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Something About the Digital

By Alexander R. Galloway
~

(This catalog essay was written in 2011 for the exhibition “Chaos as Usual,” curated by Hanne Mugaas at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway. Artists in the exhibition included Philip Kwame Apagya, Ann Craven, Liz Deschenes, Thomas Julier [in collaboration with Cédric Eisenring and Kaspar Mueller], Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Takeshi Murata, Seth Price, and Antek Walczak.)

There is something about the digital. Most people aren’t quite sure what it is. Or what they feel about it. But something.

In 2001 Lev Manovich said it was a language. For Steven Shaviro, the issue is being connected. Others talk about “cyber” this and “cyber” that. Is the Internet about the search (John Battelle)? Or is it rather, even more primordially, about the information (James Gleick)? Whatever it is, something is afoot.

What is this something? Given the times in which we live, it is ironic that this term is so rarely defined and even more rarely defined correctly. But the definition is simple: the digital means the one divides into two.

Digital doesn’t mean machine. It doesn’t mean virtual reality. It doesn’t even mean the computer – there are analog computers after all, like grandfather clocks or slide rules. Digital means the digits: the fingers and toes. And since most of us have a discrete number of fingers and toes, the digital has come to mean, by extension, any mode of representation rooted in individually separate and distinct units. So the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …) are aptly labeled “digital” because they are separate and distinct, but the arc of a bird in flight is not because it is smooth and continuous. A reel of celluloid film is correctly called “digital” because it contains distinct breaks between each frame, but the photographic frames themselves are not because they record continuously variable chromatic intensities.

We must stop believing the myth, then, about the digital future versus the analog past. For the digital died its first death in the continuous calculus of Newton and Leibniz, and the curvilinear revolution of the Baroque that came with it. And the digital has suffered a thousand blows since, from the swirling vortexes of nineteenth-century thermodynamics, to the chaos theory of recent decades. The switch from analog computing to digital computing in the middle twentieth century is but a single battle in the multi-millennial skirmish within western culture between the unary and the binary, proportion and distinction, curves and jumps, integration and division – in short, over when and how the one divides into two.

What would it mean to say that a work of art divides into two? Or to put it another way, what would art look like if it began to meditate on the one dividing into two? I think this is the only way we can truly begin to think about “digital art.” And because of this we shall leave Photoshop, and iMovie, and the Internet and all the digital tools behind us, because interrogating them will not nearly begin to address these questions. Instead look to Ann Craven’s paintings. Or look to the delightful conversation sparked here between Philip Kwame Apagya and Liz Deschenes. Or look to the work of Thomas Julier, even to a piece of his not included in the show, “Architecture Reflecting in Architecture” (2010, made with Cedric Eisenring), which depicts a rectilinear cityscape reflected inside the mirror skins of skyscrapers, just like Saul Bass’s famous title sequence in North By Northwest (1959).

Liz Deschenes, “Green Screen 4” (2001)

All of these works deal with the question of twoness. But it is twoness only in a very particular sense. This is not the twoness of the doppelganger of the romantic period, or the twoness of the “split mind” of the schizophrenic, and neither is it the twoness of the self/other distinction that so forcefully animated culture and philosophy during the twentieth century, particularly in cultural anthropology and then later in poststructuralism. Rather we see here a twoness of the material, a digitization at the level of the aesthetic regime itself.

Consider the call and response heard across the works featured here by Apagya and Deschenes. At the most superficial level, one might observe that these are works about superimposition, about compositing. Apagya’s photographs exploit one of the oldest and most useful tricks of picture making: superimpose one layer on top of another layer in order to produce a picture. Painters do this all the time of course, and very early on it became a mainstay of photographic technique (even if it often remained relegated to mere “trick” photography), evident in photomontage, spirit photography, and even the side-by-side compositing techniques of the carte de visite popularized by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in the 1850s. Recall too that the cinema has made productive use of superimposition, adopting the technique with great facility from the theater and its painted scrims and moving backdrops. (Perhaps the best illustration of this comes at the end of A Night at the Opera [1935], when Harpo Marx goes on a lunatic rampage through the flyloft during the opera’s performance, raising and lowering painted backdrops to great comic effect.) So the more “modern” cinematic techniques of, first, rear screen projection, and then later chromakey (known commonly as the “green screen” or “blue screen” effect), are but a reiteration of the much longer legacy of compositing in image making.

Deschenes’ “Green Screen #4” points to this broad aesthetic history, as it empties out the content of the image, forcing us to acknowledge the suppressed color itself – in this case green, but any color will work. Hence Deschenes gives us nothing but a pure background, a pure something.

Allowed to curve gracefully off the wall onto the floor, the green color field resembles the “sweep wall” used commonly in portraiture or fashion photography whenever an artist wishes to erase the lines and shadows of the studio environment. “Green Screen #4” is thus the antithesis of what has remained for many years the signal art work about video chromakey, Peter Campus’ “Three Transitions” (1973). Whereas Campus attempted to draw attention to the visual and spatial paradoxes made possible by chromakey, and even in so doing was forced to hide the effect inside the jittery gaps between images, Deschenes by contrast feels no such anxiety, presenting us with the medium itself, minus any “content” necessary to fuel it, minus the powerful mise en abyme of the Campus video, and so too minus Campus’ mirthless autobiographical staging. If Campus ultimately resolves the relationship between images through a version of montage, Deschenes offers something more like a “divorced digitality” in which no two images are brought into relation at all, only the minimal substrate remains, without input or output.

The sweep wall is evident too in Apagya’s images, only of a different sort, as the artifice of the various backgrounds – in a nod not so much to fantasy as to kitsch – both fuses with and separates from the foreground subject. Yet what might ultimately unite the works by Apagya and Deschenes is not so much the compositing technique, but a more general reference, albeit oblique but nevertheless crucial, to the fact that such techniques are today entirely quotidian, entirely usual. These are everyday folk techniques through and through. One needs only a web cam and simple software to perform chromakey compositing on a computer, just as one might go to the county fair and have one’s portrait superimposed on the body of a cartoon character.

What I’m trying to stress here is that there is nothing particularly “technological” about digitality. All that is required is a division from one to two – and by extension from two to three and beyond to the multiple. This is why I see layering as so important, for it spotlights an internal separation within the image. Apagya’s settings are digital, therefore, simply by virtue of the fact that he addresses our eye toward two incompatible aesthetic zones existing within the image. The artifice of a painted backdrop, and the pose of a person in a portrait.

Certainly the digital computer is “digital” by virtue of being binary, which is to say by virtue of encoding and processing numbers at the lowest levels using base-two mathematics. But that is only the most prosaic and obvious exhibit of its digitality. For the computer is “digital” too in its atomization of the universe, into, for example, a million Facebook profiles, all equally separate and discrete. Or likewise “digital” too in the computer interface itself which splits things irretrievably into cursor and content, window and file, or even, as we see commonly in video games, into heads-up-display and playable world. The one divides into two.

So when clusters of repetition appear across Ann Craven’s paintings, or the iterative layers of the “copy” of the “reconstruction” in the video here by Thomas Julier and Cédric Eisenring, or the accumulations of images that proliferate in Olia Lialina and Dragon Espenschied’s “Comparative History of Classic Animated GIFs and Glitter Graphics” [2007] (a small snapshot of what they have assembled in their spectacular book from 2009 titled Digital Folklore), or elsewhere in works like Oliver Laric’s clipart videos (“787 Cliparts” [2006] and “2000 Cliparts” [2010]), we should not simply recall the famous meditations on copies and repetitions, from Walter Benjamin in 1936 to Gilles Deleuze in 1968, but also a larger backdrop that evokes the very cleavages emanating from western metaphysics itself from Plato onward. For this same metaphysics of division is always already a digital metaphysics as it forever differentiates between subject and object, Being and being, essence and instance, or original and repetition. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we see here such vivid aesthetic meditations on that same cleavage, whether or not a computer was involved.

Another perspective on the same question would be to think about appropriation. There is a common way of talking about Internet art that goes roughly as follows: the beginning of net art in the middle to late 1990s was mostly “modernist” in that it tended to reflect back on the possibilities of the new medium, building an aesthetic from the material affordances of code, screen, browser, and jpeg, just as modernists in painting or literature built their own aesthetic style from a reflection on the specific affordances of line, color, tone, or timbre; whereas the second phase of net art, coinciding with “Web 2.0” technologies like blogging and video sharing sites, is altogether more “postmodern” in that it tends to co-opt existing material into recombinant appropriations and remixes. If something like the “WebStalker” web browser or the Jodi.org homepage are emblematic of the first period, then John Michael Boling’s “Guitar Solo Threeway,” Brody Condon’s “Without Sun,” or the Nasty Nets web surfing club, now sadly defunct, are emblematic of the second period.

I’m not entirely unsatisfied by such a periodization, even if it tends to confuse as many things as it clarifies – not entirely unsatisfied because it indicates that appropriation too is a technique of digitality. As Martin Heidegger signals, by way of his notoriously enigmatic concept Ereignis, western thought and culture was always a process in which a proper relationship of belonging is established in a world, and so too appropriation establishes new relationships of belonging between objects and their contexts, between artists and materials, and between viewers and works of art. (Such is the definition of appropriation after all: to establish a belonging.) This is what I mean when I say that appropriation is a technique of digitality: it calls out a distinction in the object from “where it was prior” to “where it is now,” simply by removing that object from one context of belonging and separating it out into another. That these two contexts are merely different – that something has changed – is evidence enough of the digitality of appropriation. Even when the act of appropriation does not reduplicate the object or rely on multiple sources, as with the artistic ready-made, it still inaugurates a “twoness” in the appropriated object, an asterisk appended to the art work denoting that something is different.

Takeshi Murata, “Cyborg” (2011)

Perhaps this is why Takeshi Murata continues his exploration of the multiplicities at the core of digital aesthetics by returning to that age old format, the still life. Is not the still life itself a kind of appropriation, in that it brings together various objects into a relationship of belonging: fig and fowl in the Dutch masters, or here the various detritus of contemporary cyber culture, from cult films to iPhones?

Because appropriation brings things together it must grapple with a fundamental question. Whatever is brought together must form a relation. These various things must sit side-by-side with each other. Hence one might speak of any grouping of objects in terms of their “parallel” nature, that is to say, in terms of the way in which they maintain their multiple identities in parallel.

But let us dwell for a moment longer on these agglomerations of things, and in particular their “parallel” composition. By parallel I mean the way in which digital media tend to segregate and divide art into multiple, separate channels. These parallel channels may be quite manifest, as in the separate video feeds that make up the aforementioned “Guitar Solo Threeway,” or they may issue from the lowest levels of the medium, as when video compression codecs divide the moving image into small blocks of pixels that move and morph semi-autonomously within the frame. In fact I have found it useful to speak of this in terms of the “parallel image” in order to differentiate today’s media making from that of a century ago, which Friedrich Kittler and others have chosen to label “serial” after the serial sequences of the film strip, or the rat-ta-tat-tat of a typewriter.

Thus films like Tatjana Marusic’s “The Memory of a Landscape” (2004) or Takeshi Murata’s “Monster Movie” (2005) are genuinely digital films, for they show parallelity in inscription. Each individual block in the video compression scheme has its own autonomy and is able to write to the screen in parallel with all the other blocks. These are quite literally, then, “multichannel” videos – we might even take a cue from online gaming circles and label them “massively multichannel” videos. They are multichannel not because they require multiple monitors, but because each individual block or “channel” within the image acts as an individual micro video feed. Each color block is its own channel. Thus, the video compression scheme illustrates, through metonymy, how pixel images work in general, and, as I suggest, it also illustrates the larger currents of digitality, for it shows that these images, in order to create “an” image must first proliferate the division of sub-images, which themselves ultimately coalesce into something resembling a whole. In other words, in order to create a “one” they must first bifurcate the single image source into two or more separate images.

The digital image is thus a cellular and discrete image, consisting of separate channels multiplexed in tandem or triplicate or, greater, into nine, twelve, twenty-four, one hundred, or indeed into a massively parallel image of a virtually infinite visuality.

For me this generates a more appealing explanation for why art and culture has, over the last several decades, developed a growing anxiety over copies, repetitions, simulations, appropriations, reenactments – you name it. It is common to attribute such anxiety to a generalized disenchantment permeating modern life: our culture has lost its aura and can no longer discern an original from a copy due to endless proliferations of simulation. Such an assessment is only partially correct. I say only partially because I am skeptical of the romantic nostalgia that often fuels such pronouncements. For who can demonstrate with certainty that the past carried with it a greater sense of aesthetic integrity, a greater unity in art? Yet the assessment begins to adopt a modicum of sense if we consider it from a different point of view, from the perspective of a generalized digitality. For if we define the digital as “the one dividing into two,” then it would be fitting to witness works of art that proliferate these same dualities and multiplicities. In other words, even if there was a “pure” aesthetic origin it was a digital origin to begin with. And thus one needn’t fret over it having infected our so-called contemporary sensibilities.

Instead it is important not to be blinded by the technology. But rather to determine that, within a generalized digitality, there must be some kind of differential at play. There must be something different, and without such a differential it is impossible to say that something is something (rather than something else, or indeed rather than nothing). The one must divide into something else. Nothing less and nothing more is required, only a generic difference. And this is our first insight into the “something” of the digital.

_____

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. 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

March 18, 2015
Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore: A Conversation between Adeline Koh and Sangeetha Thanapal

Edited by Petra Dierkes-Thrun
Introduction (by Adeline Koh)

~

Singapore, a tiny Southeast Asian nation-state, is well known for its impressive economic growth since its independence in 1965. Filled with towering skyscrapers, an impressive, well-maintained public transport system and an unemployment rate the envy of most industrialized nations, the small country is often referenced as a model postcolonial state.

Despite these impressive economic strides, many of the racial tensions that have their roots in Singapore’s colonial history continue to manifest today, especially in relation to gender. Formerly a British colony, Singapore boasts a multi-racial, multi-ethnic population, most of which are classified into four major groups by the state: Chinese, Malay, Indian and ‘Other’. Unlike Singapore’s neighboring countries Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore’s ethnic Chinese population is the majority ethnic group. These four categories are also constantly being challenged and nuanced by the high level of foreigners who are employed and study in Singapore. Constructions of ethnicities are highly inflected by gender roles in the four major ethnic groups and nuanced by the constant influx of migrants in the country, which include mainland Chinese ‘study mamas’ (mothers accompanying their young children to study in Singapore), female domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia, and male construction workers from China, India and Bangladesh.

Singapore’s ethnic Chinese population enjoys the most economic wealth and social status in this small country, which manifests itself in political and material privilege. Despite the fact that there are four officially sanctioned state languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil), television screens on public transport often broadcast shows only in English or Mandarin; increasingly, customer service representatives will be fluent in Mandarin but not the other two official languages; there are multiple reports of taxi drivers refusing to answer calls in areas where there are often more minority people. National beauty pageants also tend to celebrate a Chinese ideal of feminine beauty, as opposed to other ethnicities, so that it becomes exceedingly rare for a minority to win these competitions.

Scholarly work on race and ethnicity in Singapore seldom discusses this inflection of racial privilege with gender, an extremely important intersection that nuances the structure of minority identity in the country. In this interview, I speak with Sangeetha Thanapal, an Indian Singaporean woman who first introduced the controversial concept of ‘Chinese privilege’ in Singapore. Thanapal holds that structural ethnic Singaporean Chinese’s racial privilege is in some ways analogous to White privilege in Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, despite the important differences in the historical, social, political, and geographic circumstances and developments of these two privileges. Thanapal’s provocative work and the virulent responses it engendered (mainly by Singaporean Chinese), inspired me to write a Medium essay titled ‘To My Dear Fellow Singapore Chinese: Shut Up When A Minority Is Talking About Race’ (which has since garnered over 105,000 page views and 56 recommends). We are now collaborating on a Medium Collection on Chinese Privilege, which seeks to bring to light the stories of minority voices in Singapore.

Chinese privilege in Singapore is unique because it occurs outside of mainland China and territories which it has historically controlled. In this manner, our interview is intended as the beginning of an examination of a larger Chinese privilege, with its own histories of colonialism and migratory communities. We note that in order to zero in on the current racial and political structures in Singapore, as well as specifically on the complex role of gender, our interview does not focus on the historical development of this privilege per se, or on the obviously important, historically motivated distinctions between different groups of Chinese in Singapore. In the nineteenth century, under British colonialism, southern Chinese immigrated from China to Singapore and Malaysia to escape famine and the effects of the Opium Wars back home, and arrived to a colony in which they were brutally subjugated: the majority of male Chinese immigrants experienced great abuse under a system of indentured labor (the “coolie” system), and many of the (comparatively few) female immigrants were forced into prostitution. While this interview is intended to open up a conversation about monolithic Singaporean Chinese privilege today, we plan a more comprehensive critical historical genealogy of comparative Chinese privilege in our future work in order to elaborate upon these distinctions and developments.

Furthermore, future work should pursue two additional important lines of inquiry: first, a clear conceptual delineation between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking Singaporeans and the different sorts of privileges which they encounter; and second, a comparison between the historical forces driving the subalternity of the indigenous Malays, and that of the diasporic Indian population. Like the Chinese, many contemporary Indian Singaporeans arrived in the colony as indentured labor, as well as convicts, traders and as sepoys under the British military. Which historical and material conditions allowed the Chinese to appropriate the forms of privilege they enjoy in Singapore today, while Indians could not join or rival them in this privilege in their own Singaporean experience? Further, we want to investigate the sorts of cultural imaginaries that are used in the creation of Singaporean Chinese privilege and its connection with reinventions of mainland Chinese chauvinism (such as in the Chinese term for China, Zhong Guo, meaning Middle Kingdom, center of the world between heaven and hell). We also want to continue building on this concept of Chinese privilege through a simultaneous examination of Tamil-Hindu internal prejudices of the Indian community in Singapore, as well as its relationship with the Malay community.

In many respects, then, this interview is simply a first step towards a larger, sorely needed conversation about race, gender, and privilege in Singapore. We hope it will inspire others to build on our suggested research trajectories and also develop new ones of their own.

*******

Adeline Koh: Sangeetha, thanks so much for speaking with me today. To begin with, could you tell me about your experience being an Indian Singaporean?

Sangeetha Thanapal: To be Indian Singaporean is to carry a number of identities, not all of whom work in concert with each other. We are expected to keep in touch with our root culture, language and traditions, but never to engage in any kind of ethnic chauvinism. We are expected to be bilingual cosmopolitan citizens of the world, while constantly being grounded in Indian culture. Those who manage to do this effectively are invariably performing a form of code switching between their traditional Indian language-speaking identities and their English-speaking, modern ones. We are told we have to be firmly established in our cultures, but people who follow this advice are seen as provincial. To speak your mother tongue well is to invite questions about how long ago you immigrated from India. It is this tension that we have to constantly negotiate, and many of us cannot or refuse to do so. To be Indian is to have my ethnicity matter in all things, but to be Singaporean is not have it matter at all, supposedly. It is ironic and–given the inability of the state to adequately marry these two binaries–unsurprising that race and ethnicity are difficult concepts to examine and contend with in Singapore.

AK: Could you elaborate on this?

ST: The racialism paradox in Singapore makes race front and center of your identity, while at the same time denying that race has anything to do with the obvious differences in people’s treatment. One example is the Singaporean Identity Card, which states your ethnicity.¹ This identity card is akin to a Social Security number in the United States (used to apply for housing, bank loans, even something as simple as a phone number), and hence including this information makes someone’s racial identity a dominant factor. It is not hard to imagine the many ways in which this can disadvantage minorities. Even job applications ask for your ethnicity, a practice that is illegal in many countries. Educational achievements are viewed through the lens of race, not gender or class.² Why does the state constantly racialize us and pit us against one another? This also obfuscates the intertwinement of race and class. For instance, the state says that Malays are underperforming³ in academics, leaving out their constant marginalization leading to such class factors. The Singaporean pledge literally says, ‘regardless of race, language or religion,’ implying that meritocracy trumps race in this alleged land of opportunity. Supposedly, hard work comes with the same opportunities for all. The government has a governance principle: ‘Work for reward, Reward for work.’⁴ Meritocracy is a neoliberal lie that tends to ignore the systemic inequalities that have strong material effects on people’s ability to live and work in Singapore. It places the blame for failure on those who did not work hard enough or take full advantage of the choices they had, conveniently forgetting that some people did not have a diverse range of choices to begin with.

AK: It almost seems as though minority Singaporeans have to adopt what W.E.B. Dubois called a ‘double consciousness’–always having to think in terms of the language and social of the dominant group while maintaining their own cultural space. What do you think?

ST: When Dubois speaks of double consciousness, he is referring to people of colour’s, specifically Black people’s, constant negotiation of conflicting racial identities, often a result of racial oppression. In The Souls of Black Folk, he writes that Black people feel ‘’twoness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body…’⁵ It is the struggle between our view of ourselves, versus the dominant racial narrative. Dubois was speaking to people sharing an African history and heritage, of course, and in that context, he also addressed White supremacy and its implication in such double consciousness. In Singapore, Chinese supremacy and institutionalized racism against minorities have resulted in a similar double consciousness. We constantly think about and cater to Chinese people, as they have institutionalized power. In Singapore, the government regularly emphasizes the need for the different ethnic groups to stay in touch with their cultures and traditions, so it is not just Chinese supremacy itself that’s responsible. Personally, I think they don’t actually object to Indians and Malays giving up their cultures; on the contrary: they would probably love it if many of us gave up our cultures to assimilate through marriage or learning Mandarin, for example. The government finds Malay culture a hindrance to its economic growth and would like spread more ‘Chinese’ attitudes of hard work and personal drive. I think the government also wants Chinese people to be steeped in their traditions and are afraid of encroaching westernization. It only cares about keeping minorities’ traditions as long as they are a marketable tourism commodity, but not because they are valuable on their own. The government needs to keep up its multi-racial facade for tourists, who feel like coming to Singapore means that they can access authentic Chinese, Malay and Indian culture, all in the same place.

AK: Interesting. Dubois talks about ‘twoness’ in relation to race. How would this be further refined in relation to gender? Can you describe the difference between being an Indian Singaporean man and a woman?

ST: Being an Indian Singaporean woman is to be at the very bottom of the totem pole. Patriarchy and ensuing male privilege means that while Indian men are discriminated against for being Indian, they are also treated better than Indian women, both by the majority Chinese community and within the Singaporean Indian community. Indian women are still fairly restricted in their movements and their lives, expected to be both the modern worker and the traditional housewife. Indian men retain their patriarchal freedom. In Singapore, the hierarchy of race puts the Chinese at the top, Malays in the middle, and Indians at the bottom. Some have argued that Indians have it better than Malays in Singapore, which I think is a valid argument, depending on context. Indians are generally better off than the Malay community in terms of education and economic status, and one might even say that their minority class privilege intersects with the majority Chinese’s.⁶ In 2010, the average household income for Indians was almost twice as high as in Malay households.⁷ There is, however, a lot more research regarding Malay marginalization.⁸ Because of the diasporic Tamil Hindu immigrants’ relatively high socio-economic standing, many people do not think there is discrimination against our ethnic group. What is important is that instead of seeking to compete for attention for our oppression, we study the Chinese dominated state’s specific ways of enacting it against both communities, and validate differing experiences while encouraging a new solidarity.

As mentioned above, women of different races are treated differently. This kind of colourism and inter-POC (people of colour) policing of skin colour is not new or unique to Singapore, of course. A lot of it is internalized White supremacy: the lighter you are, the higher on the hierarchy you stand. Colourism is a serious problem within the Indian community itself, and, to a lesser extent, within the Malay community as well. White supremacy and Chinese supremacy function in combination here. Darker-skinned Indian and Malay women are constantly bombarded with messages that their skin colour makes them unattractive. Our body shapes, which are naturally curvier, are compared to skinnier, fairer Chinese women’s, and found inadequate. In such body policing, race and gender again intersect and amplify each other. The communities themselves are responsible here, but so are the state and the media. In the 2013 Singapore Miss Universe, there were no Indian or Malay women in the top twenty. Since 1966, which is when Singapore started being represented at the Miss Universe pageant, Malay or Indian women have won the title at home a grand total of four times.⁹ In 2014, for only the second time ever, an Indian woman won Miss Singapore Universe. She was inundated with disparaging comments on her face and skin colour online.¹⁰

Discrimination against Indian men is mitigated by their gender. Not so women’s: whatever racial discrimination they undergo, it is made yet worse by being female. William Keng Mun Lee of the University of Lingnan argues that in Singapore, women in general are in lower-paying jobs across both core and periphery. This observation, despite the small differences in the educational standards of males and females in Singapore, leads him to theorize that this is due to structural factors such as sexism and discrimination. Interestingly, however, he says that it is also due to ‘Chinese male workers success in protecting their economic success by excluding females from high-paying jobs.’¹¹ Chinese males, not Singaporean men in general, hold wealth and power in the core industries in Singapore. So if Chinese females are being excluded for being women, how much worse is the situation for Indian and Malay women?

AK: Let’s talk a little bit about the concept you’ve developed, ‘Chinese privilege.’ It’s a terrific concept that can be easily used to explain social inequity in Singapore. How did you come up with the concept of Chinese privilege?

ST: I remember the exact moment. I was reading bell hooks’ ‘Beloved Community: A World Without Racism.’ I deeply sympathized with what she was saying, even though she was speaking about a different context. I performed a simple experiment. I took a paragraph I particularly loved and I substituted the words ‘Chinese’ for ‘White.’ I read it back to myself, and the moment of realization that that paragraph could have been written about Singapore, and not the U.S., was what made me realize that racial privilege is not simply a White phenomenon. I don’t mean that I never realized it before, only that I had lacked the language to express it in a way that wholly encompassed the experience not as singular, but as universal to minorities here. In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, hooks speaks of ‘supremacist attitudes that permeate every aspect of […] culture’ while ‘most white folks unconsciously absorbing the ideology of white supremacy […] do not realize this socialisation is taking place [… and] feel they are not racist.’¹²

Now, I am not going to make the claim that hooks’s ideas are wholly transferable to the Singaporean context. That would be an undue appropriation of the African American experience and erase the specificity of their oppression. But there are enough similarities for me to associate the two phenomena in my mind: the daily microaggressions that minorities experience, employment discrimination, the paradoxical, simultaneous derision and appropriation of their culture.

While I realize that the concept of White privilege has its own context and history, it really helped me understand the situation in Singapore by analogy. Chinese Supremacist attitudes permeate our society. The PAP believes in keeping the Chinese and their Confucian ethic at the helm, supposedly for our economic growth and success. So-called Special Assistance Plan schools, where all taxpayers’ money pays for Chinese students’ opportunities only, with the argument that this practice enables better trade with China in the future.¹³ The media constantly laud China as the world’s next superpower, even though economists predict its one-child policy will cause it to fall behind an ever-burgeoning Indian state. And the state continues to make racist comments such as the following: ‘We could not have held the society together if we had not made adjustments to the system that gives the Malays, although they are not as hardworking and capable as the other races, a fair share of the cake.’¹⁴ Religion, specifically Islam, is not spared from racist attacks: ‘In those days, you didn’t have a school tuckshop, so you bought two cents of nasi lemak and you ate it. And there was a kway teow man and so on. But now, you go to schools with Malay and Chinese, there’s a halal and non-halal segment and so too, the universities. And they tend to sit separately, not to be contaminated. All that becomes a social divide. Now I’m not saying right or wrong, I’m saying that’s the demands of the religion but the consequences are a veil across and I think it was designed to be so. Islam is exclusive.’¹⁵

Chinese people do not see such comments as racist. Most people see it as normal–common wisdom. If minorities ever raise their voices, they are told to shut up and sit down.

I started doing a similar analogy exercise with other texts after my experience with bell hooks. In Privilege, Power and Difference, Allan G. Johnson says:

Being able to command the attention of lower-status individuals without having to give it in return is a key aspect of privilege. African Americans for example, have to pay close attention to whites and white culture and get to know them well enough to avoid displeasing them, since whites control jobs, schools, government, the police, and most other resources and sources of power. White privilege gives little reason to pay attention to African Americans or how White privilege affects them.¹⁶

If you pay attention to minorities in Singapore, the analogy rings so true. We know about Chinese culture, some of us learn Mandarin to make ourselves more employable, we try to understand how the Chinese work, we give in to them when they speak Mandarin around us, never asking them to be sensitive towards us. We know that knowledge of them will help us; they, on the other hand, know very little about our cultures, religions or languages. They do not have to: not knowing it does not affect them in a material way. Reading about the African American experience triggered these important insights about our own situation for me.

AK: Could you say a little more about how you define Chinese privilege? Does Chinese privilege take place around the world, or is it specific to Singapore?

ST: I define Chinese privilege similarly as White privilege, again by analogy rather than wholesale transference of one distinct historical context to another. White privilege is invisible and normal to those who have it, which makes it hard to discuss because people rarely see how they are being privileged. It goes beyond advantages people enjoy because of their race. It is also the unearned power the system confers by virtue of your race alone. It is a set of institutional benefits, with greater access to power and resources and opportunity, that are closed off to those who do not have it. In the same vein, these advantages are bestowed upon Chinese Singaporeans, regardless of any other intersectional identity they carry. By virtue of being Chinese in Singapore, they start life on a higher place in the scale as compared to minorities. They are the beneficiaries of a system of racial superiority, which is why when I talk about the country I call it a Chinese Supremacist state.

Many see Chinese privilege in Singapore as the root cause of Singapore’s economic strength. Lee Kuan Yew is the only man to have ever held three political titles in the government. That alone should signal his significance. He was Singapore’s first Prime Minister, and as such, the chief architect behind modern Singapore. He later became Senior Minister, a title he held until his predecessor Goh Chock Tong ascended to the position. In an attempt to continue keeping him in power, he was then given the title of Minister Mentor in 2004. He has been in power since 1959, and only stepped down in 1990, making him the world’s second longest serving head of state, after Fidel Castro. He is the man who has most impacted Singapore with his policies and his words still continue to hold enormous power and clout. In 1989, he commented that Chinese immigration from Hong Kong to Singapore was necessary, given the low birth rates amongst Chinese Singaporeans: without the Chinese ‘there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible.’¹⁷ Chinese privilege means that problems within the Chinese community are framed as national crises, while problems within minority communities are blamed on culture or genetics, and left to the communities themselves to handle.

Chinese privilege in Singapore falls into a unique category with Taiwan (and China, of course). Chinese privilege cannot exist in the U.S. or in Europe because Chinese lack institutionalized economic, social and political power in those places. In Singapore, Chinese Singaporeans have power in every facet of life; it is systemic and systematic.

AK: For me as a Chinese Singaporean, your analysis makes a lot of sense. How does this racial concept of privilege intertwine with other intersectional oppressions, such as gender?

ST: In 2012, a survey found that women hold just 6.9 per cent of directorships. Moreover, the joint study with advocacy group BoardAgender, found 61.3 per cent of the more than 730 companies listed on the Singapore exchange do not have a single female member on their boards.’¹⁸ The survey does not break it down further by race, making the assumption that all women in Singapore are discriminated against only on the basis of their gender, not their race. Singapore has the same gender representation as other places that tend to erase race in favor of gender. In the West, White women often stand in for ‘all women,’ even though they actually earn more than Black and Latino men in the US,¹⁹ just as Chinese women are seen as representatives of all women in Singapore, including minorities.

Recently, an article cited a survey of Singaporean women’s under-representation on company boards. ‘Companies with more diversity in boardrooms are more profitable, but Singapore doesn’t fare so well – 56.5% of the companies surveyed had all-male board members.’²⁰ It was a matter of much discussion. The article itself concluded that ‘we recommend empowering board nominating committees to cast their net wider and pro-actively look for women candidates.’ However, the article also mentions that ‘59% of the boards were of single ethnicity.’ No discussions, no conversations online or in the mainstream media ensued about this, and the article does not even seem to pick up on the potential impact for minorities, let alone minority women. If women’s rights groups such as AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) are solely focussed on gender representation, not gender in conjunction with racial imbalance, do we need to wonder why minorities on company boards are so few in number? Who are the women actually being represented here? Clearly, Chinese women are the default here. Given the intersection of gender and race, Indian and Malay women are at a double disadvantage. But that conversation does not happen.

Feminism in Singapore is about making Chinese women equal to Chinese men, not about equality for all women. Dismantling the Chinese patriarchal structure itself would mean that Chinese women would have to give up their racial power and privilege, too, and they do not want to do that. Chinese women need to realise that they actually have better opportunities than many minority men here. As minority women, we are far more attuned to racism and sexism than Chinese women are, because we fight both those intersections every day, and we see how we are treated not as women, but specifically as Malay or Indian women.

In the recent Singapore Literature Prize awards, all the winners were male, and a furor about women’s exclusion from these prestigious awards broke out.²¹ Again, however, there is no furor over the fact that no minority person has even won the English prize for fiction. The closest call was the playwright Haresh Sharma in 1993 and the poet Alfian Sa’at, who was awarded a commendation prize in 1998 (both before the prize was categorized into languages). This year, there was not even one minority on the English short list, either for fiction or non-fiction. Chinese writers are fully represented both in the Chinese and English categories. This is what Chinese privilege looks like in everyday life. There was only one, just one, minority woman, in the entire shortlist across all three categories under the English poetry category.²² Of course, she did not win.

Chinese women clearly realize the gender disparity in Singapore. But since they see themselves as the only women worth talking about in Singapore, they do not focus on the effects of racial discrimination against other women in Singapore.

AK: I have seen exactly what you mean–Chinese feminists who remain silent when their minority sisters and brothers are being discriminated against. It makes me so mad. For those who are new to the concept, can you please elaborate a little bit more on the effects of Chinese privilege, and give some concrete examples about how Chinese privilege affects minorities in Singapore?

ST: Privilege and oppression are two sides of the same coin. If one exists, the other does, too. Chinese privilege means that Singaporean minorities are oppressed. Within minority groups themselves, there are subtle differences. Light-skinned North Indians are treated marginally better than darker-skinned South Indians. The term ‘shit-skin’ is often a slur the Chinese use to describe us. This further intersects with class, as class privilege often mediates racial oppression. Higher-class Indians are treated better, and are often co-opted into Chinese supremacy, or they assimilate themselves by choice by marrying Chinese partners, etc. Those the government co-opts become exemplary tokens of our so called multi-culturalism — but they might as well be Chinese. S Dhanabalan, once almost tapped to be the next Prime Minister of Singapore, is of Indian Tamil descent and was a prominent minority in the government.²³ He was supposed to represent the Tamil-Indian population in Singapore. He has a Chinese wife and is Christian, while most Indians in Singapore are Hindus. There is such a lack of proper representation of minorities in Parliament. K Shanmugam, another Minister, was instrumental in the state policing of religious Hindu expressions, such as Thaipusam,²⁴ where he spoke on behalf of the government, all the while claiming to represent Indian Singaporeans. Elite Indians buy into the state rhetoric and enforce it against their own people. The complicity with the Chinese majority interest by those who could have done something for the community ensures farcical representation only, designed to only allow us a voice compatible with the government line.

AK: The issue of interracial marriage is an interesting one. How do you understand Chinese privilege in relation to marriage and relationships?

ST: In recent years, the number of interracial marriages in Singapore have risen. This is to be expected–after all, we are a multiracial country with a multitude of races and cultures. In 2012, one in five marriages was interethnic.²⁵ Singapore prides itself on being a postracial society, and within the Indian community, there has been indeed been a strong increase of Indian men dating and marrying Chinese women. And yet, the reverse is rarely true–Chinese men do not usually date or marry Indian women. It is also important to realize that the Indian men who marry Chinese women are by and large extremely well-educated members of the higher Indian-Singaporean socioeconomic classes. Chinese women are not marrying blue-collar Indian men, but rather those considered most eligible. Again, race and class issues are intertwined here. Fanon perhaps explains this phenomenon best in Black Skin, White Masks: for Black men, relationships with white women are often about the need for recognition and indirectly, the desire for assimilation.²⁶ I believe this is true in the Singapore context. Indian men who date Chinese women are desperate to assimilate. They instinctively realize the privilege of being Chinese, and unable to access it any other way, aspire to marry a Chinese woman. They do not have to experience racism as much when their wives’ Chinese privilege protects them, and it gives them access to opportunities that are usually reserved for Chinese people. They are effectively deracializing themselves.

Heterosexual patriarchy is also at work here. Women are expected to marry up wherever possible. Indian women occupy the lowest rung of the Singaporean race hierarchy, and Chinese men occupy the highest. For a Chinese man to date and marry an Indian woman means to marry far beneath his status. Chinese women of a middling socio-economic class can move up a class by marrying the wealthiest indian men in the country. These Indian men, lacking racial privilege, which is itself a ‘property right’,²⁷ can also move up the racial class through gaining access to their wives’ racial privilege. Chinese men gain nothing and lose everything by marrying an Indian girl, while Indian men gain access to racial privilege and Chinese women to class privilege by marrying rich Indian men. But what about Indian women? Singapore does not break down interracial marriages by gender, which obfuscates this racist situation, but the number of people needing to marry into Chineseness shows how powerless the minority communities really are. Indian women like me do not usually have access to the same opportunities Indian men have. Again, we observe the complex intertwinement of sexual, class, and race discrimination here, and the internal paradoxes and contradictions to official postracial, egalitarian Singaporean rhetoric are obvious.

AK: One interesting theme repeated here is that representation is either always Chinese or White. What do you think is the relationship of Chineseness to Whiteness in Singapore?

ST: Generally speaking, I think that Chinese Singaporeans do not seem to struggle with reconciling Whiteness and Chineseness. I believe this is the case because Chineseness is seen as equal, and in certain aspects even superior to Whiteness. Whiteness is liked, welcomed, and used as a stamp of approval, but the liberal political ‘Western values’ frequently clash with our ‘Asian values.’ Chinese people tend to see themselves as victims of White racism (while at the same time refusing to recognize their own racism regarding other minorities in Singapore, as I outlined above). White expatriates work well-paying jobs and live in the most expensive apartments in Singapore. They are treated very well everywhere they go in Singapore, because the ‘White is better’ mindset still exists here. Chineseness functions the same way in Singapore as Whiteness, sometimes even more so, since the Chinese are the true owners of power here while White people are long-time beneficiaries of that power.

As a person of colour living in a supposedly decolonized Singapore, I would say that what makes our struggles markedly different from minorities in the West is that we have to deal with Whiteness on top of Chinese supremacy. So we experience a double racial oppression. I often say minorities here have been colonised twice, once by the British, and once again by the Chinese. What other decolonised state has a completely alien population control political and economic power, while the formerly decolonized indigenous people remain continuously marginalized? The language of Critical Race Theory can only take us so far in Singapore. We need to start coining our own terminology and framework for talking about racism in Singapore. This conversation has just only begun.

AK: When you complicate this issue of privilege by bringing gender into the picture, how do things shift for women, regarding White privilege and Chinese privilege?

ST: Intersections always make things complicated, especially for people who carry multiple oppressed identities, and so these shifts are difficult to quantify. White women have more privilege than Chinese women. Chinese women have more privilege than Indian and Malay women. Even among Indian and Malay women, the comparative amount of privilege is hard to pin down. Indians in Singapore are by and large Tamil, the darkest Indians from the subcontinent. Malay women are generally fairer, a light brown compared to the dark brown of most Indian women here. Due to colourism, Malay women might thus have a tad more privilege. But at the same time, this can be negated by something simple as wearing the hijab. Singapore is suspicious of Malay Muslims, and Malay women who wear the hijab are seen as conservative and oppressed. Indian women, however, are not seen as religiously fanatical, even if they are in ethnic attire, as Hinduism is not seen as the same kind of threat as Islam.

AK: Can you talk about people who inhabit in-between racial spaces, for example people who might be of one ethnicity but can pass for another? How does racism affect them in Singapore?

ST: Passing is a mixed bag, and it is present across all intersectionally oppressed identities. To put it simply, passing is the ability to be able to ‘pass’ as your oppressors, even though you carry an identity and occupy a space as the ‘other.’ There are many people of mixed race in Singapore, especially a group of people in Singapore called ‘Chindians’, which is a term for people who are Indian and Chinese, and who can pass for Chinese and thus have access to Chinese privilege. People like ‘Chindians’ can effectively move between the worlds of oppressors and oppressed. It is really difficult for people who pass, because they are always fighting to have their entire identities validated.

AK: We are nearing the end of our conversation. What messages would you like to give to young minorities in Singapore?

ST: Audre Lorde said that our silence will not protect us. This is true no matter who we are. When you are silent, you are complicit. Inaction against oppression is collusion with oppression.

To young minorities in Singapore, I would say: you can start small. Call out Chinese people when they behave micro-aggressively. Call out our own people when we show stereotypical prejudices towards Malays, Indians and other minorities. Many Indians believe the Malays are better positioned because of their supposedly free education, even though that policy actually ended a long time ago. Malays believe the Indians are the preferred minority, because there are more high-profile and prominent Indians, and because Indians are compared favorably to Malays, to blame Malays for their alleged lack of progress. Indians are merely the token minority, there only because the state needs to have some public minorities to salvage its international reputation. Indians see Malays as having some sort of special advantage because the state protects their religion, and because they are indigenous to this part of the world. The Chinese supremacist state uses such highly problematic comparisons for its own ends. It wants to keep us from finding solidarity with each other. It wants us to be suspicious of each other. But divide- and-rule tactics only work when we buy the Chinese supremacist state’s lines of thinking and argument.

Zora Neale Hurston said that when you are silent, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it. Every time you remain silent, they believe they have the right to treat you this way, and worse than that, that you want to be treated this way. Again, to the Singaporean youth I would say, do not be afraid, and do not be silent. This country has gone through four generations since independence, and with each, it has become less willing to talk about its serious race problems. That needs to change. The conversation needs to happen. You cannot sit back and let a few of us take all the hits. Hit us long and hard enough, and without the support from our own communities, we will inevitably cower, too. It is unconscionable for you to let others fight your oppression, while you wait to reap the rewards of what may come. Realise that we can only do this together, or we cannot do it at all.
_____

Notes:

1. “National Registration Identity Card.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

2. Ministry of Education, Singapore: Press Releases – Performance by Ethnic Group in National Examinations 2002-2011.” Oct. 29, 2012. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2012/10/performance-by-ethnic-group-in.php. Back to the essay

3. Zakir Hussain, “No Short Cut to Raising Malays’ Maths Grades,” in The Straits Times, Dec. 18, 2009. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://news.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20091214-185790.html Back to the essay

4. Hsien Loong Lee, “Singapore’s Four Principles Of Governance.” Civil Service College, Nov. 1, 2004. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. https://www.cscollege.gov.sg/knowledge/ethos/ethos november 2004/pages/singapore four principles of governance.aspx Back to the essay

5. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1996), 9. Back to the essay

6. Education Statistics Digest.” Ministry of Education, Singapore, Jan. 1, 2013. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/education-statistics-digest/files/esd-2013.pdf Back to the essay

7. Demographics of Singapore.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 14, 2015. Back to the essay

8. See L. Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community (Oxford University Press, 2001) for an excellent discussion on oppression of the Malay community. Back to the essay

9. “Miss Singapore Universe.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 16, 2015. Back to the essay

10. Surekha Yadav, “Is Singapore a Racist Country?” Malay Mail Online, Aug. 30, 2014. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.themalaymailonline.com/opinion/surekha-a-yadav/article/is-singapore-a-racist-country Back to the essay

11. William Keng Mun Lee, “Gender Inequality And Discrimination In Singapore,” in Journal of Contemporary Asia 28, no. 4 (1998): 484-97. Back to the essay

12. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 267. Back to the essay

13. “Special Assistance Plan.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

14. Tom Plate, “The Fox and the Hedgehog (Not a Disney Movie),” in Giants of Asia; Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew Citizen Singapore; How to Build a Nation. 2nd ed. (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International [Asia] Ptd, 2013), 61. Back to the essay

15. Kuan Yew Lee and Fook Kwang Han, Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, 1st ed. (Singapore: Straits Times, 2011), 230. Back to the essay

16. Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference. 2nd ed. (Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 24. Back to the essay

17. Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, Floating on a Malayan Breeze Travels in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 194. Back to the essay

18. Joe Havely, “Singapore Lags in Board Diversity,” Singapore Lags in Board Diversity. Think Business, National University of Singapore, Business School, Mar. 7, 2012. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://thinkbusiness.nus.edu/articles/item/7-singapore-boardroom-diversity Back to the essay

19. Derek Thompson, “The Workforce Is Even More Divided by Race Than You Think,” in The Atlantic, Nov. 6, 2013. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

20. Yen Nee Lee, “Companies with More Diverse Boards Fare Better: Study.” TODAY Online, Sept. 29, 2014. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://tablet.todayonline.com/business/companies-more-diverse-boards-fare-better-study Back to the essay

21. Corrie Tan, “Gender Bias Allegations over Singapore Literature Prize English Poetry Results,” Books News & Top Stories, in The Straits Times, Nov. 6, 2014. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/books/story/gender-bias-allegations-over-singapore-literature-prize-english-poetry-results Back to the essay

22. “Singapore Literature Prize,” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 16, 2015. Back to the essay

23. “S. Dhanabalan,” Wikipedia. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. Back to the essay

24. “The Uproar Over Thaipusam.” The Online Citizen, Jan. 21, 2011. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2011/01/the-uproar-over-thaipusam/ Back to the essay

25. Theresa Tan, “More Mixed Unions, Remarriages Based on Latest Marriage Data,” in The Sunday Times, Sept. 30, 2012, Special Reports section. Back to the essay

26. Frantz Fanon, “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008), 45-60. Back to the essay

27. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707-791. Back to the essay

March 4, 2015
Abecedarium Anthology: The Cambridge Introduction to Edward W. Said

a review by Reshmi Mukherjee
~
Connor McCarthy presents a crisp and detailed overview of Edward W. Said’s life, scholarship, interdisciplinary training, and critical thought processes, for the novice readers of his works. Additionally, the use of simple language and lucid sentence construction has the potential to attract audiences from non-literary backgrounds as well. These readers may be interested in knowing what Michael Sprinker called “the very ideal of the cosmopolitan intellectual that remains so central to the humanities’ self-image to this day.”¹ Therefore this book is unlike most critical enquiry of Said’s works in that it caters to readers across disciplinary boundaries.

The content of the book is not new but the form, narrative technique, is Saidian in nature. McCarthy, an ardent critic of Said, analyzes his written works in relation to “the events and circumstances entailed by and expressed in it.”² Illustrating the relationship of a critic to the text, as explained in Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic, McCarthy reads Said’s literary, political, and critical works as one continuous narrative, and in relation to the key terms of filiation and affiliation. By filiation, Said means the writer’s natural and organic connection by “inherited location.” And affiliation is a “network of relationships that human beings make consciously […] often to replace the loss of filiative relations in modern society.”³ A writer’s work, the text, therefore is a conglomeration of both filiative and affiliative connections hence, a “worldly” phenomenon. Accordingly, McCarthy situates Said’s identity as a scholar and humanist as intrinsically connected to his socio-political and cultural reality.

The book is divided into four chapters: 1) Introduction, life, work, 2) Influences, 3) Works, and 4) Reception. The introduction covers the itinerary of Said’s life including the obsequies paid after his death on 25th September 2003. In so doing McCarthy gives an insight to the complex historical, and filial conjuncture that shaped Said’s persona including his anxiety of being exiled and nation-less, a sentiment that is echoed in his literary works, critical thinking, and political engagement with the Palestinian cause. Alongside, this section pays special attention to Said’s childhood and adolescence as oscillating between different emotional conditions. Said was vexed with contrasting but demanding parents, a constant need to please them, displacement and relocation from Jerusalem to Cairo and then to the United States, and negotiating the paradoxical meaning of his name, which he called “foolishly English.” Parts of this section reiterate Said’s memoir Out of Place but all the information is relevant for readers to understand Said’s “innate sense of a divided but reflexive self.⁴

The second chapter explains the polarized opinions about Said’s academic work. In so doing, McCarthy helps the readers understand Said’s works and his thinking processes. Reviewing the sheer volume and depth of Said’s scholarship, detailing the different schools of thought like Romance philology, Marxism, phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, musicology etc. that influenced him, McCarthy notes that Said did not accept all arguments unconditionally. While Said was influenced by these discourses, he questioned their methodology and application in the real world, while resisting any easy disciplinary categorization of his works. In particular, McCarthy’s reading focuses on Said’s complex relationships with Western Marxist tradition and post-structuralism. While Said was critical of Marxism’s rigid adherence to putatively radical theoretical position and inverse conservatism, he drew inspiration from Marxists George Lukacs, Theodre Adorno, and Antonio Gramsci. Their concepts of “methodological trap,” “absolute resistance to reification and the alienation of consciousness under industrial capitalism,” and “hegemony” continued to inspire his work till the very end.⁵ His relationship with Adorno, especially towards the end of his life, became more of an aesthetic experience, while Gramsci continued to influence his theoretical acumen. This section in the book is theoretically appealing as it epitomizes one of the basic arguments in Orientalism. It explains Said’s idea of the cultural creation of hegemony via Gramsci’s sense of materiality of culture and ideas. For example, Said in Orientalism notes, “It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism… [its] durability and strength.”⁶ By “work” Said here refers to the political elite society, in the Gramscian sense of the term, which retains power by manipulating public opinion. McCarthy further exemplifies that Said was also enthused by Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual whose job it is to forge hegemony. Consequently, Said believed in his position as an organic/public intellectual and enabler of how new socio-political movements intervene in the public sphere.

Like Gramsci, French poststructuralist Michel Foucault also influenced Said’s works. In fact Said was one of the “major mediators of Foucault’s thought into the American academy.”⁷ In Orientalism, Said explains the discursive use of power that shaped knowledge about the non-west, through Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge. Said defines knowledge as part of an underlying master-code or structure, and man is constituted via these discursive practices. However, in his later works, Said challenged Foucault’s notion of power in his 1984 commemorative essay on Foucault’s death “Michel Foucault,” and McCarthy focuses on that aspect in the third chapter.

The second half of this chapter highlights two aspects of Said’s personality, those being his “dialectical and paradoxical” relationship with Joseph Conrad, and admiration and empathy for Erich Auerbach. His fascination for Conrad is so strong that he does not emphasize Conrad’s relationship with the empire; rather, he is interested in Conrad, the exiled intellectual and writer, whose life was full of unresolved tensions. The reason being, Conrad’s personal experience of exile, complex life choices, and lingering sense of alienation, echoed some of the problems that Said encountered as a writer. Said admired Auerbach for similar reasons and for writing Mimesis at the time of his exile from Europe. Auerbach’s exile, alienation, and loneliness coupled with his “profound knowledge” left a permanent impression on him. It is from Auerbach’s experience that Said negotiated his own pain of being in exile as a necessary process that enables critical thinking.

The third chapter discusses Said’s select works in detail. It gives a fresh insight into pedagogical and methodological aspects of writing a text. McCarthy carefully unfolds Said’s theorization of text, critic, writer, discourse, power, knowledge, hegemony, as critical categories for analysis. In Beginnings, McCarthy explains, Said paid particular attention to the text, writer, and intellectual’s role in the public domain. Accordingly, the intentional production of meaning in the beginning of a text is argued as the most important function of a text. At this juncture in the text, to ratify Said’s position, McCarthy reiterates his life long commitment about connecting the writing of a text, a performative action, to its reality, and the intellectual’s role as a public persona.

In discussing Orientalism McCarthy elaborates Said’s analysis of western representation of the non-west via a hierarchical power structure that led to knowledge production about the other. However, the most essential aspect of McCarthy’s analysis here is his emphasis on Orientalism, not as a text on the Middle East but, as a discursive practice that, even if Said refused such compartmentalization while assessing the relevance of this book, changed the direction of postcolonial studies. The Question of Palestine is examined in continuation with Orientalism while the meaning of “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims” is discussed in great depth. McCarthy sheds light on the fact that Said is writing back to offer “an analysis of Zionism from a position” that was long silenced in accounts of “Whig history.” ⁸ This chapter explains the socio-political, historical, and economic reasons that led to the formation of Israel and explains Said’s statement “benefits for Jews and none for non-Jews in Palestine.” Despite Said’s scathing critique of Zionism, McCarthy directs the readers’ attention to the fact that The Question of Palestine does not delegitimize the Jews historical claim to Palestine. Rather, Said is opposed to the conditions for the fulfillment of this claim i.e. the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Therefore, he writes to remind the Zionists that their claim is intertwined with Palestinians and Palestinian history. McCarthy’s particular emphasis on this section from the book is relevant because it positions Said as an academic intellectual and human rights activist connecting the events with historical data, and not a “professor of terror” (as he was accused by Commentary magazine journalist Edward Alexander). The discussion on The World, the Text, and the Critic ends with Said’s criticism of Foucault’s theorization of power and discourse. In this segment, McCarthy mentions Said’s criticism of Foucault’s passive onto-phenomenological (how and why) questions about power, his ethnocentrism, and inability to explain why “the abrupt change [in power] occurs between one episteme and the next.”⁹

The book’s final chapter notes the reception of Said’s text, Orientalism, among the Anglo-American academic scholars of postcolonial and culture studies. Even though this section begins with anthropologist James Clifford’s complex reading of Said’s use of “Foucauldian ideas in the service of his humanist, cosmopolitan project,” critical commentaries by doyens in these fields namely Paul Bové, Robert Young, and Aijaz Ahmed are the main focus.¹⁰ McCarthy notes both Bové’s and Young’s criticism is geared towards Said’s failure to effectively employ poststructuralist ideas and “carry them to their logical conclusion.”¹¹ Bové’s critique of Orientalism is concerned with Said’s use of Foucault’s theory of power and not extending its use in the production of knowledge system. While he credits Said with a detailed picture of the voluntary and involuntary complicity of orientalism vis-à-vis imperialist power, Bové faults Said for failing to situate power within the “entire economy [where] both Orientalist and Saidian ‘oppositional’ work is produced.”¹² In so doing, Bové sides with Foucault who argued against the intellectual’s role in revolutionary change. According to Foucault, institutions discursively shape intellectuals who are “already always hemmed in by and even complicit with power.”¹³ Said, however, believed in the intellectual’s social role and, while agreeing with Foucault’s theory of power, downplayed its relationship with knowledge that shaped prominent and institutionally powerful intellectuals. Therefore, Bové’s main critique of Orientalism is that, it is critical of power “but not critical enough.”¹⁴

Robert Young’s criticism of Orientalism is based on Said’s theory against orientalist discourse and for an “alternative knowledge of the Orient.”¹⁵ Young argues, if the success of Orientalism lay in its strict “monopolization of linguistic codes to represent the Orient,” is it possible or desirable to have another form of knowledge system?¹⁶ If all knowledge is mitigated via a stringent power structure, will anti-Orientalist discourse not repeat the same mistake it wishes to castigate? By contrast, Marxist economist Aijjaz Ahmad takes a different position in his criticism of Orientalism. He has accused Said of first rethinking of history and second, using poststructuralism as a way to escape Marxist tradition. He compares poststructuralist anti-realism to fascist thinking and concludes that Said represents anti-humanist American scholarship that dominates the world today. It is connected and aids in the smooth functioning of “unprecedented imperialist consolidations of the present decade.”¹⁷ Therefore, Said, for Ahmad, is a native informant and Orientalism is a “crucial ideological wedge into [the Anglo-American academy] for Asian immigrant intellectuals.”¹⁸ McCarthy however, towards the end of this section, points out Young’s and Ahmad’s purposeful misreading of Orientalism. He reminds the readers about Said’s response to critics such as Young and stresses the fact that Orientalism is about “fragmenting, dissociating, dislocating, and decentering of the experiential terrain covered at present by universalizing historicism.”¹⁹ Said never intended it to be a book about the Orient or to construe an alternative history. In response to Ahmad, McCarthy faults Ahmad’s “polemical aggression” for clouding his argument, as McCarthy notes there is no historical evidence or sociological data to identify North American audience and readership of Orientalism.

As mentioned earlier, McCarthy has painstakingly traced Edward Said’s life and intellectual journey. However, the only flaw in this book is the lack of literature on Said’s political engagement as part of the public intellectual’s ethical responsibility. Said’s scholarly contributions and academic position were closely related to his roles as a practicing member of multiple literary, critical, and political constituencies. Indeed, without mentioning this side of Said, his contribution to the world will remain half known. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, in an interview, has said that Edward Said was a Kantian Enlightened subject/scholar “who writes for all time and all people.”²⁰ This is true because later in his life, and he has written about it in After the Last Sky, Said became deeply concerned with the Palestinian subaltern. He attempted to “change and form public opinion with well-researched commentary on political moves by involving highest level of political intervention and talented musicians in international collaboration.”²¹ Especially after the failure of the OSLO peace Said believed in other avenues to harbor a non-violent yet beneficial dialogue between Palestine and Israel. In 1997 he collaborated with Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli musician, and organized a musical concert in West Jerusalem. Said’s use of music to enable peace process between Palestine and Israel is worthy of mention because he believed that he real contribution of artists and philosophers is that they can change minds. Mentioning these aspects of Said’s public intellectual persona would have added to the richness of the book and provided a much wider spectrum of Said’s life.

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Reshmi Mukherjee (PhD. University of Illinois) is visiting assistant professor of English and interim-Director of Gender Studies at Boise State University. Her research and teaching interests include transnational feminisms, Anglophone literatures, Anglophone Arab fiction, Literature in translation [especially francophone literature], diasporic and exilic literatures, and subaltern theory. Her most recent publication is titled: “Living in Subalternity: The Becoming of the Subaltern in Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone, A Gesture of Belonging, and When Rain Clouds Gather.” It was published in the Journal of the African Literature Association, (JALA) Vol 7. No. 2, Spring 2014.

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Notes:

1. Michael, Sprinker, “Introduction,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker (Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publisher, 1992), 1. Back to the essay

2. Conor, McCarthy, The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 97. Back to the essay

3. Ibid. 100. Back to the essay

4. Ibid. 9. Back to the essay

5. Ibid. 33, 34, 35. Back to the essay

6. Ibid. 37. Back to the essay

7. Ibid. 48. Back to the essay

8. Ibid. 85, 86. Back to the essay

9. Ibid. 105. Back to the essay

10. Ibid. 126. Back to the essay

11. Ibid. 132. Back to the essay

12. Ibid. Back to the essay

13. Ibid. 129. Back to the essay

14. Ibid. 129. Back to the essay

15. Ibid. 130. Back to the essay

16. Ibid. Back to the essay

17. Ibid. 134. Back to the essay

18. Ibid. 135. Back to the essay

19. Ibid. 137. Back to the essay

20. Ben Conisbee Baer, “Edward Said Remembered on September 11, 2004. A Conversation with Gayatri Spivak,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2010), 57. Back to the essay

21. Ibid. Back to the essay

February 25, 2015
Cultivating Reform and Revolution

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-18^th 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.

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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

February 18, 2015
Trickster Makes This Web: The Ambiguous Politics of Anonymous

a review of Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014)
by Gavin Mueller
~

Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (HHWS) tackles a difficult and pressing subject: the amorphous hacker organization Anonymous. The book is not a strictly academic work. Rather, it unfolds as a rather lively history of a subculture of geeks, peppered with snippets of cultural theory and autobiographical portions. As someone interested in a more sustained theoretical exposition of Anonymous’s organizing and politics, I was a bit disappointed, though Coleman has opted for a more readable style. In fact, this is the book’s best asset. However, while containing a number of insights of interest to the general reader, the book ultimately falters as an assessment of Anonymous’s political orientation, or the state of hacker politics in general.

Coleman begins with a discussion of online trolling, a common antagonistic online cultural practice; many Anons cut their troll teeth at the notorious 4chan message board. Trolling aims to create “lulz,” a kind of digital schadenfreude produced by pranks, insults and misrepresentations. According to Coleman, the lulz are “a form of cultural differentiation and a tool or weapon used to attack, humiliate, and defame” rooted in the use of “inside jokes” of those steeped in the codes of Internet culture (32). Coleman argues that the lulz has a deeper significance: they “puncture the consensus around our politics and ethics, our social lives and our aesthetic sensibilities.” But trolling can be better understood through an offline frame of reference: hazing. Trolling is a means by which geeks have historically policed the boundaries of the subcultural corners of the Internet. If you can survive the epithets and obscene pictures, you might be able to hang. That trolling often takes the form of misogynist, racist and homophobic language is unsurprising: early Net culture was predominantly white and male, a demographic fact which overdetermines the shape of resentment towards “newbies” (or in 4chan’s unapologetically offensive argot, “newfags”). The lulz is joy that builds community, but almost always at someone else’s expense.

Coleman, drawing upon her background as an anthropologist, conceptualizes the troll as an instantiation of the trickster archetype which recurs throughout mythology and folklore. Tricksters, she argues, like trolls and Anonymous, are liminal figures who defy norms and revel in causing chaos. This kind of application of theory is a common technique in cultural studies, where seemingly apolitical or even anti-social transgressions, like punk rock or skateboarding, can be politicized with a dash of Bakhtin or de Certeau. Here it creates difficulties. There is one major difference between the spider spirit Anansi and Coleman’s main informant on trolling, the white supremacist hacker weev: Anansi is fictional, while weev is a real person who writes op-eds for neo-Nazi websites. The trickster archetype, a concept crafted for comparative structural analysis of mythology, does little to explain the actually existing social practice of trolling. Instead it renders it more complicated, ambiguous, and uncertain. These difficulties are compounded as the analysis moves to Anonymous. Anonymous doesn’t merely enact a submerged politics via style or symbols. It engages in explicitly political projects, complete with manifestos, though Coleman continues to return to transgression as one of its salient features.

The trolls of 4chan, from which Anonymous emerged, developed a culture of compulsory anonymity. In part, this was technological: unlike other message boards and social media, posting on 4chan requires no lasting profile, no consistent presence. But there was also a cultural element to this. Identifying oneself is strongly discouraged in the community. Fittingly, its major trolling weapon is doxing: revealing personal information to facilitate further harassment offline (prank calls, death threats, embarrassment in front of employers). As Whitney Phillips argues, online trolling often acts as a kind of media critique: by enforcing anonymity and rejecting fame or notoriety, Anons oppose the now-dominant dynamics of social media and personal branding which have colonized much of the web, and threaten their cherished subcultural practices, which are more adequately enshrined in formats such as image boards and IRC. In this way, Anonymous deploys technological means to thwart the dominant social practices of technology, a kind of wired Luddism. Such practices proliferate in the communities of the computer underground, which is steeped in an omnipresent prelapsarian nostalgia since at least the “eternal September” of the early 1990s.

HHWS’s overarching narrative is the emergence of Anonymous out of the cesspits of 4chan and into political consciousness: trolling for justice instead of lulz. The compulsory anonymity of 4chan, in part, determined Anonymous’s organizational form: Anonymous lacks formal membership, instead formed from entirely ad hoc affiliations. The brand itself can be selectively deployed or disavowed, leading to much argumentation and confusion. Coleman provides an insider perspective on how actions are launched: there is debate, occasionally a rough consensus, and then activity, though several times individuals opt to begin an action, dragging along a number of other participants of varying degrees of reluctance. Tactics are formalized in an experimental, impromptu way. In this, I recognized the way actions formed in the Occupy encampments. Anonymous, as Coleman shows, was an early Occupy Wall Street booster, and her analysis highlights the connection between the Occupy form and the networked forms of sociality exemplified by Anonymous. After reading Coleman’s account, I am much more convinced of Anonymous’s importance to the movement. Likewise, many criticisms of Occupy could also be levelled at Anonymous; Coleman cites Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” as one candidate.

If Anonymous can be said to have a coherent political vision, it is one rooted in civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech and opposition censorship efforts. Indeed, Coleman earns the trust of several hackers by her affiliation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, nominally the digital equivalent to the ACLU (though some object to this parallel, due in part to EFF’s strong ties to industry). Geek politics, from Anonymous to Wikileaks to the Pirate Bay, are a weaponized form of the mantra “information wants to be free.” Anonymous’s causes seem fit these concerns perfectly: Scientology’s litigious means of protecting its secrets provoked its wrath, as did the voluntary withdrawal of services to Wikileaks by PayPal and Mastercard, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit police’s blacking out of cell phone signals to scuttle a protest.

I’ve referred to Anonymous as geeks rather than hackers deliberately. Hackers — skilled individuals who can break into protected systems — participate in Anonymous, but many of the Anons pulled from 4chan are merely pranksters with above-average knowledge of the Internet and computing. This gets the organization in quite a bit of trouble when it engages in the political tactic of most interest to Coleman, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS floods a website with requests, overwhelming its servers. This technique has captured the imaginations of a number of scholars, including Coleman, with its resemblance to offline direct action like pickets and occupations. However, the AnonOps organizers falsely claimed that their DDoS app, the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon, ensured user anonymity, leading to a number of Anons facing serious criminal charges. Coleman curiously places the blame for this startling breach of operational security on journalists writing about AnonOps, rather on the organizers themselves. Furthermore, many DDoS attacks, including those launched by Anonymous, have relied on botnets, which draw power from hundreds of hijacked computers, bears little resemblance to any kind of democratic initiative. Of course, this isn’t to say that the harsh punishments meted out to Anons under the auspices of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are warranted, but that political tactics must be subjected to scrutiny.

Coleman argues that Anonymous outgrew its narrow civil libertarian agenda with its involvement in the Arab Spring: “No longer was the group bound to Internet-y issues like censorship and file-sharing” (148). However, by her own account, it is opposition to censorship which truly animates the group. The #OpTunisia manifesto (Anonymous names its actions with the prefix “Op,” for operations, along with the ubiquitous Twitter-based hashtag) states plainly, “Any organization involved in censorship will be targeted” (ibid). Anons were especially animated by the complete shut-off of the Internet in Tunisia and Egypt, actions which shattered the notion of the Internet as a space controlled by geeks, not governments. Anonymous operations launched against corporations did not oppose capitalist exploitation but fought corporate restrictions on online conduct. These are laudable goals, but also limited ones, and are often compatible with Silicon Valley companies, as illustrated by the Google-friendly anti-SOPA/PIPA protests.

Coleman is eager to distance Anonymous from the libertarian philosophies rife in geek and hacker circles, but its politics are rarely incompatible with such a perspective. The most recent Guy Fawkes Day protest I witnessed in Washington, D.C., full of mask-wearing Anons, displayed a number of slogans emerging from the Ron Paul camp, “End the Fed” prominent among them. There is no accounting for this in HHWS. It is clear that political differences among Anons exists, and that any analysis must be nuanced. But Coleman’s description of this nuance ultimately doesn’t delineate the political positions within the group and how they coalesce, opting to elide these differences in favor of a more protean focus on “transgression.” In this way, she is able to provide a conceptual coherence for Anonymous, albeit at the expense of a detailed examination of the actual politics of its members. In the final analysis, “Anonymous became a generalized symbol for dissent, a medium to channel deep disenchantment… basically, with anything” (399).

As political concerns overtake the lulz, Anonymous wavers as smaller militant hacker crews LulzSec and AntiSec take the fore, doxing white hat security executives, leaking documents, and defacing websites. This frustrates Coleman: “Anonymous had been exciting to me for a specific reason: it was the largest and most populist disruptive grassroots movement the Internet had, up to that time, fomented. But it felt, suddenly like AnonOps/Anonymous was slipping into a more familiar state of hacker-vanguardism” (302). Yet it is at this moment that Coleman offers a revealing account of hacker ideology: its alignment with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. From 4chan’s trolls scoffing at morality and decency, to hackers disregarding technical and legal restraints to accessing information, to the collective’s general rejection any standard form of accountability, Anonymous truly seems to posit itself as beyond good and evil. Coleman herself confesses to being “overtly romantic” as she supplies alibis for the group’s moral and strategic failures (it is, after all, incredibly difficult for an ethnographer to criticize her informants). But Nietzsche was a profoundly undemocratic thinker, whose avowed elitism should cast more of a disturbing shadow over the progressive potentials behind hacker groups than it does for Coleman, who embraces the ability of hackers to “cast off — at least momentarily — the shackles of normativity and attain greatness” (275). Coleman’s previous work on free software programmers convincingly makes the case for a Nietzschean current running through hacker culture; I am considerably more skeptical than she is about the liberal democratic viewpoint this engenders.

Ultimately, Coleman concludes that Anonymous cannot work as a substitute for existing organizations, but that its tactics should be taken up by other political formations: “The urgent question is how to promote cross-pollination” between Anonymous and more formalized structures (374). This may be warranted, but there needs to be a fuller accounting of the drawbacks to Anonymous. Because anyone can fly its flag, and because its actions are guided by talented and charismatic individuals working in secret, Anonymous is ripe for infiltration. Historically, hackers have proven to be easy for law enforcement and corporations to co-opt, not the least because of the ferocious rivalries amongst hackers themselves. Tactics are also ambiguous. A DDoS can be used by anti-corporate activists, or by corporations against their rivals and enemies. Document dumps can ruin a diplomatic initiative, or a woman’s social life. Public square occupations can be used to advocate for democracy, or as a platform for anti-democratic coups. Currently, a lot of the same geek energy behind Anonymous has been devoted to the misogynist vendetta GamerGate (in a Reddit AMA, Coleman adopted a diplomatic tone, referring to GamerGate as “a damn Gordian knot”). Without a steady sense of Anonymous’s actual political commitments, outside of free speech, it is difficult to do much more than marvel at the novelty of their media presence (which wears thinner with each overwrought communique). With Hoaxer, Hacker, Whistleblower, Spy, Coleman has offered a readable account of recent hacker history, but I remain unconvinced of Anonymous’s political potential.

_____

Gavin Mueller (@gavinsaywhat) is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at George Mason University, and an editor at Jacobin and Viewpoint Magazine.

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February 11, 2015
"The Black Jacobins and the Long Haitian Revolution" with Anthony Bogues

The Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has uploaded a talk by b2 editor and contributor Anthony Bogues called “The Black Jacobins and the Long Haitian Revolution: Archives, Historiography, and the Writing of Revolution” and you can watch it below.

February 5, 2015
Is the Network a Brain?

a review of Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
by Jonathan Goodwin
~

Evgeny Morozov’s recent New Yorker article about Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile caused some controversy when critics accused Morozov of not fully acknowledging his sources. One of those sources was sociologist of science Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain. Morozov is quoted as finding Pickering’s book “awful.” It’s unlikely that Morozov meant “awful” in the sense of “awe-inspiring,” but that was closer to my reaction after reading Pickering’s 500+ pp. work on the British tradition in cybernetics. This tradition was less militarist and more artistic, among other qualities, in Pickering’s account, than is popularly understood. I found myself greatly intrigued—if not awed—by the alternate future that his subtitle and final chapter announces. Cybernetics is now a largely forgotten dead-end in science. And the British tradition that Pickering describes had relatively little influence within cybernetics itself. So what is important about it now, and what is the nature of this other future that Pickering sketches?

The major figures of this book, which proceeds with overviews of their careers, views, and accomplishments, are Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask. Stuart Kauffman’s and Stephen Wolfram’s work on complexity theory also makes an appearance.[1] Laing and Bateson’s relevance may not be immediately clear. Pickering’s interest in them derives from their extension of cybernetic ideas to the emerging technologies of the self in the 1960s. Both Bateson and Laing approached schizophrenia as an adaptation to the increasing “double-binds” of Western culture, and both looked to Eastern spiritual traditions and chemical methods of consciousness-alteration as potential treatments. The Bateson and Laing material makes the most direct reference to the connection between the cybernetic tradition and the “Californian Ideology” that animates much Silicon Valley thinking. Stewart Brand was influenced by Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (183), for example. Pickering identifies Northern California as the site where cybernetics migrated into the counterculture. As a technology of control, it is arguable that this countercultural migration has become part of the ruling ideology of the present moment. Pickering recognizes this but seems to concede that the inherent topicality would detract from the focus of his work. It is a facet that would be of interest to the readers of this “Digital Studies” section of The b2 Review, however, and I will thus return to it at the end of this review.

Pickering’s path to Bateson and Laing originates with Grey Walter’s and Ross Ashby’s pursuit of cybernetic models of the brain. Computational models of the brain, though originally informed by cybernetic research, quickly replaced it in Pickering’s account (62). He asks why computational models of the brain quickly gathered so much cultural interest. Rodney Brooks’s robots, with their more embodied approach, Pickering argues, are in the tradition of Walter’s tortoises and outside the symbolic tradition of artificial intelligence. I find it noteworthy that the neurological underpinnings of early cybernetics were so strongly influenced by behaviorism. Computationalist approaches, associated by Pickering with the establishment or “royal” science, here, were intellectually formed by an attack on behaviorism. Pickering even addresses this point obliquely, when he wonders why literary scholars had not noticed that the octopus in Gravity’s Rainbow was apparently named “Grigori” in homage to Gregory Bateson (439n13).[2] I think one reason this hasn’t been noticed is that it’s much more likely that the name was random but for its Slavic form, which is clearly in the same pattern of references to Russian behaviorist psychology that informs Pynchon’s novel. An offshoot of behaviorism inspiring a countercultural movement devoted to freedom and experimentation seems peculiar.

One of Pickering’s key insights into this alternate tradition of cybernetics is that its science is performative. Rather than being as theory-laden as are the strictly computationalist approaches, cybernetic science often studied complex systems as assemblages whose interactions generated novel insights. Contrast this epistemology to what critics point to as the frequent invocation of the Duhem-Quine thesis by Noam Chomsky.[3] For Pickering, Ross Ashby’s version of cybernetics was a “supremely general and protean science” (147). As it developed, the brain lost its central place and cybernetics became a “freestanding general science” (147). As I mentioned, the chapter on Ashby closes with a consideration of the complexity science of Stuart Kauffman and Stephen Wolfram. That Kauffman and Wolfram largely have worked outside mainstream academic institutions is important for Pickering.[4] Christopher Alexander’s pattern language in architecture is a third example. Pickering mentions that Alexander’s concept was influential in some areas of computer science; the notion of “object-oriented programming” is sometimes considered to have been influenced by Alexander’s ideas.

I mention this connection because many of the alternate traditions in cybernetics have become mainstream influences in contemporary digital culture. It is difficult to imagine Laing and Bateson’s alternative therapeutic ideas having any resonance in that culture, however. The doctrine that “selves are endlessly complex and endlessly explorable” (211) is sometimes proposed as something the internet facilitates, but the inevitable result of anonymity and pseudonymity in internet discourse is the enframing of hierarchical relations. I realize this point may sound controversial to those with a more benign or optimistic view of digital culture. That this countercultural strand of cybernetic practice has clear parallels with much digital libertarian rhetoric is hard to dispute. Again, Pickering is not concerned in the book with tracing these contemporary parallels. I mention them because of my own interest and this venue’s presumed interest in the subject.

The progression that begins with some variety of conventional rationalism, extends through a career in cybernetics, and ends in some variety of mysticism is seen with almost all of the figures that Pickering profiles in The Cybernetic Brain. Perhaps the clearest example—and most fascinating in general—is that of Stafford Beer. Philip Mirowski’s review of Pickering’s book refers to Beer as “a slightly wackier Herbert Simon.” Pickering enjoys recounting the adventures of the wizard of Prang, a work that Beer composed after he had moved to a remote Welsh village and renounced many of the world’s pleasures. Beer’s involvement in Project Cybersyn makes him perhaps the most well-known of the figures profiled in this book.[5] What perhaps fascinate Pickering more than anything else in Beer’s work is the concept of viability. From early in his career, Beer advocated for upwardly viable management strategies. The firm would not need a brain, in his model, “it would react to changing circumstances; it would grow and evolve like an organism or species, all without any human intervention at all” (225). Mirowski’s review compares Beer to Friedrich Hayek and accuses Pickering of refusing to engage with this seemingly obvious intellectual affinity.[6] Beer’s intuitions in this area led him to experiment with biological and ecological computing; Pickering surmises that Douglas Adams’s superintelligent mice derived from Beer’s murine experiments in this area (241).

In a review of a recent translation of Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologiae, Pickering mentions that natural adaptive systems being like brains and being able to be utilized for intelligence amplification is the most “amazing idea in the history of cybernetics” (247).[7] Despite its association with the dreaded “synergy” (the original “syn” of Project Cybersyn), Beer’s viable system model never became a management fad (256). Alexander Galloway has recently written here about the “reticular fallacy,” the notion that de-centralized forms of organization are necessarily less repressive than are centralized or hierachical forms. Beer’s viable system model proposes an emergent and non-hierarchical management system that would increase the general “eudemony” (general well-being, another of Beer’s not-quite original neologisms [272]). Beer’s turn towards Tantric mysticism seems somehow inevitable in Pickering’s narrative of his career. The syntegric icosahedron, one of Beer’s late baroque flourishes, reminded me quite a bit of a Paul Laffoley painting. Syntegration as a concept takes reticularity to a level of mysticism rarely achieved by digital utopians. Pickering concludes the chapter on Beer with a discussion of his influence on Brian Eno’s ambient music.

Paul Laffoley, “The Orgone Motor” (1981). Image source: paullaffoley.net.

The discussion of Eno chides him for not reading Gordon Pask’s explicitly aesthetic cybernetics (308). Pask is the final cybernetician of Pickering’s study and perhaps the most eccentric. Pickering describes him as a model for Patrick Troughton’s Dr. Who (475n3), and his synaesthetic work in cybernetics with projects like the Musicolor are explicitly theatrical. A theatrical performance that directly incorporates audience feedback into the production, not just at the level of applause or hiss, but in audience interest in a particular character—a kind of choose-your-own adventure theater—was planned with Joan Littlewood (348-49). Pask’s work in interface design has been identified as an influence on hypertext (464n17). A great deal of the chapter on Pask involves his influence on British countercultural arts and architecture movements in the 1960s. Mirowski’s review shortly notes that even the anti-establishment Gordon Pask was funded by the Office of Naval Research for fifteen years (194). Mirowski also accuses Pickering of ignoring the computer as the emblematic cultural artifact of the cybernetic worldview (195). Pask is the strongest example offered of an alternate future of computation and social organization, but it is difficult to imagine his cybernetic present.

The final chapter of Pickering’s book is entitled “Sketches of Another Future.” What is called “maker culture” combined with the “internet of things” might lead some prognosticators to imagine an increasingly cybernetic digital future. Cybernetic, that is, not in the sense of increasing what Mirowski refers to as the neoliberal “background noise of modern culture” but as a “challenge to the hegemony of modernity” (393). Before reading Pickering’s book, I would have regarded such a prediction with skepticism. I still do, but Pickering has argued that an alternate—and more optimistic—perspective is worth taking seriously.

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Jonathan Goodwin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. He is working on a book about cultural representations of statistics and probability in the twentieth century.

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[1] Wolfram was born in England, though he has lived in the United States since the 1970s. Pickering taught at the University of Illinois while this book was being written, and he mentions having several interviews with Wolfram, whose company Wolfram Research is based in Champaign, Illinois (457n73). Pickering’s discussion of Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science is largely neutral; for a more skeptical view, see Cosma Shalizi’s review.

[2] Bateson experimented with octopuses, as Pickering describes. Whether Pynchon knew about this, however, remains doubtful. Pickering’s note may also be somewhat facetious.

[3] See the interview with George Lakoff in Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates, ed. Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 115. Lakoff’s account of Chomsky’s philosophical justification for his linguistic theories is tendentious; I mention it here because of the strong contrast, even in caricature, with the performative quality of the cybernetic research Pickering describes. (1999).

[4] Though it is difficult to think of the Santa Fe Institute this way now.

[5] For a detailed cultural history of Project Cybersyn, see Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011). Medina notes that Beer formed the word “algedonic” from two words meaning “pain” and “pleasure,” but the OED notes an example in the same sense from 1894. This citation does not rule out independent coinage, of course. Curiously enough, John Fowles uses the term in The Magus (1966), where it could have easily been derived from Beer.

[6] Hayek’s name appears neither in the index nor the reference list. It does seem a curious omission in the broader intellectual context of cybernetics.

[7] Though there is a reference to Lem’s fiction in an endnote (427n25), Summa Technologiae, a visionary exploration of cybernetic philosophy dating from the early 1960s, does not appear in Pickering’s work. A complete English translation only recently appeared, and I know of no evidence that Pickering’s principal figures were influenced by Lem at all. The book, as Pickering’s review acknowledges, is astonishingly prescient and highly recommended for anyone interested in the culture of cybernetics.

February 4, 2015
Thinking the Permissible, or Speaking in Common

_____

In this paper written for the MLA roundtable “Toward an Academic Commons: Academic Freedom and Sites of Contested Speech,” Colin Dayan reflects on what happens when academic freedom is cornered and subsumed by the demands of “civility” and “rationality.”

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And these are knaves that brawl for better laws
And cant of tyranny in stronger powers
Who glut their vile unsatiated maws
And freedoms birthright from the weak devour

–John Clare, “To a Fallen Elm”

Who gets to speak? “To speak,” Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks is to exist for the other. “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” To acquire a “civilizing language,” then, is to be an exile in your own land, however we define the terrain of personal significance and conviction.

The “academic commons,” is something of an oxymoron, a paradox as heady as St. Paul’s encounter with the vexation of bodily resurrection. Must not a new definition of the body be coined? The crux of the matter lies in the spirit that is also the flesh, in something quite intangible, even insensate, but persistent and always quite thing-like.

The call to the commons, to a “common ground,” or, as some would endorse “the common interests,” is to revel in what we as teachers and students share “in common.” But who is to say what the ground of the common, the commonplace or commonality is? As Morrison wrote in Beloved, “definitions are always in the hands of the definers.” To hold ideas in common is much like the call for consensus: whoever calls for this fellowship has a pretty good idea of what is or is not to be accepted or permissible as shared values. Or to put it more bluntly, these values are akin to holding certain “truths to be self-evident.” As Justice Taney made explicit in his opinion in Dred Scott: “we the people” was never meant to include that class of persons who carried the “indelible mark” of “degradation”:

The men who framed this declaration were great men — high in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others, and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.

Which people, or persons, or members of the global Academy are excluded from the commons? Zones of exclusion mark off indelibly the lives that are cordoned off, trapped, demolished, bulldozed, expropriated, uprooted, by-passed.

But for some of our colleagues, those of us who would bring these lives to light are guilty of “partisan politics,” “purges,” and “censorship,” even though there is absolutely no evidence of such practice or intent. Politics is never separate from scholarship. Thought, imagination, and learning is always enhanced by collision and conflict. In “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Theodore Adorno wrote, and I paraphrase, any poet who claims not to be political is in fact proclaiming a politics—and I would add—silencing others in a far more devious because subtle way.

* * * * * * * * *

Why should I speak? I’ve always been haunted by Gramsci’s warning that we are all “experts in legitimation” and by the savvy insight of Bourdieu and Passeron in Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture published in 1977, that we – no matter what we intend—can never shed that ermine robe of authority. An authority honed to say what needs to be taught and thought in the right, the tasteful, the distinctive and recognizable—the civil—way.

But there is always a politics to the under-read and the critical background against which such silences are made. William Carlos Williams recognized the silencing generated by experts, the careening authority of the estimable critics. Before the formidable and raging Book 3 of Paterson, against the background of a library burning and books in flames, he scorned the “knowledgeable idiots, the university,/…../The outward masks of the special interests/that perpetuate the stasis and make it profitable.”
He recognized how inextricable is the language, the craft, the tools of scholarship from the casual disregard, the everyday violence in the “corrupt cities.” So it was not artlessness that he wanted but something else, something he called “the foulness”—the kind of writing that threatened the moneyed and the privileged, the extensions of state-sanctioned racism and its sanguine exclusivity.

The affront to the reasonable, the necessary, and the secure matters now more than ever. Reasonable consensus and civility: these words engage me, unsettled as I am by the prospect of divisions (not only of subject but also genre) that allow the continued dispossession of those creatures – human and non-human alike–who remain outside the circle of grace, delivered to subjection without recourse. How can we shed the mantle of civility, consensus, and rationality just long enough to question the claims of decency?

How do we speak? When it comes to matters of civility and befouling, we need to question our role as teachers and scholars, as well the threats to our profession by a silencing that is racially driven though culturally masked. The remedy of culture always excuses or conceals the experience of racism. In this time of terror, in our complicity with “kill lists,” drone strikes, global dispossession, mass incarceration, and murders of black citizens on our streets, what are the choices offered us as academics?

A cure for all kinds of threats, reasonableness has long been a way to extend persecution, civil death, and torture. But this rationality, like the theory that accompanies it, is tied to figurative power, and its metaphors can at any time become more insistent. What the anthropologist and historian, the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot, called the “explanatory power of culture” allowed the contexts for inequality and racism to continue. Indeed, they became harsher because hidden by the call for a common ground.

Our embrace of the “commons” or “academic commons,” though well-intentioned, risks enabling the false ideal of “consensus” that always rears its ugly, if “reasonable” head just when social and racial stratification is at its worst. Against the fashionable cartography of the commons, or a search for common ground, stands the language of stigma, incarceration, control—and downright extermination. Should we not reclaim the singularity of lives that do not span borders, or more precisely, who never —at least not in this country—gained the right to have rights in common?

Matters of terminology delimit privilege, just as they silence the disenfranchised, the invisible ones, who are always quite visible though objects of serene disregard. Our thought should be supple and ever watchful for the terms that perpetuate the very contexts of inequality—and specifically, racism. I’m grappling here with the push-and-pull of the call for the commons, always moderated and even reproduced by the humanitarian concern that is analogous to it, and hence always already closed to criticism. I learned from Trouillot—may he rest in peace—how the most benign of academic trends carried with it a strategy of extermination that always targets people of color, the poor or the powerless. He knew its eugenic violence even as he confronted its universalizing promise, what he called “totalitarian humanism” and the bugbears of academia: civility and compromise.

* * * * * * * * *

Retaliation hides behind a logic that is at once exclusionary and authoritarian. This policing of thought indulges in all manner of intolerant behavior. In the context of the de-hiring of a scholar like Salaita, we have sought in our conscience how to respond to coercion and threat found in the least likely of places—the university’s so-called “ivory tower.”

Sickened by the civility-mongers’ pieties and the costs to scholars who dare to think hard and feel passionately, I recall Poe’s disdain for the oracles of “higher morality.” These “thinkers-that-they-think” used “civility”–and all such words for self-righteous sentiment–to destroy literary careers and exclude anyone who threatened the status quo. Such entrenched proclivities for what Poe condemned as “doggerel aesthetics” masked the ugly money-fundament to such cunning ideality. What has happened to Steven Salaita matters to us all, no matter our views or our assumed status in the groves of academe. The resilience of genuine academic freedom is that it ensures that these abuses, and the watchdog groups and alumni that abet them, are no longer hidden from the eyes of the world, immune to the prescriptive force of morality, beyond the judgment of society, masked by the appeal to “civility.”

January 21, 2015
Frank Pasquale — To Replace or Respect: Futurology as if People Mattered
a review of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W.W. Norton, 2014)

by Frank Pasquale

~

Business futurism is a grim discipline. Workers must either adapt to the new economic realities, or be replaced by software. There is a “race between education and technology,” as two of Harvard’s most liberal economists insist. Managers should replace labor with machines that require neither breaks nor sick leave. Superstar talents can win outsize rewards in the new digital economy, as they now enjoy global reach, but they will replace thousands or millions of also-rans. Whatever can be automated, will be, as competitive pressures make fairly paid labor a luxury.

Thankfully, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age (2MA) downplays these zero-sum tropes. Brynjolffson & McAfee (B&M) argue that the question of distribution of the gains from automation is just as important as the competitions for dominance it accelerates. 2MA invites readers to consider how societies will decide what type of bounty from automation they want, and what is wanted first. The standard, supposedly neutral economic response (“whatever the people demand, via consumer sovereignty”) is unconvincing. As inequality accelerates, the top 5% (of income earners) do 35% of the consumption. The top 1% is responsible for an even more disproportionate share of investment. Its richest members can just as easily decide to accelerate the automation of the wealth defense industry as they can allocate money to robotic construction, transportation, or mining.

A humane agenda for automation would prioritize innovations that complement (jobs that ought to be) fulfilling vocations, and substitute machines for dangerous or degrading work. Robotic meat-cutters make sense; robot day care is something to be far more cautious about. Most importantly, retarding automation that controls, stigmatizes, and cheats innocent people, or sets up arms races with zero productive gains, should be a much bigger part of public discussions of the role of machines and software in ordering human affairs.

2MA may set the stage for such a human-centered automation agenda. Its diagnosis of the problem of rapid automation (described in Part I below) is compelling. Its normative principles (II) are eclectic and often humane. But its policy vision (III) is not up to the challenge of channeling and sequencing automation. This review offers an alternative, while acknowledging the prescience and insight of B&M’s work.

I. Automation’s Discontents

For B&M, the acceleration of automation ranks with the development of agriculture, or the industrial revolution, as one of the “big stories” of human history (10-12). They offer an account of the “bounty and spread” to come from automation. “Bounty” refers to the increasing “volume, variety, and velocity” of any imaginable service or good, thanks to its digital reproduction or simulation (via, say, 3-D printing or robots). “Spread” is “ever-bigger differences among people in economic success” that they believe to be just as much an “economic consequence” of automation as bounty.[1]

2MA briskly describes various human workers recently replaced by computers. The poor souls who once penned corporate earnings reports for newspapers? Some are now replaced by Narrative Science, which seamlessly integrates new data into ready-made templates (35). Concierges should watch out for Siri (65). Forecasters of all kinds (weather, home sales, stock prices) are being shoved aside by the verdicts of “big data” (68). “Quirky,” a startup, raised $90 million by splitting the work of making products between a “crowd” that “votes on submissions, conducts research, suggest improvements, names and brands products, and drives sales” (87), and Quirky itself, which “handles engineering, manufacturing, and distribution.” 3D printing might even disintermediate firms like Quirky (36).

In short, 2MA presents a kaleidoscope of automation realities and opportunities. B&M skillfully describe the many ways automation both increases the “size of the pie,” economically, and concentrates the resulting bounty among the talented, the lucky, and the ruthless. B&M emphasize that automation is creeping up the value chain, potentially substituting machines for workers paid better than the average.

What’s missing from the book are the new wave of conflicts that would arise if those at very top of the value chain (or, less charitably, the rent and tribute chain) were to be replaced by robots and algorithms. When BART workers went on strike, Silicon Valley worthies threatened to replace them with robots. But one could just as easily call for the venture capitalists to be replaced with algorithms. Indeed, one venture capital firm added an algorithm to its board in 2013. Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, responded to a question on driver wage demands by bringing up the prospect of robotic drivers. But given Uber’s multiple legal and PR fails in 2014, a robot would probably would have done a better job running the company than Kalanick.

That’s not “crazy talk” of communistic visions along the lines of Marx’s “expropriate the expropriators,” or Chile’s failed Cybersyn.[2] Thiel Fellow and computer programming prodigy Vitaly Bukherin has stated that automation of the top management functions at firms like Uber and AirBnB would be “trivially easy.”[3] Automating the automators may sound like a fantasy, but it is a natural outgrowth of mantras (e.g., “maximize shareholder value”) that are commonplaces among the corporate elite. To attract and retain the support of investors, a firm must obtain certain results, and the short-run paths to attaining them (such as cutting wages, or financial engineering) are increasingly narrow. And in today’s investment environment of rampant short-termism, the short is often the only term there is.

In the long run, a secure firm can tolerate experiments. Little wonder, then, that the largest firm at the cutting edge of automation—Google—has a secure near-monopoly in search advertising in numerous markets. As Peter Thiel points out in his recent From Zero to One, today’s capitalism rewards the best monopolist, not the best competitor. Indeed, even the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division appeared to agree with Thiel in its 1995 guidelines on antitrust enforcement in innovation markets. It viewed intellectual property as a good monopoly, the rightful reward to innovators for developing a uniquely effective process or product. And its partner in federal antitrust enforcement, the Federal Trade Commission, has been remarkably quiescent in response to emerging data monopolies.

II. Propertizing Data

For B&M, intellectual property—or, at least, the returns accruing to intellectual insight or labor—plays a critical role in legitimating inequalities arising out of advanced technologies. They argue that “in the future, ideas will be the real scarce inputs in the world—scarcer than both labor and capital—and the few who provide good ideas will reap huge rewards.”[4] But many of the leading examples of profitable automation are not “ideas” per se, or even particularly ingenious algorithms. They are brute force feats of pattern recognition: for example, Google’s studying past patterns of clicks to see what search results, and what ads, are personalized to delight and persuade each of its hundreds of millions of users. The critical advantage there is the data, not the skill in working with it.[5] Google will demur, but if they were really confident, they’d license the data to other firms, confident that others couldn’t best their algorithmic prowess. They don’t, because the data is their critical, self-reinforcing advantage. It is a commonplace in big data literatures to say that the more data one has, the more valuable any piece of it becomes—something Googlers would agree with, as long as antitrust authorities aren’t within earshot.

As sensors become more powerful and ubiquitous, feats of automated service provision and manufacture become more easily imaginable. The Baxter robot, for example, merely needs to have a trainer show it how to move in order to ape the trainer’s own job. (One is reminded of the stories of US workers flying to India to train their replacements how to do their job, back in the day when outsourcing was the threat du jour to U.S. living standards.)

How to train a Baxter robot. Image source: Inc.

From direct physical interaction with a robot, it is a short step to, say, programmed holographic or data-driven programming. For example, a surveillance camera on a worker could, after a period of days, months, or years, potentially record every movement or statement of the worker, and replicate it, in response to whatever stimuli led to the prior movements or statements of the worker.

B&M appear to assume that such data will be owned by the corporations that monitor their own workers. For example, McDonalds could train a camera on every cook and cashier, then download the contents into robotic replicas. But it’s just as easy to imagine a legal regime where, say, workers’ rights to the data describing their movements would be their property, and firms would need to negotiate to purchase the rights to it. If dance movements can be copyrighted, so too can the sweeps and wipes of a janitor. Consider, too, that the extraordinary advances in translation accomplished by programs like Google Translate are in part based on translations by humans of United Nations’ documents released into the public domain.[6] Had the translators’ work not been covered by “work-made-for-hire” or similar doctrines, they might well have kept their copyrights, and shared in the bounty now enjoyed by Google.[7]

Of course, the creativity of translation may be greater than that displayed by a janitor or cashier. Copyright purists might thus reason that the merger doctrine denies copyrightability to the one best way (or small suite of ways) of doing something, since the idea of the movement and its expression cannot be separated. Grant that, and one could still imagine privacy laws giving workers the right to negotiate over how, and how pervasively, they are watched. There are myriad legal regimes governing, in minute detail, how information flows and who has control over it.

I do not mean to appropriate here Jaron Lanier’s ideas about micropayments, promising as they may be in areas like music or journalism. A CEO could find some critical mass of stockers or cooks or cashiers to mimic even if those at 99% of stores demanded royalties for the work (of) being watched. But the flexibility of legal regimes of credit, control, and compensation is under-recognized. Living in a world where employers can simply record everything their employees do, or Google can simply copy every website that fails to adopt “robots.txt” protection, is not inevitable. Indeed, according to renowned intellectual property scholar Oren Bracha, Google had to “stand copyright on its head” to win that default.[8]

Thus B&M are wise to acknowledge the contestability of value in the contemporary economy. For example, they build on the work of MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor to demonstrate that “skill biased technical change” is a misleading moniker for trends in wage levels. The “tasks that machines can do better than humans” are not always “low-skill” ones (139). There is a fair amount of play in the joints in the sequencing of automation: sometimes highly skilled workers get replaced before those with a less complex and difficult-to-learn repertoire of abilities. B&M also show that the bounty predictably achieved via automation could compensate the “losers” (of jobs or other functions in society) in the transition to a more fully computerized society. By seriously considering the possibility of a basic income (232), they evince a moral sensibility light years ahead of the “devil-take-the-hindmost” school of cyberlibertarianism.

III. Proposals for Reform

Unfortunately, some of B&M’s other ideas for addressing the possibility of mass unemployment in the wake of automation are less than convincing. They praise platforms like Lyft for providing new opportunities for work (244), perhaps forgetting that, earlier in the book, they described the imminent arrival of the self-driving car (14-15). Of course, one can imagine decades of tiered driving, where the wealthy get self-driving cars first, and car-less masses turn to the scrambling drivers of Uber and Lyft to catch rides. But such a future seems more likely to end in a deflationary spiral than sustainable growth and equitable distribution of purchasing power. Like the generation traumatized by the Great Depression, millions subjected to reverse auctions for their labor power, forced to price themselves ever lower to beat back the bids of the technologically unemployed, are not going to be in a mood to spend. Learned helplessness, retrenchment, and miserliness are just as likely a consequence as buoyant “re-skilling” and self-reinvention.

Thus B&M’s optimism about what they call the “peer economy” of platform-arranged production is unconvincing. A premier platform of digital labor matching—Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—has occasionally driven down the wage for “human intelligence tasks” to a penny each. Scholars like Trebor Scholz and Miriam Cherry have discussed the sociological and legal implications of platforms that try to disclaim all responsibility for labor law or other regulations. Lilly Irani’s important review of 2MA shows just how corrosive platform capitalism has become. “With workers hidden in the technology, programmers can treat [them] like bits of code and continue to think of themselves as builders, not managers,” she observes in a cutting aside on the self-image of many “maker” enthusiasts.

The “sharing economy” is a glidepath to precarity, accelerating the same fate for labor in general as “music sharing services” sealed for most musicians. The lived experience of many “TaskRabbits,” which B&M boast about using to make charts for their book, cautions against reliance on disintermediation as a key to opportunity in the new digital economy. Sarah Kessler describes making $1.94 an hour labeling images for a researcher who put the task for bid on Mturk. The median active TaskRabbit in her neighborhood made $120 a week; Kessler cleared $11 an hour on her best day.

Resistance is building, and may create fairer terms online. For example, Irani has helped develop a “Turkopticon” to help Turkers rate and rank employers on the site. Both Scholz and Mike Konczal have proposed worker cooperatives as feasible alternatives to Uber, offering drivers both a fairer share of revenues, and more say in their conditions of work. But for now, the peer economy, as organized by Silicon Valley and start-ups, is not an encouraging alternative to traditional employment. It may, in fact, be worse.

Therefore, I hope B&M are serious when they say “Wild Ideas [are] Welcomed” (245), and mention the following:
- Provide vouchers for basic necessities. . . .
- Create a national mutual fund distributing the ownership of capital widely and perhaps inalienably, providing a dividend stream to all citizens and assuring the capital returns do not become too highly concentrated.
- Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps to clean up the environment, build infrastructure.
Speaking of the non-automatable, we could add the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to the CCC suggestion above. Revalue the arts properly, and the transition may even add to GDP.

Moses Soyer, “Artists on WPA” (1935). Image source: Smithsonian American Art Museum

Unfortunately, B&M distance themselves from the ideas, saying, “we include them not necessarily to endorse them, but instead to spur further thinking about what kinds of interventions will be necessary as machines continue to race ahead” (246). That is problematic, on at least two levels.

First, a sophisticated discussion of capital should be at the core of an account of automation, not its periphery. The authors are right to call for greater investment in education, infrastructure, and basic services, but they need a more sophisticated account of how that is to be arranged in an era when capital is extraordinarily concentrated, its owners have power over the political process, and most show little to no interest in long-term investment in the skills and abilities of the 99%. Even the purchasing power of the vast majority of consumers is of little import to those who can live off lightly taxed capital gains.

Second, assuming that “machines continue to race ahead” is a dodge, a refusal to name the responsible parties running the machines. Someone is designing and purchasing algorithms and robots. Illah Reza Nourbaksh’s Robot Futures suggests another metaphor:

Today most nonspecialists have little say in charting the role that robots will play in our lives. We are simply watching a new version of Star Wars scripted by research and business interests in real time, except that this script will become our actual world. . . . Familiar devices will become more aware, more interactive and more proactive; and entirely new robot creatures will share our spaces, public and private, physical and digital. . . .Eventually, we will need to read what they write, we will have to interact with them to conduct our business transactions, and we will often mediate our friendships through them. We will even compete with them in sports, at jobs, and in business. [9]

Nourbaksh nudges us closer to the truth, focusing on the competitive angle. But the “we” he describes is also inaccurate. There is a group that will never have to “compete” with robots at jobs or in business—rentiers. Too many of them are narrowly focused on how quickly they can replace needy workers with undemanding machines.

For the rest of us, another question concerning automation is more appropriate: how much can we be stuck with? A black-card-toting bigshot will get the white glove treatment from AmEx; the rest are shunted into automated phone trees. An algorithm determines the shifts of retail and restaurant workers, oblivious to their needs for rest, a living wage, or time with their families. Automated security guards, police, and prison guards are on the horizon. And for many of the “expelled,” the homines sacres, automation is a matter of life and death: drone technology can keep small planes on their tracks for hours, days, months—as long as it takes to execute orders.

B&M focus on “brilliant technologies,” rather than the brutal or bumbling instances of automation. It is fun to imagine a souped-up Roomba making the drudgery of housecleaning a thing of the past. But domestic robots have been around since 2000, and the median wage-earner in the U.S. does not appear to be on a fast track to a Jetsons-style life of ease.[10] They are just as likely to be targeted by the algorithms of the everyday, as they are to be helped by them. Mysterious scoring systems routinely stigmatize persons, without them even knowing. They reflect the dark side of automation—and we are in the dark about them, given the protections that trade secrecy law affords their developers.

IV. Conclusion

Debates about robots and the workers “struggling to keep up” with them are becoming stereotyped and stale. There is the standard economic narrative of “skill-biased technical change,” which acts more as a tautological, post hoc, retrodictive, just-so story than a coherent explanation of how wages are actually shifting. There is cyberlibertarian cornucopianism, as Google’s Ray Kurzweil and Eric Schmidt promise there is nothing to fear from an automated future. There is dystopianism, whether intended as a self-preventing prophecy, or entertainment. Each side tends to talk past the other, taking for granted assumptions and values that its putative interlocutors reject out of hand.

Set amidst this grim field, 2MA is a clear advance. B&M are attuned to possibilities for the near and far future, and write about each in accessible and insightful ways. The authors of The Second Machine Age claim even more for it, billing it as a guide to epochal change in our economy. But it is better understood as the kind of “big idea” book that can name a social problem, underscore its magnitude, and still dodge the elaboration of solutions controversial enough to scare off celebrity blurbers.

One of 2MA’s blurbers, Clayton Christensen, offers a backhanded compliment that exposes the core weakness of the book. “[L]earners and teachers alike are in a perpetual mode of catching up with what is possible. [The Second Machine Age] frames a future that is genuinely exciting!” gushes Christensen, eager to fold automation into his grand theory of disruption. Such a future may be exciting for someone like Christensen, a millionaire many times over who won’t lack for food, medical care, or housing if his forays fail. But most people do not want to be in “perpetually catching up” mode. They want secure and stable employment, a roof over their heads, decent health care and schooling, and some other accoutrements of middle class life. Meaning is found outside the economic sphere.

Automation could help stabilize and cheapen the supply of necessities, giving more persons the time and space to enjoy pursuits of their own choosing. Or it could accelerate arms races of various kinds: for money, political power, armaments, spying, stock trading. As long as purchasing power alone—whether of persons or corporations—drives the scope and pace of automation, there is little hope that the “brilliant technologies” B&M describe will reliably lighten burdens that the average person experiences. They may just as easily entrench already great divides.

All too often, the automation literature is focused on replacing humans, rather than respecting their hopes, duties, and aspirations. A central task of educators, managers, and business leaders should be finding ways to complement a workforce’s existing skills, rather than sweeping that workforce aside. That does not simply mean creating workers with skill sets that better “plug into” the needs of machines, but also, doing the opposite: creating machines that better enhance and respect the abilities and needs of workers. That would be a “machine age” welcoming for all, rather than one calibrated to reflect and extend the power of machine owners.

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Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. His recent book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015), develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance. He blogs regularly at Concurring Opinions. He has received a commission from Triple Canopy to write and present on the political economy of automation. He is a member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society, and an Affiliate Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

Back to the essay
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[1] One can quibble with the idea of automation as necessarily entailing “bounty”—as Yves Smith has repeatedly demonstrated, computer systems can just as easily “crapify” a process once managed well by humans. Nor is “spread” a necessary consequence of automation; well-distributed tools could well counteract it. It is merely a predictable consequence, given current finance and business norms and laws.

[2] For a definition of “crazy talk,” see Neil Postman, Stupid Talk, Crazy Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It (Delacorte, 1976). For Postman, “stupid talk” can be corrected via facts, whereas “crazy talk” “establishes different purposes and functions than the ones we normally expect.” If we accept the premise of labor as a cost to be minimized, what better to cut than the compensation of the highest paid persons?

[3] Conversation with Sam Frank at the Swiss Institute, Dec. 16, 2014, sponsored by Triple Canopy.

[4] In Brynjolfsson, McAfee, and Michael Spence, “New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy,” an article promoting the book. Unfortunately, as with most statements in this vein, B&M&S give us little idea how to identify a “good idea” other than one that “reap[s] huge rewards”—a tautology all too common in economic and business writing.

[5] Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015).

[6] Programs, both in the sense of particular software regimes, and the program of human and technical efforts to collect and analyze the translations that were the critical data enabling the writing of the software programs behind Google Translate.

[7] On translator employment, see also: https://twitter.com/JamesBessen/status/545212033453817857

[8] Bracha, “Standing Copyright Law on Its Head? The Googlization of Everything and the Many Faces of Property“; cf. Field v. Google.

[9] Illah Reza Nourbaksh, Robot Futures (MIT Press, 2013), pp. xix-xx.

[10] Erwin Prassler and Kazuhiro Kosuge, “Domestic Robotics,” in Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib, eds., Springer Handbook of Robotics (Springer, 2008), p. 1258.
January 20, 2015
Letter from Warsaw

an essay by Charles Bernstein
~
In November 2014, my wife, Susan Bee, and I visited Lodz and Warsaw, Poland, for the first time, along with our friend, the poet Tracie Morris. Susan’s mother was born in Lodz, moving to Berlin when she was around five. When I spoke at the American centers at the University of Lodz and Warsaw, I acknowledged standing on the ground of a great experiment from the decade before I was born, which aimed to expel difference in order to increase harmony through sameness, but the move toward homogenization versus miscegenation is powerful in the Americas as well, since the poetics of the Americas is the continuation of European poetics by other means.

When I explore the poetics of representation of the Systematic Extermination Process, I said in Warsaw, I don’t do so as an American looking at Poland and Germany but as someone whose intellectual and cultural foundations are European. I feel it as much my story as anyone else now alive and that a part of European culture destroyed here lives on with me, in and as an American, and is expressed through a commitment to the syncretic and miscegenated poetics of Americas.

The aversion of an originary or authentic or correct language is foundational for the poetics of Americas and makes a sharp contrast with those European (and American) nationalists that place a single language as fundamental to national or literary identity or who work to police national identities in ways that go beyond being born in a place, which, unlike in parts of Europe, is sufficient for U.S. citizenship. Several years ago, at the urging of my daughter, my father-in-law, who was born and grew up in Berlin, tried to reclaim his German citizenship under repatriation laws. His request was denied because he had never actively claimed this citizenship during the Nazi period, when he was a teenager. He was told that he was Polish, the country of origin of his parents. But he would be unable to claim Polish citizenship because, for that, knowledge of Polish is required; Yiddish was not then, nor is it now, considered a proper language of this nation, which was just the problem in the first place, now compounded. (As long as monoculture laws stand in Poland, the stain of the destruction of the Jews will be ineradicable.)

The power of American poetry comes from the mixing of many languages and the resistance to the dominance of any one language, including English – or anyway and one kind of English. As I argue in “The Poetics of the Americas” in My Way: Speeches and Poems, it is the overturning of standard English by second languages and vernacular/dialect speakers that defines American poetry, which is not to say that there is no resistance to this idea in America.

The question of who owns a nation or a people is not, of course, just one of language. We can say in the U.S. that Occupy Wall Street raised the specter of the one percent whose control is through cultural tolerance combined with economic dominance. But the closer analogy in the U.S. for the systematic extermination process here is the mass incarceration of African-American young men, stripping them of opportunities to fully participate in American cultural and economic life.¹ In Poland, you have about 224 prisoners per 100,000 people, in the US it’s over 750 but for some age groups of black men it’s over 10,000, one in nine people in that population. More than one in three young black men without a high school diploma is currently behind bars.²

In Warsaw, we found an extraordinary new museum created as if from ashes. POLIN: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a site-specific work, situated on the ground of the Jewish Ghetto and as such serving as a memorial as well as a tribute to those who fought in the uprising. The museum’s main entrance is directly across from the more traditional and figurative “Monument to the Ghetto Heroes”, which was erected in 1948. The meaning of the museum is fundamentally connected to its location: as we descended into the core exhibition on the lower level, a ghostly presence makes itself felt and was a constant, and welcome, companion. This is a museum not of artifacts but of the historical record. POLIN overwhelms not with abstract splendor or holocaust memorial kitsch (as in the statue in front of Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse station, of children going off to “camp” as if the camp was “summer” and not “death”).³ This is a museum of deep, or thick, description. In place of sentimental, monumental, or abstract gestures of loss, icons that mark an absence, POLIN, in its core exhibition, curated by Barbara Kirchenbaum-Gimlet, provides a superfluity of what was present to substantiate (and transubstantiate) what has been lost. The museum is a not a funeral pyre but a living archive of what the Jews called Po-Lan when they arrived in the Middle Ages. And it succeeds in making indelible the presence of the Jews in and as Poland: not an eradicated blip in Polish history but as ineradicable thread in the fabric of Poland. Ineradicable even after being eradicated. As in Poe’s “Tell-tale Heart” –– under the floorboards that seem to seal us off from the ground, is a beating heart –– or here, let’s just say, once the floor board that covers the ground is removed, a vast underground cavern is revealed, as deep as the world and as wide as possibility. This cavern is not filled with broken rocks or statuettes of forlorn children. As we look into it more closely, we can see that it is a book.

Jane Eisner’s “Chasing Ghosts, Reviving Spirits: The Fall and Rise of Poland’s Jews” provides account of a trip to Poland at the same time as ours; and, indeed, Eisner’s experiences were close to ours.⁴ A number of Polish commentators on this article lamented the author’s failure to blame the Nazi’s for the systematic extermination of the Polish Jews or that she failed to acknowledged the horrific suffering of many Polish people during the war. As Benjamin might have said, history is written by the (self-) righteous. He made me do it. POLIN brings the horse of denial to the water but it doesn’t make it drink. In that sense, the museum is programmatically gentle, a wise choice. There is much documentation of the role the Jewish ghetto police played in the extermination process. As for Polish complicity, there is a small placard that notes, with a bloodless tone, that Poles had their own battles to fight and their own everyday lives to live; most stood by and did nothing. (And that leaves out the active participation, and profit, on part of many Poles but also the active resistance on the part of some others.) Daddy, what did you do during the war? POLIN starkly documents the continuing anti-Semitic terror in Poland during what the Poles call the “Communist time”: under this new post-Nazi regime, most of the remaining Polish Jews left Poland – but not to the Poles but rather to what was left of them. The Jewish extermination in Poland was a Polish extermination or, let’s just say, the blood is mixed on the ground. It’s not a blame game, it’s a change game.

I SURVIVED THE MUSEUM OF THE HISTORY OF POLISH JEWS

On our final evening in Warsaw, we went to see the last remains of all the Jewish Ghetto, with bullet-ridden walls over which stenciled words say “never forget” and “truth.” There was one small peephole on a stone wall, similar to Duchamp’s peephole for “Étant donnés.” The view opened onto a dark, stagnant alley, caught in a time neither now nor then, a liminal space haunted by its own aching hollowness. On the other side of the alley was a window with a flickering light; someone was still there, barely there. In a year this last remnant of the ghetto will be covered over with new, chic shops, where perhaps you will be able to buy a figurine of an old Jew floating in amber. Maybe the one we nearly saw in the ghostly light that last night.

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notes:

1. The House I Live In, a 2012 film by Eugene Jarecki, makes a compelling case for this analogy. Back to the essay

2. economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/jail-and-jobs/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 Back to the essay

3. One of the Kindertransport Sculptures by Frank Meilser, “Trains to Life – Trains to Death” (2008): “Standing at the Friedrichstrasse Railway Station this bronze sculpture commemorates 1.6 million children murdered in the Holocaust and 10,000 children whose lives were saved by being granted entry into England in 1938.” The site includes images and a line of Meisler’s Jewish kitsch figurines. Ten thousand divided by 1.6 million comes to .00625 (but whose counting?). Back to the essay

4. Jewish Daily Forward, Nov. 30, 2014. forward.com/articles/209962/chasing-ghosts-reviving-spirits-the-fall-and-risee Back to the essay

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January 14, 2015