boundary 2

Tag: queer theory

  • Rizvana Bradley — The Vicissitudes of Touch: Annotations on the Haptic

    Rizvana Bradley — The Vicissitudes of Touch: Annotations on the Haptic

    Rizvana Bradley

    The late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is known for her tenacious commitment to the indeterminate possibilities that nondualism might offer sustained inquiries into minor aesthetics, politics, and performance. In the introduction to Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Sedgwick turns to touch and texture as particularly generative heuristic sites for opening the book’s avowed project, namely the exploration of “promising tools and techniques for nondualist thought and pedagogy.”[1] Moving through psychoanalysis, queer theory, and sexuality studies, the text probes entanglements of intimacy and emotion, desire and eroticism, that animate experience and draw social life into the myriad folds of material and nonlinguistic relations. As Lauren Berlant asserts of Sedgwick’s text, “the performativity of knowledge beyond speech – aesthetic, bodily, affective – is its real topic.”[2]

    One of Sedgwick’s most important and enduring legacies is a radically queer heuristic that endeavors to make theorizable the imperceptible and obscure relationships between affect, pedagogy, and performativity, without reproducing the limits and burdens of epistemology (even antiessentialist epistemology), with its “demand on essential truth.”[3] For Sedgwick, texture and touch offer potential instances of sidestepping or evading the foreclosures of structure and its attendant calcification of subject-object relations, a pivot towards antinormative pedagogies of reading and interpretation. Following Henry James, Sedgwick suggests that “to perceive texture is always, immediately, and de facto to be immersed in a field of active narrative hypothesizing, testing, and re-understanding of how physical properties act and are acted upon over time,” to become engaged in a series of speculative departures rather than analytical arrivals.[4] Similarly, Sedgwick finds in the sense of touch a perceptual experience that “makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity.”[5] Particularly relevant for our purposes is Sedgwick’s turn to the registers of difference between texture and texxture as a guide for thinking about forms of desire, perception, and interpretation that exceed normative modalities of belonging in, being with, and making sense of the world.

    Teasing out the implications of Renu Bora’s taxonomy of textural difference, Sedgwick tells us that

    Bora notes that ‘smoothness is both a type of texture and texture’s other.’ His essay makes a very useful distinction between two kinds, or senses, of texture, which he labels ‘texture’ with one x and ‘texxture’ with two x’s. Texxture is the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantively, historically, materially, it came into being. A brick or metal-work pot that still bears the scars and uneven sheen of its making would exemplify texxture in this sense. But there is also the texture – one x this time – that defiantly or even invisibly blocks or refuses such information; there is texture usually glossy if not positively tacky, that insists instead on the polarity between substance and surface, texture that signifies the willed erasure of its history.[6]

    Though one might be tempted to singularly assign to texture’s “manufactured or overhighlighted surface” the properties and pitfalls of “psychoanalytic and commodity fetishism,” in fact,

    the narrative-performative density of the other kind of texxture – its ineffaceable historicity – also becomes susceptible to a kind of fetish-value. An example of the latter might occur where the question is one of exotism, of the palpable and highly acquirable textural record of the cheap, precious work of many foreign hands in the light of many damaged foreign eyes. [7]

    Paradoxically, it is precisely the failure of texture to erase the internal historicity that would appear to be self-evidently registered on the surface of texxture, which allows Sedgwick to effectively grant the former an elusive depth, declaring that, “however high the gloss, there is no such thing as textural lack.”[8] Meanwhile, texxture’s presumably inescapable depth seems to recede across the surficial “scars and uneven sheen” that are read as the signatures of its making. For Sedgwick, one of the primary implications of these phenomenological variegations and perplexities is that texture, “in short, comprises an array of perceptual data that includes repetition, but whose degree of organization hovers just below the level of shape or structure…[the] not-yet-differentiated quick from which the performative emerges.”[9] In this way,

    texture seems like a promising level of attention for shifting the emphasis of some interdisciplinary conversations away from the recent fixation on epistemology…by asking new questions about phenomenology and affect, [for what]…texture and affect, touching and feeling…have in common is that…both are irreducibly phenomenological.[10]

    On the one hand, Sedgwick’s turn to texture divulges extra-linguistic affiliations that performatively surprise, facilitating an erotic retrieval of subjective and aesthetic non-mastery that continues to resonate with ongoing critiques of the aesthetic. And yet, while Sedgwick’s assertions about affectivity and touch facilitate an opening for a theoretical re-evaluation of notions of agency, passivity, and self-perception, they are also deeply problematic. For what does phenomenology, which takes the body as our “point of view in the world,”[11] have to say to those who, following Frantz Fanon, have never had a body, but rather its theft, those who have only ever been granted the dissimulation of a body, “sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning[?]”[12] What of those whose skin is constantly resurfaced as depthless texxture, a texxture whose surficial inscriptions are read as proxies for the historicity that the over-glossed surface would seek to expunge? In other words, Sedgwick’s ruminations disclose an undeclared, but nevertheless central, conceit that has significant implications for thinking about the bearing of form on ontology: namely that, for Sedgwick, the texturized valences of touch are implicated in, rather than a violent displacement from, the symbolic economy of the human.

    In theorizing touch, might we trouble the presumption that aesthetics, subjectivity, and desire – or more precisely their entwinement – are necessarily embedded within the normative regime of the human? I am interested, in other words, in how Sedgwick’s observations on touch might occasion, even as they displace, a different set of interrelated questions regarding ontological mattering and the fashioning of aesthetic subjectivity. Calvin Warren’s assertion that “[q]ueer theory’s ‘closeted humanism’ reconstitutes the ‘human’ even as it attempts to challenge and, at times, erase it,” demands we reconsider any theory (about the queerness) of touch that has yet to grapple with its universalist underpinnings. It would seem that queer theory, even one as vigorously attuned to the textured rediscovery of minor forms as Sedgwick’s, nevertheless conceives desire, sexuality, and gender as co-extensive with the erotic architecture of the (queerly differentiated/differentiating) human subject. Suffering may be aestheticized, but it is not reckoned with as an ontological imposition – as a “grammar,” to use Frank B. Wilderson’s language[13] – out of which an aesthesis necessarily emerges.

    Insofar as texxture bears the inscription of its material conditions of possibility, it should direct us toward a genealogy of substance at odds with surface appearance. At stake is what film scholar Laura Marks theorizes under the rubric of the haptic[14] – the tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive dimensions of touch, the irreducibly haptic valences of touch that pressure prevailing distinctions between substance and surface, inside and outside, body and flesh. A question at once animated and omitted by queer theory’s inquiries into touch: how to theorize texxture with regard to a history of bodily wounding occasioned by touch, when it is texxture that is seized upon by the various proxies for touch that willingly or inadvertently redouble racial fantasies of violation? Thinking the haptic irreducibility of the aesthetic requires constant re-attunement to the violence touch occasions and to the violations which occasion touch. If touch is ultimately inextricable from the aesthetic economy of worldly humanity, then, apropos Saidiya Hartman, we are compelled to think about the violence that resides in our habits of worlding.[15]

    Without even addressing the massive implications that attend the frequent conflation of being with body, what cleaves to being within the context of critical theory’s alternately residual or unapologetic phenomenology, is a corporeal subject whose situatedness within and for the world is not only predetermined, but whose predetermination is taken for granted as the condition of possibility for sentient touch. Such unwitting Calvinism, which would seem to take Merleau-Ponty at his word when he declares that “every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and being taken,”[16] inevitably reproduces and rubs up against a foundational schism: being taken, where the traces of an inflective doubling disclose a morphological distinction at the level of species-being.[17] Just as the tectonics of touch – their quakes and strains, fractures and fault lines, accretions and exfoliations – can hardly be taken for simply surface phenomena, neither can they be assumed to unfold upon a universal plane of experience, or to obtain between essentially analogous subjects within a common field of relation (a fact betrayed by the nominative excess which threatens to spill from the very word, “field”). Touch cannot be understood apart from the irreducibly racial valences and demarcations of corporeality in the wake of transatlantic slavery.

    In her landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers theorizes one of the central cleavages of the modern world, wrought and sundered in the cataclysmic passages of racial slavery: that of body and flesh, which Spillers takes as the foremost distinction “between captive and liberated subjects-positions”:

    before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies – some of them female – out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.[18]

    Flesh is before the body in a dual sense. On the one hand, as Alexander Weheliye stresses, flesh is “a temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body[.]”[19] The body, which may be taken to stand for “legal personhood qua self-possession,”[20] is violently produced through the “high crimes against the flesh.” On the other hand, flesh is before the body in that it is everywhere subject to and at the disposal of the body. The body is cleaved from flesh, while flesh is serially cleaved by the body. As Fred Moten suggests, the body only emerges through the disciplining of flesh.[21]

    This diametric arrangement of corporeal exaltation and abjection is registered, as Spillers emphasizes, in “the tortures and instruments of captivity,” those innumerable, unspeakable brutalities by which flesh is irrevocably marked:

    The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose – eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol; the bullet.[22]

    The unspeakability of such woundings, however, is not merely a function of their terror and depravity, but rather a consequence of the ways flesh has been made to bear the conditions of im/possibility of and for a semiotics which takes itself to be the very foundation of language, at least in its modern dissimulations.[23] In Moten’s illumination, “[t]he value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech— its essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a differentializing inscription.”[24] Thus, when Spillers writes that “[t]hese undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural by seeing skin color[,]”[25] we may surmise that what Frantz Fanon termed “epidermalization” – the process by which a “historico-racial schema” is violently imposed upon the skin, that which, for the Black, forecloses the very possibility of assuming a body (to borrow Gayle Salamon’s turn of phrase) – is, among other things, a mechanism of semiotic concealment.[26] (R.A. Judy refers to it as “something like [flesh]…being parenthesized.”)[27] What is hidden and rehidden, the open secret alternately buried within and exposed upon the skin, is not merely a system of corporeal apartheid, but moreover what Spillers identifies as the vestibularity of flesh to culture. “This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside.”[28]

    Speaking at a conference day I curated for the Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy in 2018, entitled “There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude,” Spillers revisited her classic essay, drawing out its implications for thinking through questions of touch and hapticality.[29] For Spillers, touch “might be understood as the gateway to the most intimate experience and exchange of mutuality between subjects, or taken as the fundamental element of the absence of self-ownership…it defines at once, in the latter instance, the most terrifying personal and ontological feature of slavery’s regimes across the long ages.”[30] To meaningfully reckon with “the contradictory valences of the haptic” is to “attempt an entry into this formidable paradox, which unfolds a troubled intersubjective legacy – and, perhaps, troubled to the extent that one of these valences of touch is not walled off from the other, but haunts it, shadows it, as its own twin possibility.”[31] Spillers follows with an unavoidable question: “did slavery across the Americas rupture ties of kinship and filiation so completely that the eighteenth century demolishes what Constance Classen, in The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, calls a ‘tactile cosmology’?” If so, then the dimensions of touch which are understood as “curative, healing, erotic, [or] restorative” cannot be held apart from the myriad “violation[s] of the boundaries of the ego in the enslaved, that were not yet accorded egoistic status, or, in brief, subjecthood, subjectivity.”[32]

    Touch, then, evokes the vicious, desperate attempts of the white, the settler, to feign the ontic verity, stability, and immutability of an irreducibly racial subject-object (non-)relation through what Frank Wilderson would call “gratuitous violence”[33] as much as it does the corporeal life of intra- and intersubjective relationality and encounter. If even critical discourse on these latter, corporeal happenings tends to assume the facticity of the juridically sanctioned pretense to self-possession Spillers calls “bodiedness,” then “flesh describes an alien entity,” a corporeal formation fundamentally unable to “ward off another’s touch…[who] may be invaded or entered or penetrated, so to speak, by coercive power” in any given place or moment. It is, in other words, precisely “the captive body’s susceptibility to being touched [which] places this body on the side of the flesh,”[34] a susceptibility which is not principally historical, but ontological, even as flesh constitutes, to borrow Moten’s phrasing, “a general and generative resistance to what ontology can think[.]”[35] Spillers brings us to the very threshold of feeling, where to be cast on the side of the flesh is to inhabit the cut between existence and ontology. Black life is being-touched.

    How might we bring such knowledge to bear upon our understanding of different aesthetic practices, forms, and traditions? What if Theodor Adorno’s conception of the “shudder” experienced by the subject in his ephemeral encounter with a “genuine relation to art,” that “involuntary comportment” which is “a memento of the liquidation of the I,”[36] must be understood as the corporeal expression of a subject whose conditions of existence sustain the fantasy of being-untouched? How might such an interpretation serve not simply to foreground an indictment, but also aspire to linger with the political, ethical, and analytic questions that emerge from the entanglements of hapticality, aesthetics, and violence, questions which are unavoidable for those given to blackness? “The hold’s terrible gift,” Moten and Harney maintain, “was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in the undercommons.”[37] And, as Moten has subsequently reminded us, violence cannot be excised from the materiality of this terrible gift, which is none other than black art:

    Black art neither sutures nor is sutured to trauma. There’s no remembering, no healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon which the idea of redress is grounded.[38]

    Black art promises neither redemption nor emancipation. The “transcendent power” that Peter de Bolla, for example, finds gloriously manifest by an artwork such as Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, that encounter with a “timeless…elemental beauty” which constitutes “one of the basic building blocks of our shared culture, our common humanity,”[39] is a fabrication of a structure of aesthetic experience that is wholly unavailable to the black, who, after all, has never been human. If Immanuel Kant, as the preeminent architect of modern European aesthetic philosophy, understood art to emerge precisely in its separation from nature, as “a work of man,”[40]then it is clear his transcendental aesthetic is not the province of black art. For, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, modernity’s “arsenal of raciality” places the black before the “scene of nature,” as “as affectable things…subjected to the determination of both the ‘laws of nature’ and other coexisting things.”[41] Black art, in all its earthly perversity, emerges in the absence and refusal of the capacity to claim difference as separation, as that which instead touches and is touched by the beauty and terrors of entanglement, “a composition which is always already a recomposition and a decomposition of prior and posterior compositions.”[42] Whatever its (anti-)formal qualities, black art proceeds from enfleshment, from the immanent brutalities and minor experiments of the haptic, the cuts and woundings of which it cannot help but bear. Black art materializes in and as a metaphysical impossibility, as that which, in Moten’s words, “might pierce the distinction between the biological and the symbolic…as the continual disruption of the very idea of (symbolic) value, which moves by way of the reduction of substance…[as] the reduction to substance (body to flesh) is inseparable from the reduction of substance.”[43] Hapticality is a way of naming an analytics of touch that cannot be, let alone appear, within the onto-epistemological confines of the (moribund) world, a gesture with and towards the abyssal revolution and devolution of the sensorium to which black people have already been subject, an enfleshment of the “difference without separability”[44] that has been and will be the condition of possibility for “life in the ruins.”[45]

    _____

    Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching focuses on the study of contemporary art and aesthetics at the intersections of film, literature, poetry, contemporary art and performance. Her scholarly approach to artistic practices in global black cultural production expands and develops frameworks for thinking across these contexts, specifically in relation to contemporary aesthetic theory.  She has published articles in TDR: The Drama Review, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, and Film Quarterly, and is currently working on two book projects.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1.

    [2] Ibid., back cover.

    [3] Ibid., 6.

    [4] Ibid., 13.

    [5] Ibid., 14.

    [6] Ibid., 14-15.

    [7] Ibid., 15.

    [8] Ibid.

    [9] Ibid., 16, 17.

    [10] Ibid., 21.

    [11] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012), 73.

    [12] Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986).

    [13] See, in particular, Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

    [14] Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). My reading of Marks is in turn inestimably shaped by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s elaboration of hapticality in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013), 97-99; see also the special issue I guest edited for Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, “The Haptic: Textures of Performance,” vol. 24, no. 2-3 (2014).

    [15] This was a formulation made by Hartman in our conversation during my curated event for the Serpentine Galleries, London. “Hapticality, Waywardness, and the Practice of Entanglement: A Study Day with Saidiya Hartman,” 8 July, 2017.

    [16] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 266.

    [17] Cf. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964).

    [18] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, Volume 17, Number 2 (Summer 1987), 64-81, 67.

    [19] Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 39. For a contrasting interpretation, see R.A. Judy’s brilliant, recently published, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), xvi, 210: “flesh is with and not before the body and person, and the body and person are with and not before or even after the flesh.”

    [20] Weheliye (2014), 39.

    [21] Fred Moten, “Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy” (Part Two), b2o: An Online Journal (6 May 2020).

    [22] Spillers (1987), 67.

    [23] R.A. Judy takes up these questions surrounding flesh and what he terms “para-semiosis,” or “the dynamic of differentiation operating in multiple multiplicities of semiosis that converge without synthesis[,]” with characteristic erudition in Sentient Flesh (2020), xiiv.

    [24] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 13.

    [25] Spillers (1987), 67.

    [26] Fanon (1986). Gayle Solamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of Masculinity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

    [27] Judy (2020), 207.

    [28] Spillers (1987), 67. For one of Fred Moten’s more pointed engagements with this formulation from Spillers, see “The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out),” in Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 161-182.

    [29] Hortense Spillers, “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch,” There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude, Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy, 23 March 2018, keynote address.

    [30] Ibid.

    [31] Ibid. Emphasis added.

    [32] Ibid.

    [33] Wilderson, 2010.

    [34] Spillers (2018). As these quotations are drawn from Spillers’s talk rather than a published text, the emphasis placed on the word being is inferred from her spoken intonation.

    [35] Moten (2018), 176.

    [36] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1997), 333.

    [37] Moten and Harney (2013), 97.

    [38] Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being), (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), ix.

    [39] Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 28.

    [40] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), 184.

    [41] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “The Scene of Nature,” in Justin Desautels-Stein & Christopher Tomlins (eds.), Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 275-289, 276. For an important study of modernity’s “racial regime of aesthetics,” see David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

    [42] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “In the Raw,” e-flux, Journal #93 (September 2018).

    [43] Fred Moten (2018), 174.

    [44] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Difference without Separability,” Catalogue of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo – INCERTEZA VIVA (2016), 57-65.

    [45] Cf. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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

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

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

    by Travis Alexander

    ~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

    Back to the essay
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    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1994.
    • Edelman, Lee with Robert L. Caserio, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean. “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 819 – 828.
    • Puar, Jasbir. “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19.2 (2009): 161 – 172.
    • Woubshet, Dagmawi. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
  • Ending the World as We Know It: Alexander R. Galloway in Conversation with Andrew Culp

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

    by Alexander R. Galloway and Andrew Culp
    ~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

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

    Back to the essay

  • Something About the Digital

    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).

    DSC_0002__560
    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.

    TMu_Cyborg_2011_18-1024x682
    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.

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  • Network Pessimism

    Network Pessimism

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    I’ve been thinking a lot about pessimism recently. Eugene Thacker has been deep in this material for some time already. In fact he has a new, lengthy manuscript on pessimism called Infinite Resignation, which is a bit of departure from his other books in terms of tone and structure. I’ve read it and it’s excellent. Definitely “the worst” he’s ever written! Following the style of other treatises from the history of philosophical pessimism–Leopardi, Cioran, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and others–the bulk of the book is written in short aphorisms. It’s very poetic language, and some sections are driven by his own memories and meditations, all in an attempt to plumb the deepest, darkest corners of the worst the universe has to offer.

    Meanwhile, the worst can’t stay hidden. Pessimism has made it to prime time, to NPR, and even right-wing media. Despite all this attention, Eugene seems to have little interest in showing his manuscript to publishers. A true pessimist! Not to worry, I’m sure the book will see the light of day eventually. Or should I say dead of night? When it does, the book is sure to sadden, discourage, and generally worsen the lives of Thacker fans everywhere.

    Interestingly pessimism also appears in a number of other authors and fields. I’m thinking, for instance, of critical race theory and the concept of Afro-pessimism. The work of Fred Moten and Frank B. Wilderson, III is particularly interesting in that regard. Likewise queer theory has often wrestled with pessimism, be it the “no future” debates around reproductive futurity, or what Anna Conlan has simply labeled “homo-pessimism,” that is, the way in which the “persistent association of homosexuality with death and oppression contributes to a negative stereotype of LGBTQ lives as unhappy and unhealthy.”[1]

    In his review of my new book, Andrew Culp made reference to how some of this material has influenced me. I’ll be posting more on Moten and these other themes in the future, but let me here describe, in very general terms, how the concept of pessimism might apply to contemporary digital media.

    *

    A previous post was devoted to the reticular fallacy, defined as the false assumption that the erosion of hierarchical organization leads to an erosion of organization as such. Here I’d like to address the related question of reticular pessimism or, more simply, network pessimism.

    Network pessimism relies on two basic assumptions: (1) “everything is a network”; (2) “the best response to networks is more networks.”

    Who says everything is a network? Everyone, it seems. In philosophy, Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. In literary studies, Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. In the military, Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. (But so too our enemies are networks: the terror network.) Art, architecture, managerial literature, computer science, neuroscience, and many other fields–all have shifted prominently in recent years toward a network model. Most important, however, is the contemporary economy and the mode of production. Today’s most advanced companies are essentially network companies. Google monetizes the shape of networks (in part via clustering algorithms). Facebook has rewritten subjectivity and social interaction along the lines of canalized and discretized network services. The list goes on and on. Thus I characterize the first assumption — “everything is a network” — as a kind of network fundamentalism. It claims that whatever exists in the world appears naturally in the form of a system, an ecology, an assemblage, in short, as a network.

    Ladies and gentlemen, behold the good news, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new grand récit. As metanarrative, the network will guide us into a new Dark Age.

    If the first assumption expresses a positive dogma or creed, the second is more negative or nihilistic. The second assumption — that the best response to networks is more networks — is also evident in all manner of social and political life today. Eugene and I described this phenomena at greater length in The Exploit, but consider a few different examples from contemporary debates… In military theory: network-centric warfare is the best response to terror networks. In Deleuzian philosophy: the rhizome is the best response to schizophrenic multiplicity. In autonomist Marxism: the multitude is the best response to empire. In the environmental movement: ecologies and systems are the best response to the systemic colonization of nature. In computer science: distributed architectures are the best response to bottlenecks in connectivity. In economics: heterogenous “economies of scope” are the best response to the distributed nature of the “long tail.”

    To be sure, there are many sites today where networks still confront power centers. The point is not to deny the continuing existence of massified, centralized sovereignty. But at the same time it’s important to contextualize such confrontations within a larger ideological structure, one that inoculates the network form and recasts it as the exclusive site of liberation, deviation, political maturation, complex thinking, and indeed the very living of life itself.

    Why label this a pessimism? For the same reasons that queer theory and critical race theory are grappling with pessimism: Is alterity a death sentence? Is this as good as it gets? Is this all there is? Can we imagine a parallel universe different from this one? (Although the pro-pessimism camp would likely state it in the reverse: We must destabilize and annihilate all normative descriptions of the “good.” This world isn’t good, and hooray for that!)

    So what’s the problem? Why should we be concerned about network pessimism? Let me state clearly so there’s no misunderstanding, pessimism isn’t the problem here. Likewise, networks are not the problem. (Let no one label me “anti network” nor “anti pessimism” — in fact I’m not even sure what either of those positions would mean.) The issue, as I see it, is that network pessimism deploys and sustains a specific dogma, confining both networks and pessimism to a single, narrow ideological position. It’s this narrow-mindedness that should be questioned.

