by organizing their reactions. Furthermore “the intensity of cultural desires to invest hopes in the images of self-regulating interest within markets and/or divine providence wards off acknowledgment of the fragility of things” (118). Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” appears as a corrective to this ethic of inculcation – it features “an element of tragic possibility within it” (133) which is the essential confrontation with the “fragility” that may act as a catalyst for a new radical activism.

    In the face of impending doom neoliberalism will once more have an opportunity to demonstrate its creativity even as this very creativity will have reverberations that will potentially unleash further disasters. Facing the possible catastrophe means that “we may need to recraft the long debate between secular, linear, and deterministic images of the world on the one hand and divinely touched, voluntarist, providential, and/or punitive images on the other” (149). Creativity, and the potential for creativity, is once more essential – as it is the creativity in multiple self-organizing systems that has created the world, for better or worse, around us today. Bringing his earlier discussions of Kant into conversation with the thought of Whitehead and Nietzsche, Connolly further considers the place of creative processes in shaping and reshaping the world. Nietzsche, in particular, provides Connolly with a way to emphasize the dispersion of creativity by removing the province of creativity from the control of God to treat it as something naturally recurring across various “force-fields.” A different demand thus takes shape wherein “we need to slow down and divert human intrusions into various planetary force fields, even as we speed up efforts to reconstitute the identities, spiritualities, consumption practices, market faiths, and state policies entangled with them” (172) though neoliberalism knows but one speed: faster.

    An odd dissonance occurs at present wherein people are confronted with the seeming triumph of neoliberal capitalism (one can hear the echoes of “there is no alternative”) and the warnings pointing to the fragility of things. In this context, for Connolly, withdrawal is irresponsible, it would be to “cultivate a garden” when what is needed is an “ethic of cultivation.” Neoliberal capitalism has trained people to accept the strictures of its ideology, but now is a time when different roles are needed; it is a time to become “role experimentalists” (187). Such experiments may take a variety of forms that run the gamut from “reformist” to “revolutionary” and back again, but the process of such experimentation can break the training of neoliberalism and demonstrate other ways of living, interacting, being and having. Connolly does not put forth a simple solution for the challenges facing humanity, instead he emphasizes how recognizing the “fragility of things” allows for people to come to terms with these challenges. After all, it may be that neoliberalism only appears so solid because we have forgotten that it is not actually a naturally occurring mountain but a human built pyramid – and our backs are its foundation.

    * * *

    In the “First Interlude,” on page 45, Connolly poses a question that haunts the remainder of The Fragility of Things, the question – asked in the midst of a brief discussion of the 2011 Lars von Trier film Melancholia – is, “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” It is the sort of disarming and discomforting question that in its cold honesty forces readers to face a conclusion they may not want to consider. It is a question that evokes the deceptively simple acronym FRED (Facing the Reality of Extinction and Doom). And yet there is something refreshing in the question – many have heard the recommendations about what must be done to halt climate catastrophe, but how many believe these steps will be taken? Indeed, even though Connolly claims “we need to slow down” there are also those who, to the contrary, insist that what is needed is even greater acceleration. Granted, Connolly does not pose this question on the first page of his book, and had he done so The Fragility of Things could have easily appeared as a dismissible dirge. Wisely, Connolly recognizes that “a therapist, a priest, or a philosopher might stutter over such questions. Even Pangloss might hesitate” (45); one of the core strengths of The Fragility of Things is that it does not “stutter over such questions” but realizes that such questions require an honest reckoning. Which includes being willing to ask “How do you prepare for the end of the world?”