    Specifically I can see three basic problems with network pessimism, the problem of presentism, the problem of ideology, and the problem of the event.

    The problem of presentism refers to the way in which networks and network thinking are, by design, allergic to historicization. This exhibits itself in a number of different ways. Networks arrive on the scene at the proverbial “end of history” (and they do so precisely because they help end this history). Ecological and systems-oriented thinking, while admittedly always temporal by nature, gained popularity as a kind of solution to the problems of diachrony. Space and landscape take the place of time and history. As Fredric Jameson has noted, the “spatial turn” of postmodernity goes hand in hand with a denigration of the “temporal moment” of previous intellectual movements.

    man machines buy fritz kahn
    Fritz Kahn, “Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace)” (Stuttgart, 1926). Image source: NIH

    From Hegel’s history to Luhmann’s systems. From Einstein’s general relativity to Riemann’s complex surfaces. From phenomenology to assemblage theory. From the “time image” of cinema to the “database image” of the internet. From the old mantra always historicize to the new mantra always connect.

    During the age of clockwork, the universe was thought to be a huge mechanism, with the heavens rotating according to the music of the spheres. When the steam engine was the source of newfound power, the world suddenly became a dynamo of untold thermodynamic force. After full-fledged industrialization, the body became a factory. Technologies and infrastructures are seductive metaphors. So it’s no surprise (and no coincidence) that today, in the age of the network, a new template imprints itself on everything in sight. In other words, the assumption “everything is a network” gradually falls apart into a kind of tautology of presentism. “Everything right now is a network…because everything right now has been already defined as a network.”

    This leads to the problem of ideology. Again we’re faced with an existential challenge, because network technologies were largely invented as a non-ideological or extra-ideological structure. When writing Protocol I interviewed some of the computer scientists responsible for the basic internet protocols and most of them reported that they “have no ideology” when designing networks, that they are merely interested in “code that works” and “systems that are efficient and robust.” In sociology and philosophy of science, figures like Bruno Latour routinely describe their work as “post-critical,” merely focused on the direct mechanisms of network organization. Hence ideology as a problem to be forgotten or subsumed: networks are specifically conceived and designed as those things that both are non-ideological in their conception (we just want to “get things done”), but also post-ideological in their architecture (in that they acknowledge and co-opt the very terms of previous ideological debates, things like heterogeneity, difference, agency, and subject formation).

    The problem of the event indicates a crisis for the very concept of events themselves. Here the work of Alain Badiou is invaluable. Network architectures are the perfect instantiation of what Badiou derisively labels “democratic materialism,” that is, a world in which there are “only bodies and languages.” In Badiou’s terms, if networks are the natural state of the situation and there is no way to deviate from nature, then there is no event, and hence no possibility for truth. Networks appear, then, as the consummate “being without event.”

    What could be worse? If networks are designed to accommodate massive levels of contingency — as with the famous Robustness Principle — then they are also exceptionally adept at warding off “uncontrollable” change wherever it might arise. If everything is a network, then there’s no escape, there’s no possibility for the event.

    Jameson writes as much in The Seeds of Time when he says that it is easier to imagine the end of the earth and the end of nature than it is to imagine the ends of capitalism. Network pessimism, in other words, is really a kind of network defeatism in that it makes networks the alpha and omega of our world. It’s easier to imagine the end of that world than it is to discard the network metaphor and imagine a kind of non-world in which networks are no longer dominant.

    In sum, we shouldn’t give in to network pessimism. We shouldn’t subscribe to the strong claim that everything is a network. (Nor should we subscribe to the softer claim, that networks are merely the most common, popular, or natural architecture for today’s world.) Further, we shouldn’t think that networks are the best response to networks. Instead we must ask the hard questions. What is the political fate of networks? Did heterogeneity and systematicity survive the Twentieth Century? If so, at what cost? What would a non-net look like? And does thinking have a future without the network as guide?

    _____

    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.

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    _____

    Notes

    [1] Anna Conlan, “Representing Possibility: Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology,” in Gender, Sexuality and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010). 253-263.