    William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things is both ethically and intellectually rigorous, demanding readers perceive the “fragility” of the world around them even as it lays out the ways in which the world around them derives its stability from making that very fragility invisible. Though it may seem that there are relatively simple concerns at the core of The Fragility of Things Connolly never succumbs to simplistic argumentation – preferring the fine-toothed complexity that allows moments of fragility to be fully understood. The tone and style of The Fragility of Things feels as though it assumes its readership will consist primarily of academics, activists, and those who see themselves as both. It is a book that wastes no time trying to convince its reader that “climate change is real” or “neoliberalism is making things worse,” and the book is more easily understood if a reader begins with at least a basic acquaintance with the thought of Hayek, Kant, Whitehead, and Nietzsche. Even if not every reader of The Fragility of Things has dwelled for hours upon the question of “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” the book seems to expect that this question lurks somewhere in the subconscious of the reader.

    Amidst Connolly’s discussions of ethics, fragility and neoliberalism, he devotes much of the book to arguing for the need for a revitalized, active, and committed Left – one that would conceivably do more than hold large marches and then disappear. While Connolly cautions against “giving up” on electoral politics he does evince a distrust for US party politics; to the extent that Connolly appears to be a democrat it is a democrat with a lowercase d. Drawing inspiration from the wave of protests in and around 2011 Connolly expresses the need for a multi-issue, broadly supported, international (and internationalist) Left that can organize effectively to win small-scale local reforms while building the power to truly challenge the grip of neoliberalism. The goal, as Connolly envisions it, is to eventually “mobilize enough collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future” even as Connolly remains cognizant of threats that “the emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism” can pose (39). Connolly’s focus on the, often slow, “traditional” activist strategies of organizing should not be overlooked, as his focus on mobilizing large numbers of people acts as a retort to a utopian belief that “technology will fix everything.” The “general strike” as the democratic response once electoral democracy has gone awry is a theme that Connolly concludes with as he calls for his readership to take part in helping to bring together “a set of interacting minorities in several countries for the time when we coalesce around a general strike launched in several states simultaneously” (195). Connolly emphasizes the types of localized activism and action that are also necessary, but “the general strike” is iconic as the way to challenge neoliberalism. In emphasizing the “the general strike” Connolly stakes out a position in which people have an obligation to actively challenge existing neoliberalism, waiting for capitalism to collapse due to its own contradictions (and trying to accelerate these contradictions) does not appear as a viable tactic.

    All of which raises something of prickly question for The Fragility of Things: which element of the book strikes the reader as more outlandish, the question of how to prepare for the end of the world, or the prospect of a renewed Left launching “a general strike…in the near future”? This question is not asked idly or as provocation; and the goal here is in no way to traffic in Leftist apocalyptic romanticism. Yet experience in current activism and organizing does not necessarily imbue one with great confidence in the prospect of a city-wide general strike (in the US) to say nothing of an international one. Activists may be acutely aware of the creative potentials and challenges faced by repressed communities, precarious labor, the ecosystem, and so forth – but these same activists are aware of the solidity of militarized police forces, a reactionary culture industry, and neoliberal dominance. Current, committed, activists’ awareness of the challenges they face makes it seem rather odd that Connolly suggests that radical theorists have ignored “fragility.” Indeed many radical thinkers, or at least some (Grace Lee Boggs and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, to name just two) seem to have warned consistently of “fragility” – even if they do not always use that exact term. Nevertheless, here the challenge may not be the Sisyphean work of activism but the rather cynical answer many, non-activists, give to the question of “How does one prepare for the end of the world?” That answer? Download some new apps, binge watch a few shows, enjoy the sci-fi cool of the latest gadget, and otherwise eat, drink and be merry because we’ll invent something to solve tomorrow’s problems next week. Neoliberalism has trained people well.

    That answer, however, is the type that Connolly seems to find untenable, and his apparent hope in The Fragility of Things is that most readers will also find this answer unacceptable. Thus Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” returns and shows its value again. “Our lives are messages” (185) Connolly writes and thus the actions that an individual takes to defend “fragility” and oppose neoliberalism act as a demonstration to others that different ways of being are possible.

    What The Fragility of Things makes clear is that an “ethic of cultivation” is not a one-off event but an ongoing process – cultivating a garden, after all, is something that takes time. Some gardens require years of cultivation before they start to bear fruit.

    _____

    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. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay